The Cleveland State University Art Gallery will present the exhibition On the Other Side, opening Friday, May 29 and running through Saturday, June 27. An opening reception will take place on May 29 from 5-8 p.m. and a Gallery Talk on Saturday, May 30 at 2 p.m. The exhibit, reception and gallery talk are all free and open to the public.

On the Other Side features paintings and sculptures by four artists whose art reflects their experiences of alternately working in two distinct cultures — living, working and exhibiting on the other side of their worlds. The exhibition includes Tracy Heneberger, Yong Han, Kam Shun Lee and Andrzej Siwkievicz. The Cleveland State University Art Gallery brings together these artists of different origins but common traits, demonstrating that Cleveland is a venue for artistic exploration that spans cultures and builds bridges between them.

Three of the presented artists have ties to Northeast Ohio. Lee and Siwkiewicz live and work in their studios in the Art Quadrangle district in downtown Cleveland. Han studied painting at the Cleveland Institute of Art and worked and exhibited here while running the CACP Gallery in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Heneberger lives in Brooklyn, New York, but has traveled to work and exhibit in China every year since 1998.

About the Artists

Born in Poland, Andrzej Siwkiewicz received his MFA in painting, sculpture and printmaking from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. He moved to Cleveland in 1996 and exhibits in local and regional venues. While his work from the 1990s often concerned dramatic world events like Balkan wars and atrocities in the context of human experience, his recent work is returning more to his interest of exploring individual relationships and existential contradictions through the human figure, including live studies. His work is in private collections in Europe, the U.S. and Canada.

Kam Shun Lee was born in the People’s Republic of China during the height of Mao’s dreaded cultural revolution. He and his family emigrated to the U.S. and settled in Toledo, Ohio. It was through classes at the Toledo Museum of Art that he became serious about a career in art. He then studied at the prestigious Cleveland Institute of Art, earning several awards of distinction, including the Honorary Merit Scholarship and the Eastman Painting Award, before earning his BFA in Painting in 1993. He has exhibited his colorful, gestural paintings frequently in exhibitions throughout Northeast Ohio, including such venues as the Great Northern Corporate Center, the River Gallery, FAVA in Oberlin and Ashland College Gallery.

For Tracy Heneberger, sculpture is accumulative in nature, each large gesture an embroidery of many small ones. It is the way he perceives life – for him, fragments are the forms he understands and repeating and expanding them is an act of faith and transformation. In this exhibit, these increments of growth include cast fish, mushrooms, angelica and ginger roots. Not only could these form the basis of a very good meal, they are also strongly linked to the sacred and to ritual, especially in China, where these sculptures were conceived and made. Heneberger handles these materials with care and respect.

Born in Korea, Yong Han came to the U.S. in 1983. He exhibited in the annual Connecticut Artists Exhibition during the 1980s, winning awards for two years, and has shown at the Slater Memorial Museum in Connecticut, BK Smith Gallery at Lake Erie College in Painesville, SPACES, The Heights Arts Collective, and Marlborough Art Center in Connecticut. He won the Chilcote Foundation Award for painting from the Cleveland Institute of Art. He is represented in the collections of the Progressive Corporation, Case Western Reserve University, LTV Steel Corporation, and Hahn Loeser and Parks LLP. Han studied at Eastern Connecticut State University and has a BFA in painting from the CIA and MFA in painting from the University of Pennsylvania.

In Gallery C:
May 29-June 27
Gallery Talk Sat., June 6, 2 p.m.
Object Lesson: Readymade Assemblages by Three Ohio Artists
Joan of Art (Deveney), Tim Haas and Nick R. Square explore the formal and semantic significance of ‘real’ objects in their work.

On the Other Side is generously funded by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture as well as the Ohio Arts Council. The Art Gallery is located at 2307 Chester Avenue. Summer hours are Wednesday and Thursday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and Saturday from noon to 4 p.m.

For more information, please visit www.csuohio.edu/artgallery or call 216.687.2103

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