Curator-Led Lunchtime Gallery Tour

Spend an hour learning about the artists selected in the exhibition, their work, and their relationship to their chosen site and neighborhood.

About Robin Robinson
Crossroads: Still We Rise curator, Robin Robinson is an award-winning artist, art educator, art therapist, and community activist. Although a native of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Robinson has a strong connection to Cleveland. As a child, she spent every Easter and summer vacation in the Glenville neighborhood with her grandparents and cousins. She fondly remembers looking forward to shopping on East 105th Street because of the entrepreneurial excitement that radiated from that area. Since her return to Cleveland in 2011, Robin has observed the devastation of many economically depressed East-Side neighborhoods. In 2015 Robin created the “Urban Renaissance with heART” program convinced of the healing power of community-driven public art. As the co-director of Sankofa Fine Art Plus, Robin is dedicated to bringing fine art outside of the traditional, restrictive art venue into the urban community in the form of co-creative, collaborative, socially relevant public art projects. In her words, “As a Black artist, it is my responsibility to translate the otherwise ignored voices of under-represented communities into artworks that are engaging aesthetically while being intrinsically thought-provoking.”

Curatorial Statement
I envisioned Crossroads: Still We Rise to challenge the perceptions and expectations that the media, politicians and the uninformed populations have of Cleveland’s East-side communities and their residents. I commissioned twelve brilliant Black artists to create work for this project. The artists are multidisciplinary with various levels of artistic practices, and all share a compassion for injustice. One of the most important criteria for the artist selection was that of trust. Each artist has personally experienced the weight of Cleveland’s policies of inequity in their own lives, thus, trust and mutual admiration is inherently present in their community collaborations. Secondly but no less important, each artist had to be able to engage the residents in open and honest conversations and consider the unique history of each community. I wanted the commissioned artwork to represent the history and resilience of the community that hosted it. These communities are more than their perceived symbols of urban blight. These neighborhoods are full of history, culture and home-grown activists born of necessity, fortitude and ingenuity.

The Lunchtime Gallery Tour is free! Registration is required.