SPACES  |  October 03, 2024

JOYCE AWARDS EXHIBITION TO OPEN OCT. 25: SPACES x LGBT CENTER x JULIE TOLENTINO

Fanna Gebreyesus, Executive Director | 216.621.2314 | contact@SPACEScle.org

(Cleveland, OH) — October 1, 2024 — SPACES presents the exhibition Crystalscape: An Archive of Relation, featuring a sculptural collaboration with local Cleveland participants and artist Julie Tolentino. The exhibition is the culmination of collaboration, workshops, conversations, and performance programs between Tolentino, SPACES, and the LGBT Community Center of Greater Cleveland as part of the 2023–2024 Joyce Awards. The installation serves as a living archive of intergenerational queer life in Cleveland, Ohio. Tolentino and SPACES are one of the five winners of the 2023 Joyce Awards, which lift up collaborations between artists of color and arts and community organizations throughout the Great Lakes region.

Crystalscape: An Archive of Relation is a multi-spoked project focused on experimentation and community-building. To illuminate the various conversations and creative practices shared between strangers within SPACES’ bright, window-clad front gallery, Tolentino staged a series of “NIGHT LABS” as the group continuously worked towards the final installation. The “NIGHT LABS,” viewable both during the day and at night, illuminates the process of crafting the crystal structures and, ultimately, the final installation.

The sculptures were grown from hair collected by the participants’ communities, crafted with materials such as wire, leather, thread, ties, and feathers, and soaked in a solution of minerals, salts, and water. Hair in this project offers a tangible foundation for crystallization alongside the contemplation of change and the haunt of queer history and its afterlife. Collective gatherings offer fleeting and lasting connections, and these meeting points bring together that which is both lost and found in our diverse thriving. The Lab offers traces of not only the sculptural process/progress but also a durational imprint of group breathwork, dialogue, and movement experimentation as the group spans generations, origins, backgrounds, ambitions, and futures. As the crystals grow, both individually and together, they illuminate unfurling relationships celebrated before, during, and after our time together in the efforts towards layered world-building and connection.

Crystalscape: An Archive of Relation was organized by the artist and Imani Badillo, Fanna Gebreyesus, and Tizziana Baldenebro with support from the Joyce Foundation through the 2023–2024 Joyce Awards. The exhibition will be on view at SPACES throughout the end of 2024.

About the Artist

Julie Tolentino (she/they interchangeably) is a Filipina-Salvadorean artist whose performance/installation practice explores the interstitial spaces of race, gender, relationality, and the archive.

Tolentino’s work has been exhibited at Commonwealth and Council (2024, 2019, 2013); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2022); Aspen Art Museum (2020); Performance Space New York (2019); Participant Inc, New York (2019, 2005); The Kitchen, New York (2019, 2001); EFA Project Space, New York (2019); 6th Annual Thessaloniki Biennale (2018) amongst others. Projects include Visual AIDS Duets book with Kia LaBeija; Movements in Blue with the What Would An HIV Doula Do? Collective; Archive in Dirt 2018,. In the 90s, she wrote the Lesbian AIDS Project Women’s Safer Sex Handbook with Cynthia Madansky, ran the Clit Club from 1990–2002, along with Tattooed Love Child, and Dagger in New York City, and was part of ACTUP NY, the House of Color Video Collective, and Art Positive.

Recent awards include the Joyce Award 2023–2024; Mid-Atlantic Arts U.S. Artists International Grant (2022); Anonymous was a Woman and the Herb Alpert/UCROSS Residency Prize (2021); Queer|Art Sustained Artist Recognition (2020); Fulcrum Arts Honoree, Foundation for Contemporary Art in Performance, a Herb Alpert/MacDowell Fellowship and UCROSS Award (2021); among other grants and commissions. She has been the editor of Provocations in TDR-The Drama Review, NYU Tisch, since 2012.

About the LGBT Center

Founded in 1975, The Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Community Center of Greater Cleveland is a leading nonprofit organization that empowers Northeast Ohio’s LGBTQ community through advocacy, education, collaboration, and celebration. The heart of the region’s LGBTQ community, The Center is a one-stop hub that provides opportunities and resources for everyone it serves. The Center’s facility is a welcoming and visible space that brings the community together for resources, support, connections and programming. The Center serves as the public face and advocate for the LGBTQ community. Through leadership within the community, cultural competency training outside the community, media representation, and collaborations, the organization aims to improve every Northeast Ohio resident’s quality of life. In addition, The Center has the important role of social connector, hosting year-round gatherings, public events, and cultural programs that unite, honor, and celebrate the LGBTQ community. For more information, please visit www.lgbtcleveland.org.

About the Joyce Awards

The Joyce Awards, launched in 2004, was the only regional grants program that supported artists of color in major Great Lakes cities. It aimed to inspire creativity, artistic growth, and collaboration in Great Lakes communities. In its first twenty years, the competition awarded more than $5 million to commission 87 new works created through sustained collaborations between artists of color and leading arts, cultural, and community-based organizations in Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis-St. Paul. Each award has supported an artist or artist in the creation and production of a new work and has provided the commissioning organization with the resources needed to engage their surrounding communities. Demonstrating the capacity of the arts to inspire and mobilize social change, the Joyce Awards have served as catalysts for artists’ creative practices and have helped foster culturally vibrant, equitable, and sustainable communities through the arts.

About SPACES

SPACES is a nonprofit alternative art organization based in Cleveland, OH with a mission to serve as the resource and public forum for artists who explore and experiment. Operating for over 40 years as a residency, exhibition space, and re-granting organization, SPACES commissions and presents major projects by artists-in-residence working in all media, provides resources to cultural producers, and serves as a welcoming access point for audiences to experience experimental concepts. Supported artists include Chloë Bass, Pope.L, Michael Rakowitz, Cooking Sections, and more. SPACES complements the exhibition and residency programs with creative engagement supporting surrounding communities in Cleveland, hosting workshops, lectures, group tours, and skill-sharing events. Beyond programming, they provide nearly $150,000 in re-granted awards to artists and cultural producers around Cuyahoga County, infusing the region with unparalleled resources for creative work. SPACES was selected to commission and curate the United States Pavilion for the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, organizing the exhibition Everlasting Plastics which ran from May 20 to November 26, 2023, and will be exhibited at SPACES in 2025. For more information and to sign up for the newsletter, please visit www.spacescle.org or email contact@SPACEScle.org. Gallery Hours are 12 PM–5 PM Wednesday–Saturday.