CLEVELAND, Ohio — It could be time to give up the notion that there’s a specific identity to art produced in Cleveland or Northeast Ohio. A trio of strong solo exhibitions on view through June 29 at the Artists Archives of the Western Reserve (AAWR) makes the point clear.
The AAWR exhibitions focus on works by Baila Litton, Jean Kondo Weigl, and the late Arabella Proffer, three artists active in Northeast Ohio over the past two decades.
Their work has little to do with the region or each other. Instead, their side-by-side shows argue for a sense of Northeast Ohio as an affordable haven in which accomplished artists can pursue their careers while maintaining diverse aesthetic dialogues and commercial possibilities inside and outside the region.
All three artists have had meaningful interactions within Northeast Ohio’s arts ecology, which includes academic institutions that offer opportunities to study or teach. But they’ve also studied, worked and shown their work in other places. In the internet age, an artist can be based anywhere and interact with the world.
What Litton, Proffer and Weigl share is that they were accepted in recent years for membership in the AAWR, a Cleveland-based archive that preserves and exhibits works donated by artists who qualify for admission after review by a professional jury.
Founded in 1996 by the late Cleveland sculptor David Davis and eight other regional artists, the archive now has a collection of over 10,000 objects and growing, according to Mindy Tousley, its executive director.
Membership entitles participating artists to a solo show, but the works by Litton, Proffer and Weigl don’t exhibit any particular sense of dialogue or affinity, as in the old-timey days of the “Cleveland School’’ artists before and between the wars, or perhaps the Ohio Op Artists of the 1960s and ‘70s, including Julian Stanczak and Ed Mieczkowski.
What’s on view at AAWR, instead, are works by three individuals who have (had in Proffer’s case; she died in May after a long battle with cancer) something intriguing and meaningful to say, and the artistic capacity to get their message across with clout.
Here’s a closer look at the three shows:
Baila Litton
Litton is a Cleveland native who studied at the Art Students League in New York and the Cleveland Institute of Art before earning a bachelor’s degree in art education at Kent State University. Her website doesn’t include dates for her educational experiences and she declined through AAWR to provide her birth year.
Litton is represented by selections from several series of images on paper made over the past two decades that focus primarily on icon-like portraits of men and women of color in ways that suggest personal struggles related to racism or marginality.
What gives Litton’s work its particular integrity is the way she infuses meaning and holds attention not just through her imagery, but through the textures and materiality of her multimedia surfaces, which can include collaged paper, pencil, charcoal, ink, pastel, acrylic, watercolor and encaustic, or pigment suspended in hot wax.
Litton’s “Displaced Project,’’ 2019-2024, focuses on bust-length portraits of enslaved men and women with hands bound by rope or chains, along with images of 19th century diagrams of ships showing silhouettes of the bodies of enslaved individuals packed in like cordwood.
Also noteworthy in Litton’s show is “Herstories,’’ 2001-2003, a series in which the artist layers richly worked, photo-based portraits of Latina subjects with tattoo-like imagery that conveys a sense of hidden personal narratives stamped, literally, on the features of each woman.
Given their focus on Black and brown subjects and suggestions of relationships to the slave trade or Caribbean history, Litton’s work would look at home among that of other artists exploring themes related to the African diaspora throughout the Atlantic world, a topic of rising importance to art museums and artists across the U.S. and Latin America. In other words, Litton’s work is from Cleveland and produced in Cleveland, but it feels like part of a larger conversation.
Jean Kondo Weigl
So too do Weigl’s restrained, dreamlike scenes of slender Asian women and children juxtaposed in stage-like spaces with dancing bears, narrow boats with sharp prows afloat on mysterious bodies of flat water, distant mountains and seated Buddhas levitating amid landscapes inspired by traditional Japanese woodblock prints of the 19th-century.
Weigl was born in 1948 in Berkeley, California after her parents were released from one of the notorious internment camps to which Japanese-Americans were relegated during World War II under President Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066.
The artist holds a bachelor’s degree from Scripps College, a master’s degree from Oberlin College, and a master of fine arts degree from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. She has exhibited across the U.S. and has taught at colleges and universities in Arkansas, Virginia and Ohio, including Oberlin and Lorain County Community College.
In a statement in the catalog of the AAWR show, Weigl says her Japanese-American identity is an abiding influence, along with her interest in human and animal characters that, to her, represent immigrants and fugitives, and “the contrast between civilization and the natural order.’’
