Douglas Max Utter
Timelines
COV E R :
Far From Home, 2013
latex paint, acrylic, black
pastel, shellac on canvas,
32 x 31 in.
Merton F. Utter, Sr.,
with my father and
Aunt Ann at Lake Okoboji
RIGHT:
UFO (Self Portrait in 1986),
2013
latex paint, black pastel on
canvas, 12 x 12 in.
OPPOSITE:
Descent, 1989
latex paint, spray paint on
canvas, 99 x 72 in.
Based on a news photo.
Exhibited at May Show,
Cleveland Museum of Art,
1988
There was a small can of black paint and a
brush on a shelf in the back room of the
William Busta Gallery on Murray Hill Road.
It was reserved for Douglas Max Utter.
After his exhibitions at the gallery were
installed, I would hand the paint and brush
to him and he would go around the gallery,
painting to painting , and sign his name.
It was a way to finish a body of work.
Utter’s work first made an impression on
me when my wife and I were eating at
Tommy’s on Coventry Road in Cleveland
Heights and his work was hanging on the
walls. It is the only time, ever, that art on
the walls of a restaurant impressed me.
It was so expressive and daring and insistent
in its presence, even in the distracting
atmosphere of animated conversation,
savory smells, and crashing plates.
Douglas Max Utter
Timelines
Mar 13–Apr 18, 2015
The impression was lasting. As I opened
my first gallery in January 1989, his work
become central to my sense of what I wished
my gallery to be. This is the tenth one-person
exhibition that I have presented of Utter’s
work. Previous exhibitions were held in
1989, 1990, 1993, 1995, 1997, 1998, 2008,
2009, and 2011. The Gallery on Murray Hill
Road closed with an exhibition of Utter’s
paintings.
From first sight, I’ve known that his work
is a glimpse of what is holy and universal.
—William Busta
William Busta Gallery
2731 Prospect Avenue
Cleveland OH 44115
Wwilliambustagallery.com
T216.298.9071
[email protected]
Strange Country
My father died of an undiagnosed heart condition in November of
1980. That cardiac event, which the coroner termed “an electrical
failure of the heart,” happened early in the morning on the day after
Thanksgiving. He woke during the night and moved to an unusual,
ornate upstairs room with shelves and pressed tin walls which we
called the library, where there was a long gold couch. My mother
found him there, just before dawn, lying down as if for one of his
naps. Dr. Merton Franklin Utter was 63 years old, a few months
younger than I am now, in the middle of a busy life of research
and teaching at CWRU.
I was not quite 30, living temporarily (I hoped) in the basement
of my parents’ house in Cleveland Heights. Four months earlier
I had completed two weeks of rehabilitation at the venerable
alcohol treatment ward of St. Vincent’s Charity Hospital in
downtown Cleveland, known as Rosary Hall. After a decade of
wasted opportunities and struggles with drinking I was raw and
impressionable, both younger and older than my years.
I was an only child and my mother and I shared an intense, terrible
grief. By turns I was angry and incredulous, or full of sorrow and
regret. I turned to activities that were part of a fellowship I had
joined, and also to painting and drawing. My art practice and my
interest in the history of art dated from childhood, though at
CWRU in the mid 1970s I studied classical languages and Greek
and Roman literature, rather than art. But I had long regarded
painting as an integral part of my life. After some soul searching in
the late summer of 1980 I decided to keep making art, in this new
context provided by a sober life.
Within a year and a half I was married to a sculptor, who had also
recently lost her own father. I was self-employed as a furniture
and interior woodwork refinisher, painting ever larger and more
contemporary-looking paintings in the basement of our home.
In February of 1984 our son was born, followed by our daughter in
August of 1985. It became clear I needed more room for the six-footsquare paintings I was beginning to do, and I moved my operation
downtown to the sixth floor of the ArtCraft Building at East 25th
Street and Superior in June, 1986, where I remained for 19 years.
I began to use common household and industrial methods and
materials, influenced by abstract expressionist practice and
au courant neo-expressionist international styles. While my work
became steadily bigger in scale it was also more intimately human
in subject matter. I soon came to understand that my own most
immediate interest in expressive terms was to find a way of drawing
that felt integral to the painted surface. For about seven years
beginning in early 1985, I used spray paint with latex house paint,
sometimes applied with rollers, to render greatly enlarged versions
of family photographs and dramatic news photos found in daily
newspapers and national magazines, drawn freehand with a can
of black spray paint directly onto water-based under-painting.
