“I think it takes a lot of nerve, a lot of guts, to be here,” says
artist Katherine Chilcote. “You need to really believe that your
creativity is meant to survive in a vast gray space, and that your
creative energy is able to take you somewhere else. Cleveland has a
very steady heartbeat — not like New York or other cities that
are constantly having heart attacks. If you listen to that, it sustains
you. But it’s hard to hear at times.”
I’m talking with the 30-year-old artist in the middle of the
reinvented west-side area called Gordon Square Arts District.
We’re around the corner from Katherine’s one-bedroom home (purchased in
2008 for $5,000 and rehabbed with the help of friends), talking about
her art — including a show of her smaller, more nuanced paintings
and drawings that opens Friday at Perimeter Gallery.
But that’s the least of what she’s been up to in the last few years.
Since returning to Cleveland in 2005 following graduate studies at the
New York Studio School, she’s founded a nonprofit organization called
Building Bridges, putting together funding, expertise and workers for
more than half a dozen ambitious projects. The group has a double
mission: pursuing a jobs-and- education agenda while beautifying the
large, blank inner-city spaces she talks about.
It’s all about making meaningful passages in the city and hopefully
binding some urban wounds. Chilcote designs large-scale murals
and employs inner-city kids, as well as other arts educators, to work
with her. The murals are executed in sections, usually on large metal
panels that are reassembled onsite. Most Clevelanders have probably
glimpsed a couple of these gigantic scenes. One is located across from
St. Malachi’s Church at the north end of West 25th Street. Completed in
2006, Chilcote’s panels there are mounted on the banked concrete
highway overpass. The painting, which measures 12 by 40 feet, was
completed by high-school-aged students — paid interns in
Chilcote’s Bridges Summer Mural Institute. Other murals are at Case
Western Reserve University’s Interfaith Center and St. Paul’s Community
Church at West 45th and Franklin. Fairmount Presbyterian Church in
Cleveland Heights commissioned a work titled “Gathering Knowledge” to
celebrate its 90th anniversary in 2006.
Chilcote’s palette tends toward blue and muted shades of green,
brown and red: a fluid, rainy range of colors. Often, water
imagery is present in her works as gushing streams or broad rivers. Her
current projects include a painting titled “Words of the River,” which
incorporates poetry into public murals. It will be installed at the
waterline of the Cuyahoga River basin.
Another 48-by-36-foot mural was placed along the waterline of the
Cuyahoga at Settlers Landing this past June. “It’s about the building
of the Erie Canal, the progressions of our river and the contradictory
nature and movement of water — how it sustains us, yet can drown
us,” she says.
This article appears in Dec 9-15, 2009.