BIOS
Alenka Banko
Alenka Banco is founder and developer for Josaphat Arts Hall, a for-profit Arts Center located in Cleveland OH. Since 2001, Banco has worked to develop three abandoned church properties into a thriving arts campus, including the Convivium 33 gallery and a series of artist studios and business spaces. She was recognized for her renovation of the Josaphat Church building with an award from the Cleveland chapter of the American Institute of Architects, despite the fact that no professional architect took part in the restoration and The Cleveland Restoration Society as an award recipient in 2006 for the adaptive re-use of a Sacred Structure. Previously, Banco has served as Community Development Coordinator at the St. Clair Superior Neighborhood Development Association and as Executive Director of the St. Clair Business Association. She has also owned, operated or managed a number of buildings, including Eddie Moved Gallery in Tremont where she also served as Tremont Merchants Association Board President. Banco remains active as a volunteer with local arts and culture organizations and continues to work as a multi-media visual artist. Banco is committed to Arts Organizations and Arts development. Since opening Josaphat Arts Hall in Deceber of 2005 Banco has donated the space to over 30 organizations for fundraising or community activities. Banco serves on the Cleveland Arts Prize Board and is the Artistic Director of Muse Magazine.
Lyz Bly
Lyz Bly is a doctoral candidate in the history department at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH. Her dissertation, “Generation X and the Invention of a Third Feminist Wave,” is the first work in the field of women’s history to critically examine the pop cultural discourse that influenced women who came of age as “third wave” feminists in the early 1990s. Lyz has written art and pop cultural criticism for numerous publications, including the Free Times, dialogue: arts of the Midwest, angle: a journal of art+culture, Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture, and artUS. DIY culture is at the center of her scholarly work; she uses feminist/riot grrrl zines as primary source material, conducting research at institutions such as the Sallie Bingham Women’s History Collection in the Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library at Duke University, which houses the renowned Sarah Dyer Zine Collection. She and her spouse Kristin Bly are DIY advocates; over the last ten years they have produced a variety of art exhibitions and community events at newsense, their home/gallery in Lakewood, OH (http://www.newsenseonline.com/gallery.htm).
Patsy Kline
Patsy Kline is a Cleveland-based artist known for her multimedia, live, interactive art installations held in odd places. She is best know for her Gallery U ARTcade Project, Gallery U Haul and ReThinkPink. She was born in Kentucky in 1960, raised Lake County, and graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1990 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Graphic Design. She studied modern philosophy, marketing and business at Cleveland State University, where she has been employed for ten years as a graphic designer. She graduated in the top ten percent of her class at CIA and received a Bronze Addy in 2009 from the American Advertising Federation for her CSU design work.
Kline has slowly been turning her two-family home in Tremont into a studio where she holds art MIX events. Kline created art MIX(ers) with the intent to foster the development of new works across the disciplines of theater, dance, music, visual art, and creative writing and to encourage interdisciplinary collaborations between artists, students, and guests. The main focus is to experience the creative process via live art and audience participation.
For additional information about Kline and or her gallery, visit her website: www.galleryucleveland.com
Anderson Turner
Anderson Turner received a BFA in sculpture from the University of Arizona and went on to earn an MFA in ceramic art from Kent State University (Ohio). A former assistant editor of Ceramics Monthly magazine, he has also edited numerous handbooks for the American Ceramic Society as well scholarly journals for the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts. He continues to make and show artwork and maintains a studio at his farm in Garrettsville, Ohio (http://www.luckypennyfarm.com). He currently serves as the director of galleries for the Kent state University School of Art.
Dana Depew
Visiting Dana Depew’s labyrinthine basement-studio is a lot like wandering through an old thrift store. Hundreds of paintings, sculptures and found objects are piled high everywhere you look. Some are finished. Others stand like bits of memorabilia in a museum with no discernable theme.
One of nine children who grew up on a farm in Medina, Ohio, Depew isn't exactly a pack rat. His mother was an antiques dealer and left her vast collection to him. He's been tinkering with it ever since. But even before that, Depew was the kind of artist who was inspired by objects of all kinds, and accordingly, he made work in a wide range of styles. Though he studied sculpture at Kent State University, he often makes paintings.
