Spaces picks D.C.-area curator Fanna Gebreyesus to lead gallery toward 50th anniversary year
The new director at Spaces gallery sees opportunity to build on momentum following its exhibit at the Venice Biennale Fanna Gebreyesus has been appointed as the new director of Cleveland's experimental West Side gallery, Spaces, which is nearing its 50th anniversary year in 2028. She will be the second Black woman to lead an important visual arts institution in Northeast Ohio after art historian Sharon Patton led the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College from 1998 to 2003. The gallery, which recently hosted the traveling exhibition "Everlasting Plastics," debuted at the 2023 Architecture Biennale in Venice, Italy. Gebeyesus plans to use this momentum to keep Spaces on the national and international stage. She also aims to connect the current community with the community that founded Spaces.
Опубликовано : 4 недели назад от slitt, Steven Litt | [email protected], Steven Litt в
CLEVELAND, Ohio — What happens when a small, revolutionary, globally influential nonprofit gallery in Cleveland reaches solid middle age?
Fanna Gebreyesus will get to help find the answers as the new director of Spaces, the experimental West Side gallery nearing its 50th anniversary year in 2028.
Spaces announced Thursday that Gebreyesus, a native of St. Louis with curatorial and administrative experience at institutions big and small in the Washington, D.C. area has been appointed the seventh executive director at the gallery.
Gebreyesus will be the second Black woman to lead an important visual arts institution in Northeast Ohio after art historian Sharon Patton, who led the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College from 1998 to 2003.
Spaces is now coming off the high of having organized the traveling exhibition “Everlasting Plastics,” which debuted at the 2023 Architecture Biennale in Venice, Italy.
Gebreyesus said she sees Spaces poised for big things after the Biennale exhibition, led by her predecessor, Tizziana Baldenebro, with curator Lauren Leving of the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland. The exhibition is currently on view at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh and will be featured at SPACES in 2025.
“I want to continue using this wonderful unique opportunity, the momentum of the Biennale, to keep Spaces on the national and international stage,” Gebreyesus said. “That doesn’t mean organizing a show in another country, but there are other ways we can explore how to make sure that momentum keeps going.’’
Gebreyesus said she also wants to “figure new ways to reconnect our current community with the community that founded Spaces.”
For local artists and art lovers who remember the infancy of Spaces in the Cleveland Warehouse District and its long tenure across the Cuyahoga River on Superior Viaduct on the West Bank of the Flats, it may come as a jolt to hear that one of Gebreyesus’ major goals now is to plan for the 50th anniversary of Spaces in 2028.
The gallery moved from Superior Viaduct in 2017 to a renovated space at 2900 Detroit Avenue in the former Van Rooy Building as part of an urban renaissance in the Hingetown neighborhood, which also includes the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Transformer Station gallery and Bop Stop at the Music Settlement.
“We are confident that Fanna’s talent and thoughtful and engaging approach will lead our vital organization forward at a pivotal time,” SPACES Board President Bill Gagliano said in a news release about hiring Gebreyesus.
Gebreyesus, who will start work at Spaces in April 9, served from 2016 to 2021 as a curatorial associate at Glenstone, a sprawling sculpture park and art museum in Travilah, Maryland, about 25 miles northwest of Washington.
She worked from 2021 to 2022 as artistic director of NoMüNoMü, which describes itself on its website as “an intersectional artist collective and curatorial platform in Baltimore working towards liberation from the perpetual systems of oppression.”
Most recently, Gebreyesus has worked as an independent curatorial consultant. She has also worked as a curatorial intern at the Phillips Collection in Washington and as an art researcher and contributor at National Geographic.
She earned a bachelor’s degree in art history and English in 2009 at the University of Maryland and a master’s degree in art history at American University in 2015. She is the daughter of first-generation immigrants from Ethiopia.
Of the prospect of moving to Cleveland to work at Spaces, Gebreyesus said, “I love it. I really see it as kind of a melding of my time at Glenstone with my time doing grassroots work in Baltimore. It’s a nice melding of my two past experiences and really where I want to go and where art has the most impact.”