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SATURDAY, JULY 31, 3-5 PM
Join Secrets: A Panel with Artists Courtney Kessel, Michelle Murphy, and Jacquelynn Sullivan and Juror Astria Suparak and a closing reception to meet the artists

Read Dan Tranberg’s review in The Plain Dealer

The Sculpture Center closes After the Pedestal, the 6th Annual of Smaller Sculpture from the Region with an artists’ panel and reception to meet the artists on Saturday, July 31, the last day of the exhibition. The public is invited to Secrets: A Panel with Artists Courtney Kessel, Michelle Murphy, and Jacquelynn Sullivan and Juror Astria Suparak from 3-4 PM, followed by a closing reception in the Sculpture Courtyard to meet the artists until 5 PM. Parking is available in The Sculpture Center parking lot, on the street, and in the lot of the Free Clinic. Call 216.229.6527 if you have any questions.

Courtney Kessel, Susan Kennedy: Pieces (detail), 2010, wood, low voltage lighting system, peephole, porcelain, paper, graphite, 42 x 16 x 16 in. Image courtesy of The Sculpture Center.	Michelle Murphy, Untitled (participatory objects) (detail), 2010, mixed media installation. Image courtesy of The Sculpture Center.	Jacquelynn Sullivan, Vacant Spaces (detail), 2009, bronze, repurposed steel case chair, 3 x 2 x 2 ft. Image courtesy of The Sculpture Center.

At first glance Courtney Kessel’s Susan Kennedy: Pieces appears to be an empty pedestal with its sculpture forgotten or perhaps stolen; however, a look into a discrete peephole reveals a hidden world. The viewer must become a participant to discover the secret within. Kessel, who received her BFA from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, PA, is a second year MFA student at Ohio University in Athens, OH. Her artwork has been exhibited in New York City, Morehead, KY, Athens, OH, and Pittsburgh, PA.

Michelle Murphy‘s installation Untitled (participatory objects) also requires full viewer participation to reveal its secrets, handwritten messages in balloons that must be popped. Murphy, a 2004 BFA graduate from the Cleveland Institute of Art (CIA), creates multi-disciplinary visual art that explores differences between reality and constructed ideals. Her artwork has been published internationally and exhibited in Geneva, Switzerland, San Francisco, CA, Chicago, IL, Cleveland, OH, and across the Midwest. Murphy works by day as a NASA Glenn Research Center photographer and CIA adjunct faculty member.

Jacquelynn Sullivan’s two sculptures Benign and Vacant Spaces bring into the open pathologies and the fears surrounding them that the sufferers often keep secreted away. Sullivan, who received her BA from the University of Minnesota (2008), is completing her MFA at Michigan State University in East Lansing MI, where she has a graduate assistantship. Her artwork has been exhibited in Michigan, Kansas, and Minnesota.

About the juror
Astria Suparak is the director of Carnegie Mellon University's Miller Gallery, where she curated the touring survey exhibition Keep It Slick: Infiltrating Capitalism with the Yes Men and Your Town, Inc.: Big Box Reuse with Julia Christensen and co-organized the Contestational Cartographies Symposium. She has curated exhibitions, screenings, and events at The Kitchen in New York, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Eyebeam, Anthology Film Archives, P.S.1, FotoFest Biennial in Houston, Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo in Mexico City, Participant Inc., Yale University, and The Liverpool Biennial, in addition to numerous alternative spaces. Over the last ten years she has presented 300 shows in ten countries. Suparak was the director of the media series at Pratt Institute from 1997 to 2000 and of Syracuse University's Warehouse Gallery from 2006-2007. Suparak’s drawings have been published in feminist journal LTTR, photo essay book I NY, British art magazine Black Diamond, and Graffiti Women: Street Art from Five Continents. Her writing has appeared in NY Arts, The
Independent, and Heeb, and in the upcoming anthologies Live Cinema: A Contemporary Reader and A Microcinema Primer: A Brief History of Small Cinemas.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 14, 7 PM
Join us for “The Best Location” Still Searching: A Woven Reflection
The Cleveland Arts Prize Goes Live: A free multidisciplinary performance in the Euclid Avenue Gallery