Although I was raised in a non-religious household and remained
agnostic in temperament, many of my most keenly expressed
subjects involved the formal and emotional
interlocking of a mother and child, or scenes
of rescue, or of mourning. Realizing that
these archetypal images tended to coincide
with traditional European Christian
iconography, I began to deliberately
reference specific Flemish paintings of the
Renaissance, and Rembrandt’s powerful
range of narrative biblical paintings.
This brings me to the subject of mourning.
I’ve backtracked in the previous paragraphs
to account for the numerous depictions of
bereavement and the circumstances
surrounding the death of a parent in my
painting, from 1980 to the present, which
are the focus of the current show Timelines.
My first major work on that theme was the
1987 O What Shall I Hang on the Chamber
Walls, which was given the Painting Award
in the Cleveland Museum of Art’s May Show
that year. Like many of the large paintings
that followed over the next two or three
years (Lamentation, 1988; Descent, 1989;
X at the End of the World, 1989) it was based
(loosely) on an anonymous news photo
distributed by the Associated Press (AP).
I held the clipping in my hand and outlined
the figures on semi-wet latex paint, painting
quickly by eye. The title is the first line of the
eleventh stanza of Walt Whitman’s elegy on
Lincoln, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard
Bloomed. The verse continues: “And what
shall the pictures be that I hang on the walls
/ To adorn the burial-house of him I love?”
RIGHT:
Holiday Inn, 2012
latex paint, black pastel,
acrylic on canvas,
34.5 x 31.5 in.
OPPOSITE:
Cleveland Rain, a Lament for
My Mother, 2000
latex paint, oil paint, tar, black
pastel, shellac, 98 x 112 in.
As I transferred the pyramidal composition
onto the big canvas, working with wide
sweeps of roller and spray can and then
running my gloved fingers through the spray
paint, striping their faces as if with tears,
I thought of my father’s death and the long
grieving process that had underscored and
shadowed the dramatic, otherwise very
positive changes in my life during the seven
years that followed his loss. I was reading
Whitman and the line from the poem
seemed like an obvious title. O What Shall I
Hang on the Chamber Walls was reproduced
a few years later in an experimental west
coast publication—Raygun—where the editor
assumed the title was ironic (art was
assumed to be ironic in the early 1990s);
but no. Subjectively, the black spray
paint line which was the crux of all these
paintings felt to me like a dose of reality and
seriousness compared to fine arts materials
per se—like an especially action-packed
material that delivered gestural presence
and the creative power of free-form mark-
making, plus a literal sort of integrity, as it spread and interacted
with other paint and surface features—paint-roller marks, for
example. Later I became impatient with the graphic limits that spray
paint does have, in terms of detail and accuracy when trying to
render particular people and places. As early as 1990 I was
supplementing spray paint with black pastel, which has been my
chosen drawing medium ever since.
My father and I weren’t exactly close. There was a genuine emotional
bond between us, but we were undemonstrative, even guarded
with each other, and rarely talked about personal matters. I loved
him in my conflicted way, and valued the fact that I could count on
him. I identified with him, admired his qualities of mind and spirit,
and enjoyed his company. On the other hand, I was angry that he hid
himself from me, that my affection for him seemed unrequited (I’m
pretty sure he felt the same way), angry that I felt locked out of his
interior world, and that my own private experience was seemingly of
no real interest to him. Long after his death I realized that because of
that anger and reticence there were very important things about his
life of which I knew nothing—that I should have asked about,
probably, but which now were unsolvable mysteries, a lingering
condition of our mutual distance. Chief among these were the facts
surrounding the death of my grandfather, his father, in an
automobile accident during a summer trip in July of 1935, when
he was 18 years old.
