I participated in Cleveland Rooms to Let 2016 where curated a room that will feature the dinnerware designs of Cleveland Artist, Designer and CIA professor, Viktor Schreckengost. The installation will be called Everyday Dishes and is based on an exhibition I curated in 2004 at the Northern Clay Studio in Minneapolis called The Dinnerware Legacy of Viktor Schreckengost. The dishes Viktor designed when he worked for Salem China and American Limoges in Sebring, OH in the early part of the 20th century, were the dishes that people used to eat their daily meals and would have bought at stores like J C Penny, Sears and Montgomery Ward. They were not the good dishes that only came out a couple of times a year, but the ones that they grabbed for their morning toast and set their dinner tables with. The Rooms to Let Cleveland event will took place on May 21 & 22, 2016.

Rooms to Let in Slavic Village in Cleveland

There was a uplifting art happening in Cleveland last weekend called "Rooms to Let." It was the second such event where foreclosed and abandoned houses in a hard hit area of Cleveland (houses that are scheduled to be demolished) are turned over to artists, who give them one last celebratory and dignified, send-off.

Artist: Dana Depew

The houses are all roughly a hundred years old and the last few years have been less then their best years. They are filled with character, beautiful wood, built-in china cabinets, window seats, etc., but what the artists focus on, for the most part, are that the houses are also filled with the lives of their former occupants. The houses sheltered people whose lives cry out to be celebrated before the tangible evidence of their exsistence is gone forever. We as a society, especially one hard hit by its changes like Cleveland's Slavic Village, are too quick to erase the past as we rush toward the future and we often don't realize what has been lost until it is no longer there. "Rooms to Let" stops us in our tracks and makes us look at these places, see the beauty, enjoy some music, laugh and talk with people, honor these structures and the families who lived and loved in them.

Artist: Christine Mauersberger

Having become blighted and a burden on the neighborhood, the city has no choice but to tear them down. This has been the story for many rust belt cities who deal with a loss of population and aging housing stock. For one more weekend though, people filled rooms, created music, gathered around them and enjoyed life. It was a celebration of the service of the houses as dwellings and the lives of the people who lived in them.

Artist: Jeff Chiplis

Artist: Paul Sydorenko