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Alana Cartwright is a multidisciplinary, visual artist based in Cleveland, Ohio.

She graduated in 2021 from Cleveland State University with a bachelor’s degree in studio art and Spanish minor. She is continuing her education at the Cleveland Institute of Art for the 2021-2022 school year. While Alana has experience in several art mediums, photography is her primary concentration.

Her artwork is both figurative and conceptual, as she manifests the complexities and facets of the human condition, often using the human figure to do so.

In the spring of 2019 she featured work in the Merit Scholar Exhibition at Galleries @ CSU. Alana also had a solo exhibition for her body of work, “Clothed in Resilience” at the Massillon Museum in March 2021. The Massillon Museum purchased the photography book included in the work exhibited for their collection. In the spring of 2021 Alana exhibited work in the Merit Scholar Exhibition again at Galleries @ CSU. Alana’s passion to communicate through her lens stems from the tumultuous journeys comprising life.

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Amber N. Ford is an artist and freelance photographer based in Cleveland, Ohio, USA. She holds a BFA in Photography from the Cleveland Institute of Art. While Ford’s practice is primarily in digital photography, she continues to explore other mediums such as alternative photographic processes, printmaking and collage art. Ford’s work in portraiture has gained national notoriety appearing in publication such as The Atlantic and Washington Post and she has exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, the Kent State University Museum, Transformer Station, SPACES Gallery, Youngstown State University and more.

Her work explores Blackness, identity and culture while questioning the accepted idealized conceptualization of “truth”. Ford describes her artistic practice as a “collaborative engagement between photographer and sitter,” wherein she, the photographer, establishes a platform to which the sitter constructs themselves. This allows the sitter to show up how they would like to be seen, unapologetically, and engages them in the conversation her works prompts. Amber N. Ford was a recipient of the Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award in 2017, and selected as a 2019 Gordon Square Arts District Artist-In-Residence for her outstanding achievements in photography. Her community-based photographic mural, “This Story is Mines and Ours” is located along the north wall of the Gordon Square Arcade on Alger Court. Ford is a 2022 MOCA Cleveland Artist-in-Residence where she is exploring the duality of dying and healing. She is also the Space Activation Curator at Thirdspace Action Lab (TSAL), a grassroots research, strategy, and design cooperative located in the Glenville neighborhood of Cleveland, OH, where she participates in creating the vision, scope and execution of TSAL creative programs, projects and initiatives.

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A Cleveland-based photographer, Aja Joi Grant aims to create new dialogues around what is unseen, often creating links to the beauty and power of our individual beings. Utilizing digital media and film, she seeks out the unique features that make up an individual's identity, to capture their narrative. She sees photos as moments in time, and different moments are like the different chapters in one's story. Many works include the element of water and nature, as it is a common motif found in African spirituality. Honoring her own spiritual journey, her chosen themes invite the audience to reconcile what ‘healing’ means to them. Her main goal is to move past the subtle yet harmful narratives and stereotypes black women face, heal from internalized racism and misogynoir, and share her deep appreciation for Black American culture.

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Sharon Hughes is a Cleveland-based editorial and commercial photographer. She currently lives with her husband and three young children in Lakewood, Ohio. She is drawn to visual storytelling from the margins of society, personally connecting with subjects who may be overlooked or undervalued. She places a high value on stepping into the context of her subject and cares deeply about listening and observing as a part of her process. She believes photography can be a tool to transform minds and hearts and push viewers to see people with greater respect and dignity. Her photographs are invitations to listen and learn in an effort to find a new sense of beauty and human connection.

In 2021, Sharon received the Urgent Art Grant, through SPACES and the Cuyahoga Arts Council. She interviewed and photographed sixteen mothers with black sons for exhibits in Cleveland and Chicago titled “Mothers in Black and White: Exploring the Hopes, Dreams and Fears of Mothers with Black sons. It sparked a deeper interest in editorial work.

“Rawan” is a collection of photos taken in 2022. Sharon met Rawan at her local school playground in the fall of 2021 on the school playground where their children go to school. They became friends and realized they each longed for their respective homes, Saudi Arabia and Chicago. They found commonality in navigating a pandemic, missing their families and working towards putting down roots in Lakewood, OH. While their stories differed, Sharon found strength, hope and seeds of friendship in Rawan that would become valuable as they each embrace what it means to be mothers and neighbors in a new place.

