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Firelands Association for the Visual Arts (FAVA)
New Union Center for the Arts
39 South Main St.
Oberlin, OH 44074

Hours
Tuesday–Saturday 11am–5pm

Sunday 1pm-5pm

Contact
Tirzah Legg, Gallery Director
tirzah@fava.org

Phone
440.774.7158

FRONT International 2022

Launched in 2018, FRONT International is a contemporary art exhibition that presents artist commissions, performances, films, and public programs across Northeast Ohio every three years.

The 2022 edition, Oh, Gods of Dust and Rainbows, embraces art as an agent of transformation, a mode of healing, and a therapeutic process. The title is an homage to “Two Somewhat Different Epigrams,” a 1957 poem by Langston Hughes, who moved to Cleveland in his childhood and maintained an artistic connection to the region. A tender, brutal, and provocative prayer, the poem meditates on the inseparability of joy and suffering.

Amid a time of ongoing tragedy and loss, FRONT 2022 explores how art making can heal us— as individuals, as groups, and as a society. Spanning over twenty-five sites in Cleveland, Akron, and Oberlin, the exhibition bears witness to interlocking personal and public crises while emphasizing collaborative creative processes, partnering closely with institutions across the region, and connecting artists with local communities.

Emerging over multiple timeframes, FRONT 2022 approaches the slow process of curating as a way to leave lasting traces upon civic and cultural infrastructures, while also embracing the ephemeral glimpses of beauty that art—like a rainbow—can offer.

Oh, Gods of Dust and Rainbows features over ninety regional, national, and international artists. Starting with how daily practice allows individual artists to cultivate liberation, the triennial also demonstrates how aesthetic pleasure—sharing joy through movement, music, craft, and color—can bring different people together. Finally, the exhibition suggests ways that contemporary art can speak with power, showing us how to recognize and reimagine the invisible structures that govern our lives.

Is a body an archive? Can an archive be embodied?

Akron-born Alexandria Couch presents a series of new paintings, using found materials like recycled thread, fabric, and paper scraps to create intimate depictions of fragmented bodies that explore the relationship of blackness to its environment. “Shapeshifting becomes the routine,” she writes. “To strip down constantly and rebuild becomes easier than wearing the same clothes. Change is comfortable. Change is necessary to live between worlds.” Embodying both power and vulnerability, these figures are one way Couch explores the uncomfortable duality of Black bodies and their surroundings.

Joe Namy’s installation Sets for a Song (2022) is part of his ongoing engagement with the life and oeuvre of legendary composer, musician, ethnomusicologist, and teacher Halim El Dabh (born 1921 in Cairo; died 2017 in Kent, OH). A pioneer of electroacoustic music, El Dabh taught at Kent State University for many decades and frequently performed across Northeast Ohio. Resurrecting a forgotten moment in the history of the postwar American avant-garde, Namy’s installation focuses on an original score El Dabh composed for choreographer Martha Graham’s 1958 ballet Clytemnestra, for which sculptor Isamu Noguchi designed the sets. The installation includes selections from El Dabh’s personal papers and documentation of the production from the Graham and Noguchi archives, alongside Namy’s own reconstruction of what he calls a “collaborative communion” between these artists. The installation complements the artist’s Songs for a Set (2022), a series of performances at Noguchi’s Portal (1976) in downtown Cleveland.

In their own distinct ways, Couch and Namy both envision bodies as essentially performative, as ever-changing sites of becoming rather than being, where identities are imagined, disassembled, and reconstructed and where history can be remembered or forgotten. Alongside Couch and Namy, FAVA is also presenting work by Tony Cokes, whose art appears in multiple FRONT venues.

Presented by The Eric & Jane Nord Family Fund and The Nord Family Foundation