His newest series, recently featured in a solo show titled "The Captain and Chenille" at Cleveland's Miller-Weitzel Gallery, began with white chenille bedspreads from his mother's collection. Depew used the blankets' patterns in a sort of paint-by-number manner, as he puts it, filling in each shape with solid colored house paint. Stretched like rectangular canvases, the resulting works recall the patchwork of quilts, the repetitive shapes of Op Art, and the slightly irreverent sense humor that permeates nearly everything.
Other aspects of Depew's life are not so humorous. During the workweek he stays with his father, who is in the early stages of Alzheimer's. He also works as a chemist at a water treatment plant, which, he says, is "just a job —-- to pay the bills."
Those bills include the rent at Asterisk Gallery, a large space (above his studio) in Cleveland's Tremont neighborhood. Depew has been running the gallery for the past four years, holding as many as 15 shows annually. He also lends the space (rent free) to local organizations The Cleveland Rape Crisis Center, The Gay and Lesbian Center, and the AIDS Taskforce for events and fundraisers.
As a gallery director, Depew has fervently maintained the importance of keeping art venues alive in a neighborhood that has been transformed over the past decade into a trendy nightspot, peppered with pricey restaurants and gift shops. Though the merchants who "show up with dollar signs in their eyes" irk him at times, he's not letting the shift in the neighborhood affect the way he operates. "I cater to young Cleveland artists because there aren't a lot of opportunities out there for them. You can't just jump right into an established gallery. I know, because I went through it myself when I came here after I got out of school. You have to build a ladder for yourself." Like the art he builds, Depew's gallery seems to hold boundless possibilities for making meaningful discoveries among other people's castoffs.
Christopher Pekoc
Christopher Pekoc makes hand made photographs. Over the last twenty years, Pekoc’s unusual mixture of photography and other media has quietly attracted the attention of an international group of discriminating photography collectors. Pekoc’s father, grandfather and great grandfather were in the hardware business in Cleveland, and Pekoc attributes his interest in the art of assemblage to the early exposure to tools and construction projects he received in his father’s store. In his cramped basement studio, Pekoc works with an unusual array of implements including a blow torch, hole punches, hammers, pins, sand paper, steel wool, and a sewing machine along with the more traditional brushes and paint to fashion components of his collages before cutting them up and stitching them together in unusual configurations.
Pekoc was born in Cleveland, Ohio and studied at Kent State University. He has participated in more than 110 solo and group exhibitions at venues including the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Print Center, Philadelphia; the National Gallery of Australia Canberra; the Ueda Gallery, Tokyo; Fotographie Forum International, Frankfurt, Germany; Cimelice Castle, Czech Republic; and various galleries in New York City.
Pekoc received five Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowships and an OAC sponsored two-month International Residency in the Czech Republic. In 2007 he won the Cleveland Art’s Prize. In 2008, Case Western Reserve University published a 72 page catalog about his work that included an essay by noted art historian Henry Adams. Also a video documentary, funded by Toby Devan Lewis, was produced that will accompany a two year national touring exhibit, curated by Henry Adams, that is presently being planned. Pekoc lives in Cleveland and teaches drawing in the Art Studio Department at Case Western Reserve University.
John Wood, poet, educator, curator, author of more than 20 books on photography and editor of 21st: The Journal of Contemporary Photography described Pekoc’s work as “…often life-sized, beautiful, and individually handmade photographs [that] contain drawing, painting, and collage composed of smaller, colored bits of thick, stitched paper and polyester film that have been sanded, scratched, or crumpled and then coated with paint, varnish, or shellac. They bring to mind the shimmering mosaics of Ravenna, as well as many of the paintings of Gustav Klimt…” Wood also noted that Pekoc’s process of cutting and stitching his photographs suggests “a metaphor for the psychological repair and stitching back together of the self.”
