Canvas Cleveland   |  August 20, 2021

Making SPACE(S)

With a new leader at the helm, SPACES continues to challenge itself

Starting a new role, in a new city leading a 43-year-old arts organization during a once-in-a-century pandemic and amid a reinvigorated societal reckoning with racism and social issues may seem daunting.

But both Tizziana Baldenebro, SPACES' 33-year-old new executive director, and the organization itself, it's an opportunity to try to do better.

To Baldenebro, that means making the arts organization more inviting to all, having hard conversations about the intersection of the international artists SPACES engages and the local Cleveland community, and understanding the many dynamics at play in creating a more equitable future.

"I think there is something very radical about post-industrial landscapes," says Baldenebro, who arrived at SPACES in August 2020 after about a year as Ford Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. "I've written a bit about how it does feel like things are possible here in a way that they don't feel possible in a coastal city, sort of like major art centers. And there's a real, sincere opportunity to envision an artscape that is equitable, that is actually challenging culturally," she says.

But for Baldenebro and the contemporary arts organization as a whole, expanding equity and helping produce and show work that addresses some of the most difficult issues of our time involves questioning long-held functions at the root, and asking, what audiences are being served?

Continued here.

By Amanda Koehn, Canvas Cleveland

Original Article