Cleveland City Hall’s neoclassical hallways are currently dotted with artwork for a special exhibition celebrating six local Black artists.
“City hall has such beautiful architecture,” participating artist Christa Childs who goes by Christa Freehands said. “It's a space where when you're in it, it feels like a museum itself.”
The exhibit is supported by Cleveland’s Transformative Arts Fund, administered by Rhonda K. Brown, Cleveland’s senior strategist for arts, culture and the creative economy.
“[It’s] an ARPA funded project that allocated $3 million for public art projects for Cleveland artists,” Brown said. “We went through a very rigorous program to identify, create plans, and initiate the entire project. It netted seven amazing art projects all over the city of Cleveland, and they're in full swing.”
One of the seven funded projects is the For Art’s Sake artist collective curated by lead artist and Cleveland entrepreneur Kumar Arora. The project hosts various Cleveland art events this year starting with the city hall show for Black History Month, “Artists Run the Streets,” on view through May 30.
Arora said curating the project led him and his team to ask a new set of questions.
“How can we actually change our city through the arts?” Arora said. “What can we be doing to empower creatives around us? And then most importantly, how can we leave a longer impact and leave something behind? That's why it's called For Arts Sake, because we wanted to make sure that it is for the artist.”
The collective selected six artists for the “Artists Run the Streets” exhibit: Christa Freehands, Chris Goody, Ryan Harris, Mike Miller, Sampson Smiley and Lacy Talley. Each artist explores the exhibit’s theme, celebrating labor and history, which aligns with the national Black History Month theme of African Americans and Labor, determined by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.
The artists received a stipend along with marketing assistance from Arora’s team.
“It's always nice to be a part of something where they consider how to compensate the artist,” Freehands said. “It's nice to acknowledge the fact that we put a lot of work and effort into what we produce.”
Freehands’ contribution is a series of paintings called “The Cleveland Blues.”
“I come from a blue-collar family. A lot of people in my family work some type of hands-on occupation or some type of trade,” she said. “I really wanted to focus on blue-collar workers and the fact that blue-collar workers make the city run.”
