Wolfs Gallery
13010 Larchmere Blvd, Cleveland, Ohio 44120
216-721-6945
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Press ReleaseRed Bull Arts New York- Rammellzee Racing For Thunder
Rammellzee, From Living Letters to Living Sculpture The universe of the graffiti master turned astrofunk storyteller in a bracing show reveals his lifelong battle against the limitations of form. Rammellzee assembled his “Letter Racer” sculptures (1988-1991) from found objects, corrugated plastic and skateboards. These repurposed objects of beauty, in warrior shapes, are in a survey of his work at Red Bull Arts New York.Credit: Vincent Tullo for The New York Times The graffiti writer, rapper, sculptor, quasi-outsider artist and unorthodox philosopher of language known as Rammellzee was given to enigmatic dissertations, and near the front of the bracing survey of his work, “Rammellzee: Racing for Thunder,” there is a media station with a telling page from one of them. On it, he sketches the evolution of graffiti’s engagement with individual letters. Up top is Bomberism, which in his rendering is soft, almost cuddly. Beneath that is Wild Stylism, in which the letter is denatured and recast as a futurist puzzle. For many, that was graffiti’s great formal shift, the thing that elevated tagging to speculative art. Rammellzee in 1987. The graffiti artist and rapper moved to mixed-media work, repurposing detritus he found on the streets into beauty.Credit: Peter Gramberg/Red Bull Arts New York But at the bottom of that page is Rammellzee’s own invention — Ikonoklast Panzerism, in which the letter had been distended further, shaded and reconstructed into something gleaming and weapon-like. What started as a simple E became a narrative character — prepared for a fight, ready to peel off the page and start shooting. Ever since he was a teenager in Far Rockaway, Queens, a precocious kid with an artistic bent and a propensity for tinkering, Rammellzee wanted to make letters into weapons. He saw language as a system of domination, and understood that whoever controlled the letters controlled much more than that. From Rammellzee’s Garbage Gods series, “Vain,” 1994-2001. The outfits are part Kabuki, part horror film, part techno-dystopic craft fair.Credit: Vincent Tullo for The New York Times And so for much of his career, from making graffiti in the 1970s to building vivid character figures in the 1990s,…
Press ReleaseCleveland: A Cultural Center
Join us as we celebrate the community of makers known as the Cleveland School, whose artistic contributions made an important impact on the American cultural landscape throughout much of the 20th century. This stunning display of over 150 works of art and design was conceived as a celebration of the Cleveland School and their important role within our city’s longstanding tradition of artistic excellence. As a not-for-profit exhibition, Cleveland: A Cultural Center is the first of its kind for WOLFS. The vast majority of exhibited works have been loaned from private collections. Curated by Henry Adams, Ph.D. STUNNING EXHIBITION FLAUNTS CLEVELAND CULTURE WOLFS is pleased to present Cleveland: A Cultural Center, an exhibition of over 150 works originating from the Cleveland School, a community of exceptionally talented artists which began to take shape in Northeast Ohio during the early 1900s. The men and women of the Cleveland School would go on to contribute a staggering number of beautiful and important works of art and design throughout much of the 20th century. By many accounts, this exhibition is long overdue. The Cleveland School’s collective body of work has been aggressively pursued by collectors for over a century; as a result, much of the Cleveland School’s greatest work has existed within private collections, rarely having been exhibited publicly. Not since The Cleveland Museum of Art’s 1996 exhibition, Transformations in Cleveland Art, has such a comprehensive survey of the Cleveland School’s remarkable legacy been available for public viewing. Curated by Henry Adams, Professor of Art History at Case Western Reserve University and noted authority on the Cleveland School, Cleveland: A Cultural Center is a celebration of both the Cleveland School’s enormous impact on the region’s cultural landscape, and its importance within the larger narrative of American art history. This loan exhibition is drawn almost entirely from private Cleveland School collections throughout the country. In fact, a great many of the works included in the exhibition were acquired from WOLFS over the course of the last four decades. By assembling the finest examples of work by the Cleveland School’s most talented artists, a vibrant visual…
Press ReleaseThe Future Was Then
The de Young’s “Cult of the Machine” is an ode to the aesthetics of industry and the period of American ascendance. FEATURING CLARENCE HOLBROOK CARTER, WAR BRIDE, 1940. COURTESY OF THE FINE ARTS MUSEUMS OF SAN FRANCISCO Johan Galtung, the venerable sociologist who predicted the collapse of the USSR, said in 2000 that the American Empire had 25 years of life left in it. Two-thirds the way through that period, the prescience may be increasingly hard to deny. (Incidentally, if re-elected, President Trump would serve until Jan. 20, 2025.) Rather than issue prophecies of doom about our backward future, the de Young has chosen to make a sweeping statement about the forward-looking past. In “Cult of the Machine: Precisionism in American Art,” the museum has combined various strands of early American modernism into one coherent mass, some of it nearly as photo-realistic as the work of Gerhard Richter. Precisionism is an aesthetic of industrial magnificence, extolling tall smokestacks with the same adoration that 19th-century English Romantics might feel for a cloud passing over a glen. Its proponents, known as “Immaculates” in their own time, had no trouble finding the sublime in brick and chrome. But they were coy, refraining from the didactic quality of socialist realism. Many of these works display factories without people, allowing viewers to pour in their own ideological interpretation as if ladling molten steel into a crucible. Precision isn’t necessarily the same thing as accuracy, and whether these works are celebrations or criticisms is up to you. Take Charles Sheeler’s American Landscape, in which a train passes by a snowy industrial plant. Is it the Ford River Rouge Complex in Detroit, at that time the largest factory in the world? (You can make out a Ford logo on one of the train’s cars, a sort of early form of product placement.) Completed in 1930, its quietude could reflect an economic moment that was only just entering free fall. No people means no labor, but then again, no reminder of pesky labor disputes. Upton Sinclair called it the jungle, but Precisionists fashion it as a desert — in the sense of depopulation, like a desert island. There’s lots…