My mother and I were much closer. She lived for another 20 years
after his death, during the last ten of which she was paralyzed from
the waist down. Following my divorce in 1990 I lived with her,
sometimes joined by the kids for lengthy periods, all through her
final decade until she also died at home of complications from
leukemia. My painting during those years involved experimentation
with ordinary roofing tar as a sort of painting medium that moved
toward sculpture, in combination with both oil-based and latexbased house paints, and glazing mediums, with black pastel. The
overall thrust of these attempts was to feel my way toward sensuality
and an intimation of presence that was in part independent of sight,
strongly referencing the sense of touch and the human body’s occult
capabilities of coordination and balance (I’m thinking here of the
complex of neuromuscular reactions that neurologists call
“proprioception”). In paintings like the Black Madonna (1994) and
Mother and Child (2001) from this period, I wanted to bring into play
the sort of interpersonal and intrapersonal reactions people
experience in a dark room, barely aided by sight. I painted many
portraits, also, between 1995–2000, most of which are reproduced
on my website (douglasutter.com). In these the sitter’s features are
“discovered,” as I clear a space for their features in the darkness
that surrounds them. Executed in tar, black pastel, and glazes (clear,
red, or amber), these portraits are (among other things) metaphors
for any process of excavation, and for the achievement of
interpersonal intimacy. On a primary,
sensual level they’re about texture, and the
shifting boundaries between two and three
dimensions. These works combine drawing
and modeling for that reason, to evoke an
idea of identity as perceived in the presence
of another, and the tactile satisfactions of
working with earthy materials.
Cleveland Rain was conceived and completed
during the month or so of my mother’s final
illness and death and became an expression
of my desolation. While she was in the
hospital receiving different treatments
I drove on the highway almost every day,
and a certain bleak bend in the road on
I-71 at the 116th Street overpass began
to represent a point of no return to me.
In October of 2000, a few days before her
death, I finished the large painting of that
scene, which a little later was exhibited as a
conceptual portrait of my mother (The Many
Faces of Cleveland: A Century of Portraiture,
Cleveland Artists Foundation, 2002).
As I began to approach my father’s age at
his death following my own experience of
congestive heart failure and extensive CABG
surgery in 2007, I began to think about all
those things I didn’t know about my Dad.
I particularly wished that I had asked him
about the circumstances surrounding his
own father’s tragic, violent death, which
must have been the central event of his
youth. I knew he was already a student at
Simpson College at Indianola, just south
of Des Moines, Iowa, and that he and his
sister Anne had driven with their parents
from their home in the southwest corner of
Iowa, to Kenosha, Wisconsin, probably after
visiting my great grandfather at Trempeleau
on the Mississippi. A terrible collision with a
drunk driver killed both drivers and left my
aunt in a coma. My grandmother was badly
cut up by broken glass in that pre-safety
glass era, but my father suffered relatively
minor cuts and a broken arm (I picture him
and his sister riding in the back seat of
the large touring car I’ve seen in one of
our old photo albums, but I can’t be sure).
One day recently, digging through boxes of
memorabilia, I found a packet of letters
written by my father’s cousin Lois, who was
a student in her early 20s at the time.
They relate how she traveled by train to
Kenosha from Chicago as soon as they heard
the news. She stayed in a hotel near the
hospital and visited every day while my aunt was still unconscious.
She was impressed with the facility: “I don’t believe there’s a nicer
hospital anywhere… They sterilize everything, as in the movies,” she
writes; and I was moved to read her description of my father. “Junior
certainly is acting as if nothing has happened,” Lois writes, and
elsewhere observes, “Everyone around here marvels to see how
Junior acts. It’s a help to Aunt Gertie [his mother] to have him
around.” Another letter describes him playing with a little boy on the
ward. Lois describes a self-possessed, capable, practical young
man, who for better or worse came through the crash fully
conscious, and despite a broken arm was seemingly unimpaired
during the aftermath. None of this contradicts the idea that he must
have been deeply shocked—if anything his unnaturally calm
behavior supports that likelihood. No doubt traumatic echoes
followed him down the years, and some of the distance between
us must have been a partial measure of the pain that separated
his later life from that day on the road from Kenosha.
The large painting titled Wisconsin Car Crash, 1935 isn’t a serious
attempt to recreate the realities of my grandfather’s fatal accident.