Dana Gioia, award winning poet, critic, former commentator on American culture for the British Broadcasting Corporation and for six years Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts declared, “The first time I saw Christopher Pekoc’s work, I knew I was in the presence of a powerful and original artist. His work is in equal parts beautiful and unsettling which is to say that it transforms our usual sense of the beautiful to include the strange, the disturbing, and
the mysterious”
Tom Hinson, Curator of Photography, and former Curator of Contemporary Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art, who has followed Pekoc’s work since the early 1970s, praises the work for its “formal beauty, technical excellence, and emotional resonance,” and ranks him as “one of the northeast Ohio’s most distinguished artists.”
Megan Lykins Reich
Megan Lykins Reich is the Director of Education and Associate Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland. A member of MOCA’s senior management team, Reich directs the museum’s Education Department, overseeing the Curator of Education and the New Media Education Manager and organizing all adult and university education programs. Reich also curates and coordinates exhibitions at the museum, including There Goes the Neighborhood, currently on view. Reich has organized eleven exhibitions at MOCA Cleveland as well as supervised numerous programs and events, including major conferences and artist panels. She created MOCA’s audio-guide podcast program in 2006 (now a cell phone-delivered program) and is responsible for supervising MOCA’s technology-based education and outreach activities. Prior to assuming her current post, Reich served as the Emily Hall Tremaine Curatorial Fellow at MOCA Cleveland (2004-2006) and The Cleveland Museum of Art Fellow (2003-2004). In 2001, she graduated valedictorian from The Pennsylvania State University’s School of Visual Arts, where she earned a BA in Art History and a BA in Studio Art. In 2004, Reich received her MA in Art History and Museum Studies from Case Western Reserve University.
Marilyn Ladd-Simmons
Gallery Manager SPACES Gallery, Cleveland, Ohio
Marilyn Simmons has been Gallery Manager at SPACES Gallery for the past 18 years. SPACES is a contemporary art center that interacts directly with artists, promoting excellence and experimentation to produce challenging gallery exhibitions, public programs, residencies, and publications. She received a BA in Studio Art and Business from Baldwin Wallace College. Simmons was a board member of National Association of Artists’ Organizations (NAAO) a national organization for artists which use convening, networking, and advocacy in an effort to mobilize the field in a national dialogue. In addition she is a printmaker and has curated or assisted with many exhibitions.
As Gallery Manager at SPACES, I work with the artists to help install and trouble shoot exhibitions. Exhibition and annual programming review coordinator. Staff lead for SPACES Annual Benefit and Silent Art Action and Annual Members’ Show and Sale.
Christy Gray
Associate Director,RED DOT Project
Christy Gray is an artist and design professional with 16 years experience in project management, organization, planning, sales and marketing. As Associate Director at RED DOT Project, all activity is mission driven to create economic opportunities for Northeast Ohio's member artists. From working collaboratively with artists and clients to develop commissioned artwork for public spaces, Gray facilitates the process to satisfy the client and embolden the artist. RED DOT Project is uniquely positioned as a social enterprise presenting over 100 of the region's artists with a web portal that allows for simple and quick accessibility to artwork during the course of a project. Gray works directly with business clients to create a diverse mix of artwork for their environments that both enhances the space and communicates the mission.
Gray has demonstrated her ability to work on a wide cross section of projects while balancing an art career and volunteer activities. As a collaborator with ZeroLandfill since 2005, Gray has connected art entrepreneurs and arts educators with the offerings from the architectural and design community. In 2004, Christy Gray served as the Sparx in the City
Urban Gallery Hop Coordinator. As a textile artist whose work has been exhibited in group shows across the region, she is actively involved with the Textile Art Alliance, an affiliate group of the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Gianna Commito
Assistant Professor of Painting, Kent State University
Gianna Commito is an Assistant Professor of Painting at Kent State, where she has taught since 2005. She received her BFA (1998) in painting and ceramics from The New York State School of Art and Design at Alfred University and MA (2002) and MFA (2003) in painting from the University of Iowa. Gianna was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, and The Bemis Center for Contemporary Art. She served as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the New York State College of Art and Design at Alfred University, and was an Artist in Residence at St. Michael’s College in
Colchester, VT.
