Sculpture for Society/a Cleveland Sculptors Network Panel, with visiting artists Allison Smith & Adam Milner

Allison Smith was born in Manassas, Virginia, in 1972, and later went on to graduate from The New School for Social Research. She then achieved a BFA in fine arts from Parsons School of Design and an MFA in sculpture from Yale University School of Art. She has produced over twenty-five solo exhibitions, installations, and performances at establishments including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, The Arts Club of Chicago, and S!GNAL Center for Contemporary Art among many more. She has also been involved with many group exhibitions including some at P.S.1./MoMA and The Tang Museum. Smith also lectures at schools and museums at home and abroad. Smith has received funding from many programs, and has held residencies in Sweden, New York, Massachusetts, Texas, and California. She currently has work on display at multiple museums including the Whitney, LACMA, Saatchi Gallery, and many private collections. Learn more about Allison and see her past work here.

Allison was teaching at Carnegie Mellon University when she and Adam met. She has now returned to San Francisco to take the post of Dean of Fine Arts of the California College of the Arts, where she previously was the Head of Sculpture.

Adam Milner is an artist treating personal experiences as a site of anthropological inquiry: observing, interviewing, collecting, and archiving, carefully but somewhat distanced. Studying and drawing upon the various ways we connect with material and social worlds, as well as how we hold on to those moments through objects, Milner combines and confuses spaces like the hoard, the archive, the museum, and the home. The resulting works take the form of performances, sculptures, drawings, texts, and interventions which examine broader politics of relationships and intimacy. Rooted in longing, the archives ultimately point to their own subjectivity, creating blurred categories which embrace queerness. Milner has exhibited at the Andy Warhol Museum, the Aspen Art Museum, MCA Denver, Casa Maauad, Flux Factory, Gildar Gallery, and David B. Smith Gallery and created a commission for the current issue of The Third Rail. An Art at the Frontier Grant from the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry led to Nowhere Voyage, a performance and documentary surrounding a grindr-led cruise liner. Milner received an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University and has upcoming projects at the Mattress Factory and The Clyfford Still Museum. See Adam’s past work here.

Matthew L. Levy is Assistant Professor of Art History at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College. His book, Abstract Painting and the Minimalist Critiques: Robert Mangold, David Novros, and Jo Baer in the 1960s, will be published by Routledge in 2019. His writing has appeared in the Brooklyn Rail and Journal of Contemporary Painting, as well as in exhibition catalogues for the National Gallery of Canada and Museum Wiesbaden. At Penn State Erie, he organized a series of lectures by social practice artists that featured representatives from Critical Art Ensemble, Transformazium, and Conflict Kitchen.

As a facilitator of learning, moderator Nicole Ledinek is interested in the intersections of progressive education and informal learning spaces. As a graduate of the Leadership in Museum Education at BankStreet College in New York City, Nicole aims to design inclusive programs and interpretive opportunities for visitors of to build skills necessary to be active participants in their lives and communities. Here, Our Voices: teens for social change, is a recent example. Nicole holds a Masters of Science in Education from BankStreet College and a Bachelors of Art Education from The Ohio State University.

CONGRATULATIONS to our selected winners for the Master Review: Ella Medicus of Cleveland, OH; E.D. Taylor, of  Lakewood, OH; Eric D.Charlton, of Meadville, PA; and Alice Young, of Cincinnati, OH. Medicus‘ work is wrought with irony, and a dryly humorous use of cultural imagery. Pieces such as Elongated Amazon Box suggest Amazon’s branding to activate a sense of familiarity that is immediately denied by the box’s strange proportions and the glitchy rendering of the symbols. Taylor‘s work focuses on the body and the mystical, combining imagery of the base and universally accessible– that being stripped down elements of the human anatomy, with the vocabulary of the spiritual. Her work shares a visual synergy with folk art and artists. Young projects light and shadow onto the wall to create fictive industrial environments, like the ones she sees from the window of her studio in Southern Ohio. These projections act like shifting dreamlike visions, warped by the contours of the wall itself. The same effect of dreamlike distance is created in her DarkGlass series that combines images of natural disasters with Victorian-style mirrors and furniture. Charlton combines performance, digital media, industrial materia, and even cheap costumes to act as an artist/agent of chaos. Pieces like cheddarcheeseSuperman, where Charlton donned a one-size-fits-all superman outfit and caked it with pound after pound of powdered cheese and drank beer while offering vague “help” to shoppers at a mall, are troubling but in the end, harmless. His work is constantly testing the viewer and himself, his materials consisting of things like “as many concrete hot dogs as I can hold,” and it is ultimately dripping with a singular sensibility that seems to mock the mainstream art world as much as it contributes to it. The four artists will be in attendance at the panel on the 22nd.