I’m trying to outline a symbolic vocabulary that can help me to
consider his death and the foreshortening of his life with some
perspective and nuance, moving beyond the few local facts I know
about the event itself. I’ve imagined a stretch of road where a couple
of vintage cars sit badly damaged. A tree in the field beyond is
abruptly cut off at about half its natural height, but its laterally
branching limbs stretch beyond the edges of the frame. Various
animals walk into the road in the foreground, filling the space made
suddenly vacant by violent death. To me they represent the
persistence and loneliness of spirit in the natural world, the
disheveled grace of the land as it still was when my parents were
young—not yet as fully measured, distorted and exploited. This is
the past as a “foreign country,” as in L.P. Hartley’s famous phrase,
though it’s also a familiar place. On the right the blackness of
another dimension intrudes, collage-like, and the white outline of
my grandfather’s ghost reclines within its boundaries, “loafing” like
Whitman in “Song of Myself”: “I loafe and invite my soul, / I lean and
loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.” On the upper
left I’ve painted the house in Trempeleau where he grew up. The sky
is an abstraction in this in-between country, showing the lines of a
low pressure system as they would be represented on a weather
map—the conditions of a coming storm (I’m also remembering that,
before settling on chemistry as his primary area of study, my father
thought about pursuing meteorology). The dog is Bobby, the beloved
family pet back in Coin. All the specific references in the scene are
based on snapshots passed down to me. I intend their factual nature
to fasten down the corners of this Limbo I’ve created, hopefully
lending it some emotional/historical weight.
Other experiments involving perspective, time, and memory have
been typical of my paintings for the past few years. One series of
landscapes proposes images of the past as a Google Earth sort of
place, existing far below the present, distant and disposed at an
odd, unfamiliar angle to human thought. From high above the fields
of rural Wisconsin and southwestern Iowa the family tragedy
of 1935 can be descried in these paintings unfolding along
geometrically straight county byways (Partial Eclipse, Evening
Funeral Procession). Similarly I’ve based works on actual satellite
views of the acres north of the town where my mother’s girlhood
farm was located. Compositionally these images begin to resemble
geometric abstract works or expressionistic abstraction (Dense Fog
Over Lake Okoboji). Some employ areas of semi-opaque amber
shadow, suggesting that the ever-looming present is a transparent
but integral feature of memory. In several pieces I’ve tried to
re-imagine features of my forbears’ lives and characters against the
background of the midwestern American landscape where they
OPPOSITE:
Thick Fog Over Lake Okoboji,
2006
latex paint, shellac on
canvas, 28 x 44 in.
LEFT:
Tribute at Papillion, 2013
mixed paint and drawing
media on canvas,
32 x 31 in.
My mother at her sister
D.J.’s wedding in the
late 1940s
lived. The “spirit portraits” of 2011 show
my mother, grandmother, and great aunt
Rose holding wild animals to suggest the
power and strangeness hidden in their
lives and bodies (an idea I revisit in
Wisconsin Car Crash).
In 1953–54 when I was a small child my
parents and I traveled around the world—
literally all the way around—on British ships
that had been built as modest passenger
liners. During World War II these vessels had
been employed as troop carriers, returning
to their peacetime purpose after 1945.
They were carriers of the Royal Mail
(so reads a notice on an old ticket), and
the crew and the food were mostly Indian.
We sailed from Montreal, through the
Panama Canal and across the Pacific to
Australia, where we lived for most of a year
in Adelaide. We returned through the Indian
Ocean and the Suez Canal to Naples, then
to London and New York. In the summers
when I was a little older we drove from
Cleveland to Iowa, where we visited my
grandparents. After a year in England in
1960 I began to paint in oils, and when we
went on the road the art supplies came
along. I painted pictures standing in the
dusty streets of Coin, Iowa, where my
paternal grandmother Gertrude lived in a
tiny house, surrounded by friendly country
dogs and curious kids my own age, and
out in the mountains when we went to
Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana.
I remember that on those long trips my
parents shared the driving, and I remember
my father’s hands on the wheel. Later
I took my own kids on long journeys across
several countries. It strikes me that whatever
painful memories my Dad may have had,
I remember him as a man who was notably
unafraid of the world, who quietly immersed
himself in life. My mother, equally brave,
taught me to see and love beauty, and
encouraged my art from earliest childhood.
The paintings I have done are an extension
of what they saw and showed to me.
My landscape is theirs, farther down the
road, just as theirs was a continuation of
sight and being that disappears with the
thoughts and charms and flaws of other
ancestors, into the lost wild of time.
Childhood Migraine, which I painted in January 2015, is an attempt
to recapture and understand a peculiar, recurring mind-body
incident that I experienced between the ages of about four and 11.