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Patsy Coffey Kline was born in Manchester, Kentucky and raised in the greater Cleveland, Ohio area. She received her BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art with a major in graphic design and minor in photography, graduating in the top ten percent. She worked as a freelance graphic designer during college for organizations like the Cleveland Museum of Art and Nottingham & Spirk Design. Shortly after graduation Kline moved to Tremont where she began a graphic design and marketing firm that supplied gratis services to area nonprofits such as Cleveland Public Theater and Near West Theater. In addition, she sat on various fund rising committees for organization such as the March of Dimes, Cleveland Center of Contemporary Art, Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland Film Society, and Tremont Arts and Cultural Festival.

Since 1996 she has focused on curating multi-sensory art exhibitions which include everything from live original music, DJ’s, stilt and luminous dance, to videography, juggling, and card and poetry readings. Kline has facilitated nearly 200 events spotlighting Cleveland and internationally known artists. The venues selected are as diverse as the exhibits. Locations include everything from restaurants, galleries, offices, and storefronts, to vacant city lots and U-haul trucks. In 2002 she opened her first gallery, Gallery U Cleveland, in the Colonial Marketplace Arcade, downtown Cleveland. A founding member of a group of galleries that made up the ARTcade Project designed to market the building to developers. The gallery focused on exhibiting a lively mix of contemporary art that was stimulating, generated growth, narrated the unconscious, fostered change, and encouraged creativity. After losing her space three years later to make way for a sports complex she moved her gallery into a rented 17’ foot U-haul truck and became Gallery U Haul.

Within months Kline began creating her own conceptual art installations in the truck. A consummate storyteller, Kline’s installations engage the viewer with her candid exploration of universal emotions. Using experiences from her own life, she often reveals painful situations with brutal honesty and poetic humor. Kline is interested in creating a conversation about what holds important in our shared contemporary culture and experience. Trying to prompt an exchange that removes the traditional boundaries imposed by the institutional system or other accepted norms in order to question what it is that brings us together and share intimacy. At the heart of Kline’s work is the idea of establishing relationship; creating new bonds and strengthening old; of the profound difficulty in connecting, repairing, loving. Kline’s work asks one to wonder if those difficulties are not what we need to overcome in order to love, if they are what make love so meaningful. Her work investigates whether minimizing those contradictions and difficulties, is to minimize love itself. Her installations are at first therapy; then art takes over. “It’s the right method for me, turning things to my advantage in order not to suffer from them,” states Kline.

Kline works part-time at the Cleveland Museum of Art as a gallery guard after 20 years at Cleveland State University as a graphic designer and lives in Tremont with her cat, Smokey Velour, and budgie, Franklin.

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bio

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Deborah Pinter began her education career when she worked as a studio artist and educator for the Education Department at the Cleveland Museum of Art before becoming an Associate Educator at the Akron Art Museum in 1999. In 2005 Deborah became the Executive Director of the Orange Art Center and after eleven years, in 2016, left to dedicate the majority of her time to her art. She has also taught photo history at Hiram College, Hiram, OH and Photography to Freshman and Sophomore Photography majors at the Cleveland Institute of Art. Her photographs and monotype prints are included in numerous private and public collections including the Cleveland Museum of Art, Zygote Press Archives, Progressive Art Collection, The Cleveland State University Art Collection, Laura Ruth and Fred Bidwell Collection and the Grafikwerkstatt Collection, Dresden, Germany. Exhibition venues include solo exhibitions in 2018 at BAYarts, 2017 at Heights Arts and The Maria Neil Art Project and in 2012 The Cleveland Botanical Gardens. Group shows include Alte Feuerwache Loschwitz, Dresden, Germany, The Art Gallery at Cleveland State University, the University of Akron Emily Davis Gallery and The Colburn Gallery, Ashland University. She also self-published a book in 2012, Luminous Florals, that was included in the DIY: Photographers and Books Exhibition, curated by Barbara Tannenbaum at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Pinter has also served as a trustee on a number of nonprofit art institution committees and boards, including SPACES Gallery, Cleveland, OH and the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Friends of Photography board where she served as Vice President for three years.