|
|
Tremont is the quintessential Cleveland neighborhood. Its industrial and urban skyline vistas are offset by the architecture of numerous churches; the grit of industry not only permeates the outdoors, it also makes its way inside in the form of soot, coating floors and furniture on hot summer days when windows are open.
Tremont residents are always aware of Cleveland's past and present, and there is an overwhelming sense of authenticity to the neighborhood; this may be what has drawn artists here for nearly two decades. But over the last ten years, Tremont has attracted more than just artists. Real estate developers, restaurateurs and gift shop owners have not only been seduced by the uniqueness of the community, they have also been interested in the rehab potential of abandoned buildings, the inexpensive rent, and the neighborhood's proximity to downtown.
Likewise, there is no shortage of galleries in Tremont. While many have come and gone, one has remained steadfast: Brandt Gallery has been a mainstay in Tremont, and in Cleveland's art community since September 1990, when Jean Brandt mounted an exhibition of work by Tremont resident Terry Durst. Brandt, an attorney who also uses the gallery as her office, frequently exhibits art by Cleveland artists. She is not one to shy away from experimental or transgressive artwork; she can take risks because she doesn't rely on art sales to sustain the gallery.
The current exhibition of work by native Clevelander Cushmere Bell is typical of the kind of art exhibited at Brandt Gallery. Bell's mixed-media works are compositionally tight, with content that is ambiguously edgy. Bell, who grew up in Slavic Village in a single-parent household, graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Art in the mid-1990s. His work has an archetypal Cleveland vibe about it. Bell favors warm, muddy colors such as orange yellow, gray blue, and mauve pink, which are reminiscent of the smoggy yet beautiful sunsets over Lake Erie. The surfaces of the works are packed with appropriated images — bits of old maps, pictures of scantily clad women from porn magazines, and product labels and logos.
Bell further complicates his compositions with cartoon-like drawings of people, animal characters or decorative elements, as well as wallpaper-esque patterns and colors. He masterfully melds paint, pattern and found materials, creating collages that are complex and visually appealing without being overdone.
However, Bell's works are more than simply eye candy; he often uses pop culture icons propagated via mass media in previous decades — the word “Life” from Life magazine, the Hanna-Barbera cartoon character Top Cat, old Post cereal and Carnation brand logos, and photos and illustrations of stereotypically beautiful women. These iconic signs are endemic of the dominate white culture of the 1950s, '60s and '70s. When white male artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol first appropriated pop culture imagery in the 1950s, it was from a place of privilege and of collusion; they were attempting to deconstruct and assign new meanings to their culture's artifacts.
But as Bell appropriates the same type of icons, he must come to terms with them, make sense of them as a detached observer. For Bell, an African-American male, as for most of the people outside of the ruling race, class and gender, these signs are imbued with multifarious meanings. Bell's creative process is an attempt at reinterpreting facets of popular culture and at recasting it in a visual language of his own making.
Late last month, one of Bell's pieces, Death, was the object of censorship. The collage depicts a cartoony drawing of a mustached man groaning “AAAH!” atop a red-lipped blonde woman. The lusty couple floats above an image of a white woman modeling 1980s fashion, another white woman who, aside from her spiky blonde hair, dons only black G-string underwear, and a mostly obscured picture of a bearded white man. Behind the couple a skull sprouts red roses from its eye sockets. The image was to appear on the October Tremont Art Walk announcement card, until a volunteer committee member judged it too racy for some of the business owners who also participate in the monthly art event. Ultimately, Bell's image was replaced with a photo of an insipid brushed metal sculpture from Frank Brozman's show at Atmosphere Gallery.
While the committee member's decision to replace Death with the image of the bland sculpture may seem reasonable from a business perspective, it is illustrative of the current atmosphere in Tremont. On one end of the art community spectrum are serious galleries; at the other end are business owners like Marianne Ludwig of Tremont Scoops ice cream parlor, who want to use their establishments to make art accessible to the public and to attract customers during Art Walks, when Clevelanders swarm the neighborhood's streets in search of food, drink, art and entertainment.
“The Tremont Art Walk is special because it is a collaborative community effort,” says Ludwig. “Having art on the walls of an ice cream shop is truly unexpected, and it makes art accessible to people from all walks of life.”
While this an admirable sentiment, it begs the question: should business owners be displaying art and advertising their “exhibitions” alongside serious Tremont art galleries like Brandt Gallery, Asterisk and Doubting Thomas? Lately Clevelanders have been elevating the arts as our cultural and economic savior. Unfortunately, as was the case with last summer's downtown “Sparx in the City” fire hydrant fiasco, what is being held up as “art” often barely qualifies as such. If Bell's piece, with its allusion to a copulating couple offends, so be it. It is art by a born-and-bred Clevelander from one of the city's working-class neighborhoods, selected by a woman who has been exhibiting contemporary art for nearly 15 years. Bell and his work belong in Tremont; after all, artists like Bell forged the path to the trendy neighborhood in the first place.