It wasn’t exactly a fit (I’m happy to say); I’m sure nobody around me
ever noticed there was anything wrong. I never mentioned it, which
I guess is odd in itself. Usually I was sitting down when it came on.
I became aware of one mechanical noise, and then another, like
the airplane and lawn mower in the painting. As I listened it seemed
that the tempo of these sounds and of everything around me
became faster and faster, and I had a sensation of holding one or
two heavy, round objects in my hands. Then these sensations
quickly faded. The whole sequence took about a minute. I was left
a little breathless, but it wasn’t scary. Then, some year along toward
adolescence, it stopped happening, and I certainly didn’t miss it.
When I described all this for my daughter Lizzie, who has an interest
in medical things (and in me), she said she experienced somewhat
similar symptoms herself, and that they are often typical of
childhood migraines. So maybe that’s what they were. My painting
shows me around the age of four in yellow overalls, holding a red
ball. Over the darkening suburban rooftops flies a turboprop aircraft,
as someone (Death?) steers a push lawn mower across the red
grass in the last light of a day that darkened long ago. If people in
the past do things differently, then so do we, here in the present.
I hope my paintings communicate something of the urgency that
a sense of the past can bring to life as we live it today.
OPPOSITE:
Childhood Migraine, 2015
acrylic paint, latex paint,
black pastel, shellac on linen,
26 x 22.5 in.
L E F T, A B O V E :
The Lonely Child (study for
Extended Family), 2013
latex paint, acrylic paint,
black pastel on canvas,
12 x 12 in.
L E F T, B E L O W :
Extended Family, 2013
latex paint, acrylic paint, black
pastel, shellac on canvas,
75 x 67 in.
Based on a Polaroid
photograph of Lori
with son Christopher
and daughter Elizabeth
(metamorphosing into
her dog Beowulf).
Douglas Max Utter
Born 1950, Cleveland, OH
Lives and works in Cleveland, OH
douglasutter.com
Timeline
1935
(July 1) Merton Franklin Utter, Sr. killed in a fatal car
collision with a drunk driver near Kenosha, Wisconsin.
His wife Gertrude suffers multiple cuts. Their daughter
Ann is in a coma for a week, Merton Jr. has a broken arm.
1939
(September 1) M.F. Utter, Jr. and Marjorie Fern Manifold
are married at Indianola, Iowa.
1950
(December 8) Douglas Max Utter born, Cleveland, Ohio
1953
(Academic sabbatical year) Dr. Merton F. Utter, Jr.,
travels around the globe by ship with his wife and son,
pursues biochemistry research for ten months at the
University of South Australia at Adelaide.
1960
M.F. Utter works at New College, Oxford (GB), the family
lives in North Oxford, Douglas attends a Berkshire
County school, visits museums in England and abroad,
sketches in the countryside and at the Ashmolean and
Pitt Rivers Museums.
1961
(August) First oil paintings, instructed by
Mary Oliver (RA), Oxford.
1963–64
Drawing classes at the Cleveland Institute of Art
1970–71
Classes at Cuyahoga Community College
1973
Exhibits two paintings at NOVA, downtown Cleveland
1974–75
Undergraduate and graduate courses in classical
languages, Greek and Roman art, history, and literature,
Case Western Reserve University
1976
(January) Moves to New York City, lives near the
Bowery on East Houston Street for three years of
private study and punk rock. Paints, writes.
1979
Crosses country in a van, finds odd jobs in
Portland, Oregon.
1980
(July 29) Back in Cleveland, enters alcohol
treatment program.
(November 22) M.F. Utter dies at home of an
undiagnosed heart problem.
1982
(June 1) Married to Lori Hyler
1983
The family purchases a home in Cleveland Heights
1984
Christopher Benjamin Utter born February 9.
1985
Elizabeth Anne Hyler born August 26.
Ghost Portrait painted (February).
1986
Study for A Bas Relief accepted into CMA’s May Show
Rents large studio in ArtCraft Building in
downtown Cleveland
1987
O What Shall I Hang on the Chamber Walls awarded
Best Painting Prize at CMA’s May Show.
OPPOSITE:
Ghost Portrait, 1985
latex paint, spray paint on
canvas, 28 x 26 in.
LEFT:
X at the End of the World, 1989
latex paint, black spray paint
on canvas, 75 x 70.5 in.