What’s most striking, however, is the dreamlike mood Weigl’s paintings evoke through her simple, cartoon-like drawing style, and her subtle palette of gray, ocher, tangerine, pale turquoise, jade, pale violet and amethyst.
Weigl’s delicate shades scintillate against one another with a soft vibrance, an effect heightened by the dull, matte surfaces of her paintings. Her brushwork and paint-handling is direct, unfussy and assured. She’s a graceful performer with her materials.
Weigl’s paintings certainly evoke Japanese artistic traditions including those of the artists of the Ukiyo-e, or “Floating World,’’ from which her show takes its title. Ukiyo-e refers to the 18th- and 19th-century entertainment districts of Edo, (now Tokyo), and Osaka and Kyoto that inspired woodblock print artists such as Hiroshige and Hokusai. But Weigl’s art is not specifically derivative of her sources. It appears to “float,’’ delightfully, in a world of the artist’s imagining.
Arabella Proffer
Proffer, born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1978, spent much of her career in the Los Angeles area after earning a bachelor of fine arts degree from the California Institute of the Arts. She moved to Cleveland in 2004 in search of affordable housing and studio space. In addition to making art, she was the co-founder of the indie record label, Elephant Stone Records.
Proffer, who considered herself a surrealist, developed an art that centered on a kind of dangerous beauty embodied in lush still-lifes that included ambiguous, dripping biomorphic organisms and fluids, or goth-influenced portraits rooted in 16th-century European Mannerism. The imaginary subjects in Proffer’s portraits combine spiked collars and piercings with elongated necks and champagne-bottle shoulders.
After receiving a cancer diagnosis three years ago, Proffer stopped painting in oils, which her doctors advised against, according to Mindy Tousley, AAWR’s executive director. Instead, Proffer focused on animated video images of femmes fatale that blend contemporary high fashion with Renaissance concepts of beauty, like a cross between Botticelli and Vogue.
Some of the images are available as NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, through the artist’s website, arabellaproffer.com. Examples in the show include “Summer Storm,’’ an image of an amber-eyed beauty wrapped in a neon green and yellow shawl, whose long black hair undulates in a soft breeze, or “Siren’’ a closeup portrait of a red-lipped mermaid in blue-tinted mascara whose liquid tresses cascade like waterfalls as she appears to lure a heeling clipper ship to crash on unseen rocks.
Proffer’s art is beguiling, entertaining and easy to enjoy. Marketed online, it developed a broad audience of followers and fans and was published in The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, SF Weekly, and other publications. Her website states that her work is in over 100 private collections and that she participated in solo and group shows across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Australia. She was married to the novelist and rock music historian Ben Vendetta, who survives her. (Tousley said the family will announce a celebration of the artist’s life when a date has been chosen).
In her writings, Proffer adopted a wry, self-deprecating, unpretentious persona. She titled her blog “Arty Farty,: Arabella’s art and culture with a dash of gas.’’ She posted advice that urged readers to “go to that gig, that lecture, that exhibition, dinner party, and go on that date.’’
Proffer apparently didn’t take herself too seriously but was a hard worker who succeeded in making her images look fluent, approachable and fun.
An exception, however, might be the still-lifes she painted in 2016-18, and again in 2023. The AAWR gallery states in a label that the clusters of scary looking biomorphic growths in the earlier series anticipated the appearance of tumors caused by her cancer. Even without knowing that, these images are a disturbing mix of menace and beauty.
Tousley said that after Proffer’s doctors told her last year that there was nothing more they could do for her, she returned to oil painting, obviously a passion. Inspired by 17th-century “memento mori’’ Dutch still-lifes, the paintings include of bouquets that drip pink fluids, stacks of books that sweat black droplets, and other imagery suggesting breakdown and decay. Yet Proffer painted them with the same, graceful and deceptive ease that characterized the rest of her work.
There is no obvious connection between the Litton, Weigl and Proffer shows other than that the artists have all had parallel careers in Northeast Ohio, and all merited inclusion in the AAWR archive. Thanks to the institution, art historians and art lovers will have the opportunity years and decades from now to sort out how they fit into the evolving puzzle of art history in Northeast Ohio.
For now, however, it seems these three gifted practitioners are, or were, in Proffer’s case, Cleveland-based artists who have found the region a supportive place from which to explore creative influences and possibilities that feel more unbounded than strictly local.