The three preeminent artists  - Johnny Coleman (CAP winner 2003), sculptor and sound installation artist, Dianne McIntyre (CAP winner  2006), internationally renowned, multi-talented dancer, choreographer, and theater artist, and celebrated poet and incipient novelist Bernard Matambo - will offer a sweeping gesture to present to others the bequeathed gifts of their African descended peoples. The artists will provide reflections upon the pain, immeasurable cost, unspeakable beauty, and strength given to them by the priceless legacy of their African and African-American ancestry.

Through dance, the spoken word, sound design, and created environments evocative of various locations and historical traumas, the performance places the viewer contemporaneously within the continuum of the African and African-American heritage. The audience will directly participate in this hour-long event as they move through different physical spaces where they will experience meditations on the great crossing and the “railroad of bones” under the Atlantic ocean, the historic and ongoing moves necessary for Africans and African-Americans to find their right place, and the location of Cleveland as a final place to which to cleave.

Johnny Coleman	Dianne McIntyre	Bernardo Matambo

About the artists
Johnny Coleman was born on the East Coast, raised on the West Coast, and has made his family home for many years in Oberlin, OH, where he teaches studio art and African-American studies at Oberlin College. His work first drew local attention when his contribution to the 1996 invitational group show, Urban Evidence: Contemporary Artists Reveal Cleveland, was displayed at SPACES Gallery. He has since exhibited large scale installations at the Akron Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, SPACES, and the William Cannon Art Center in Carlsbad, CA, among other places. In 2012, Coleman will be exhibiting, at both the Art Gallery of Cleveland State University and at The Sculpture Center, a new body of work that reflects upon past African-American experiences in Cleveland when the city was a jazz center and a mecca of work in the industrialized north.

Dianne McIntyre, born and raised in Cleveland, lived for 30 year in New York and returned home in 2000. She has danced world-wide and choreographed for such distinguished companies as Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Ensemble, and the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company. Infusing jazz and poetry into her work, she founded the dance/music ensemble Sounds in Motion in 1972. She dissolved the ensemble in 1988 to pursue other creative outlets. After her return to Cleveland, in 2005 she directed the world premiere of Daughter of a Buffalo Soldier at Karamu House, a dance-theatre piece honoring 96-year-old Cleveland choreographer Marjorie Witt Johnson, founder of the Karamu Dancers. McIntyre has also reached into her own history, creating I Could Stop on a Dime/And Get Ten Cents Change, featuring dances and narratives from her father's life in Cleveland.
McIntyre is the recipient of three New York Dance and Performance Awards, an Emmy nomination, and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pew Charitable Trust.

Bernard Motambo, a native of Zimbabwe, attended Oberlin College with majors in economics and creative writing and received his MA from Brown University. He returned to Oberlin in 2008 to teach creative writing. His essays and poetry have been widely published, and he is completing his first novel.

About the collaboration and other The Cleveland Arts Prize Goes Live performances
This performance is part of a multi-venue celebration, The Cleveland Arts Prize Goes Live, to draw attention to the excellence of the arts in Cleveland as seen through the lens of the Cleveland Arts Prize. The Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (MOCA), SPACES, and The Sculpture Center  are presenting three multi-venue programs featuring newly created, collaborative work by CAP winners from a variety of media and other outstanding  artists not yet CAP winners.

Other collaborative events include “Motion in Three Parts: Sound, Body, Image,” performed July 14 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland and “Seeking Radiance” at  SPACES  on Sept. 24 through Oct. 3, 2010. Also, through March 13, 2011, the Cleveland Museum of Art is exhibiting works by visual Arts Prize winners from the museum’s collection, In Honor of the Cleveland Arts Prize, in the upper East Wing Galleries.