1988
(January) SPACES exhibits large Utter paintings in
three-person show with Anna Arnold and Brian
Azzarello. Amy Bracken Sparks writes about the show
in Northern Ohio Live (January 1988)
1989
Douglas and Lori separate. Marjorie Utter becomes
partially paralyzed following a spinal operation at
University Hospitals. Utter moves into her home in
Cleveland Heights. William Busta and Douglas Utter
meet and discuss Busta’s plans to open a new gallery in
Joyce Porcelli’s Murray Hill Road space. Utter joins the
gallery. Begins writing reviews and arts commentary
for Dialogue Magazine, Columbus OH.
1990–91
Divorce (June 1990). Solo show at William Busta
(Souvenirs). Three solo shows in New York—Venustatis
(West 14th St), Galerie Saireido (West Broadway),
Rockefeller House Gallery (Columbia University).
Solo exhibit in Augsburg, Germany. Publishes reviews
for the first time in New Art Examiner (Chicago) and
Northern Ohio Live (Cleveland). Several of Utter’s
paintings are purchased by Albert Grokoest (notable
collector, co-founder of the Orpheus Orchestra, friend
and physician to Mark Rothko), and Manhattan financier
Peter B. Cannell.
1993
Solo shows at William Busta Gallery and Brooklyn 11205
Art (Brooklyn Navy Yard). Ohio Arts Council Individual
Fellowship in Visual Arts.
1994–95
Solo shows at the Interchurch Center (Rockefeller Drive,
NYC) and William Busta Gallery. Wins second OAC
Individual Fellowship in the area of Criticism. Begins
writing art reviews for the Free Times. A second spinal
operation leaves Marjorie Utter entirely paralyzed
from the waist down.
1997
Teaches Advanced Painting for a semester at
University of Akron at the invitation of Don Harvey.
1998
William Busta Gallery announces its permanent closing,
ends its nine-year run with Utter’s solo exhibit.
2000
Marjorie Utter dies of leukemia at home. Cleveland Rain,
a large, landscape-inspired painting dealing with her
death, is completed.
2001–04
OAC Individual Arts Fellowship (criticism). Mounts four
solo exhibits at Dead Horse Gallery (Lakewood, OH);
is reviewed in Art in America (January 2002) by Frank
Green. Begins writing reviews for Art Papers (Atlanta).
Is admitted to KSU graduate program as MFA candidate,
teaches first and second year Drawing and Painting
(leaves program after a year without a degree). Dan
Tranberg, Amy Sparks, and Utter found Angle (a journal
of arts and culture) in 2003, following the (first) financial
failure of the Free Times. Writes weekly art reviews and
commentary for the Free Times (through 2008). Begins
to write occasional reviews for the Plain Dealer (through
2012). Dead Horse Gallery publishes an extensive
catalog of Utter’s paintings with essay by Dan Tranberg.
2002
Cleveland Rain exhibited as part of The Many Faces
of Cleveland Portraiture at the Beck Center, curated by
Dr. Marianne Berardi.
2003
Fills in as second year Painting instructor for
Daniel Dove at Cleveland Institute of Art.
2004
Receives Cleveland Press Club Excellence in Journalism
Award. Is named Artist in Residence, Zygote Press
(summer), followed by a solo exhibit at Zygote (November). Is presented with Special Award by
Poet and Writers Guild of Cleveland.
Bicameral Infusions, 2004
latex paint, shellac, black
pastel on canvas, 28 x 23 in.
2005–06 Moves out of ArtCraft Building studio, continues painting
at home. Declares bankruptcy. Works as Gallery Director
at the Artists Archives of the Western Reserve in
University Circle.
2007
Moves to a house in East Cleveland (March). Is admitted
to University Hospitals with congestive heart failure
(June). Sextuple bypass “CABG” surgery is successful.
2008
Rapidly developing cataracts in both eyes are removed
at MetroHealth Hospital. Enjoys 20/20 vision for the
first time since childhood. Writes about the experience
for his weekly column at Scene Magazine (following the reorganization of the Free Times).
2010
Progressive Insurance Collection purchases large
1989 painting Clinamen.
2011
Solo show Heartland at William Busta Gallery.
Is awarded a CPAC Creative Workforce Fellowship.
2012
Begins writing brochure essays for William Busta Gallery
2013
Honored with a Cleveland Arts Prize for
Lifetime Achievement.