Gianna has had recent exhibitions at MoCA, Cleveland, the Weatherspoon Art Museum in North Carolina, Geoffrey Young Gallery in Massachusetts, and The Drawing Center and Taxter and Spengemann gallery in New York City. She lives and paints in Kent.
Julie Langsam
Julie Langsam is currently Joseph P. Motto Endowed Chair and Head of Painting at The Cleveland Institute of Art. In the fall she will assume a new position as Assistant Professor at The Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers, The State University of NJ. As an artist, Langsam has had numerous exhibitions including a solo museum show at MOCA Cleveland; is the recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award; and is represented in many collections throughout the US. Her most recent exhibition of paintings "Of Other Spaces" at Frederieke Taylor Gallery was reviewed in the March issue of "Art in America". Among Langsam’s other activities she is co-curator of such exhibitions as "Arte Povera American Style: Funk, Play, Poetry & Labor", "House: Case Study Cleveland", and "It’s a Wonderful Life: Psychodrama in Contemporary Painting". She has been the Director of CIA’s Kacalieff Visiting Artist & Scholars Program since 2004.
Terry Schwarz
Terry Schwarz has been the senior planner at Kent State University’s Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative since 2000. Her work at the CUDC includes neighborhood and campus planning, commercial and residential design guidelines, stormwater management and green infrastructure strategies. She recently prepared the Re-imagining a More Sustainable Cleveland plan in collaboration with Neighborhood Progress, Inc. and the Cleveland City Planning Commission. Terry launched the CUDC’s Shrinking Cities Institute in 2005 in an effort to understand and address the implications of population decline and large-scale urban vacancy in Northeast Ohio. She teaches in the graduate design curriculum for the KSU College of Architecture and Environmental Design. She has a Bachelor’s degree in English from the Illinois Institute of Technology and a Master’s degree in City and Regional Planning from Cornell University.
The Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative is a community service organization with a professional staff of designers committed to improving the quality of urban places through technical design assistance, research and advocacy. Supported by the Ohio Board of Regents' Urban University Program and the College of Architecture and Environmental Design at Kent State University, the CUDC offers architectural and urban design expertise in the service of urban communities, design professionals, and the planning and public policy work of the state universities in Akron, Youngstown and Cleveland.
Carol Hummel
Carol Hummel received her BS in Photojournalism and MFA in Sculpture from Kent State University. Her twin passions are art and travel. Her work has been shown internationally and featured in publications around the world. Her recent artist’s residencies include Global Arts Village in India, Esther Benjamin’s Trust in Nepal, Center for Land Use Interpretation in Utah and Colorado Art Ranch in Colorado Springs.
Isabel Farnsworth
Isabel Farnsworth is an Associate Professor of Sculpture at Kent State University, received her BFA in painting from Tyler School of Art in 1989 and her MFA in Sculpture from Stanford University in 1995. She attended Skowhegan School of Art She has been an artist-in-residence at the Skowhegan School of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (the Core Program at The Glassell School) in Houston TX, the Rijksacademie Von Beelden Kuntz in Amsterdam, the Cite’ International des Arts in Paris, and the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, CA. She is the recipient of an individual Artist Fellowship grant from the Ohio Arts Council in 1999.
Amy Casey
Amy Casey is a 1999 graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Art. Recent exhibitions include a solo show at POV Evolving Gallery, Los Angeles, and Zg Gallery, Chicago. Her images have been included in many publications including New American Paintings, The New York Times, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer. She is included in the current MOCA exhibition titled “There Goes the Neighborhood” and was recently featured in the quarterly national publication New American Painting. Casey received a Full Fellowship Award from The Vermont Studio Center, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council, the Katherine and Lee Chilcote Foundation Award for New Work, and was
Artist in Residence at Zygote Press, Cleveland in 2006. She is the 2009 recipient of the Emerging ArtistAward from the Cleveland Arts Prize. Amy Casey is represented by Zg Gallery, Chicago and Michael Rosenthal Gallery, San Francisco.