I took a walk around Tremont yesterday and wandered into a new gallery on Professor Avenue. The gallery space was, until recently, some sort of drapery or upholstery store.

The Paul Duda Gallery opened for the first time during Friday's Art Walk. Paul is not new to the gallery scene and has had a gallery in Brecksville for almost twenty years. The gallery on Professor is a wide-open, uncluttered space and Paul said that he'd be willing to share the space with groups who need a reception or meeting space.

I talked with Paul about his photography; his photos look almost like paintings, they are printed on canvas and mounted like paintings. Many of his photographs are of Cleveland's cityscapes and landscapes.


My favorite (on the right) is a photograph Paul took on this year's snowy Valentine's Day at Edgewater Park. I can't afford the original, but Paul sells nice looking prints for $35.

Paul is no stranger to the neighborhood; he has lived in Tremont for six years. He has some ideas for how the gallery owners could work together, including having unified business hours. Paul's idea is that people will travel from afar to the neighborhood to visit the galleries, if they were all open for business--making it worth the trip.

I went to two community meetings tonight; both had to do with my involvement in a new middle-school, after-school arts program that will begin this fall at Mound Elementary School in Slavic Village. The program, The Slavic Village Players, is simple: an after-school arts program, one afternoon a week for 12 weeks each semester. Each semester culminates in a performance for family, friends and the community.

The first meeting was at the Carnegie West Library in Ohio City for Neighborhood Connections, a program of the Cleveland Foundation. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the nuts and bolts of collecting the grant money awarded to us by the program, but the most interesting part of the meeting happened during the introductions. Each organization present introduced the name of their program, the neighborhood it will serve and the goals of the program. This meeting is one of many that Neighborhood Connections is having around Cleveland, yet I was amazed at the number and the creativity of the grassroots community programming represented.

There were many, many organizations who received funding for urban community gardens; I counted about ten groups at this meeting alone. I also learned about the Ben Franklin Community Garden in Old Brooklyn, which is a five acre garden that provides food for area hunger centers.

Community groups were also awarded funding to plant trees, to create walking groups and to provide arts and youth programs. Neighborhood Connections also funded a program that provides strollers to mothers who cannot afford them, a program to provide school supplies and book bags to indigent children and a program to fund a new African Dance group at Tri-C Metro. I left the meeting feeling fortunate to have shared a room with such a committed and motivated group of community-minded individuals.

The second meeting was at Slavic Village Development. The meeting was with Cleveland Public Art and ParkWorks to talk about the public art project pending for Cleveland's first rails-to-trails project on the Morgana Run Trail.

The Morgana Run Trail runs from East 49^th and I-77 to the Mill Creek Falls off of Fleet Avenue. This trail connects Slavic Village to both the Garfield Reservation as well as the Ohio and Erie Canal Towpath Trail.

Architect Christopher Diehl, the new director of the Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative, part of the College of Architecture and Environmental Design at Kent State, unveiled his visions for public art projects along the trail, an appropriate combination of urban-space and green-space. He spoke about not wanting to “add something, but to find something already there (along the trail) and charge it with more meaning and emphasis”.

Diehl's ideas include creating a pixelated mural on a long industrial building; converting a house adjacent to the trail head into a work of public art to be seen from I-77; and painting convenience stores and an abandoned building to mark the route when the trail converges with city streets for a couple of blocks.

His preliminary images were thought-provoking and left plenty of space for community involvement—that’s where The Slavic Village Players come in. We are looking for community arts projects in which the students could participate. The Morgana Run Trail is near Mound Elementary and being involved in this project could be an ideal fit for our program.

I received this poem in the mail on Friday from my best friend from college. I love getting real mail from a real friend.

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

-Mary Oliver

I planted broccoli, tomato, basil, brussels sprouts and cayenne peppers in the middle of March. I knocked over a couple of the tomato pots pre-sprout and my cat knocked over some of the basil. Despite being knocked around a bit, some of the seeds have achieved sprout status.

This morning I pried apart wooden pallets and this afternoon, with help, reassembled them into a raised vegetable garden bed.

Last week I checked out the Girl Culture photography exhibit at the Gallery in Trinity Commons. I recommend the exhibit to anyone who has the time to check it out, but I confess that I left Trinity feeling a little disturbed.

The photographs were selected from some of Lauren Greenfield's books and are photo-journalistic in style. Greenfield collected images of females at fat camps, at inpatient eating disorder clinics, at charm schools, playing dress-up, backstage at strip clubs and other uncomfortable and disordered female situations.

Had I looked at just one or two of the photographs, my reaction would have been, "well, it is too bad for those poor women and boy don't they have problems." However, the pervasiveness of society's unreasonable expectations for women is undeniable when the photos are viewed as a group and I admit my place on that neurotic continuum even though I try to rise above it.

Girl Culture is at the Gallery at Trinity Commons until April 28, 2007.
Exhibit Hours:
Tuesday: 10-6 Friday: 10-6
Wednesday: 1-8 Saturday: 10-3
Thursday: 10-6 Sunday: 10-3
Closed Monday

Spring has arrived in Cleveland. I went to the Rocky River Reservation this afternoon to practice using my new camera. I am not an accomplished photographer, but I did my best to document the beginning of the season.

It’s usually a lie to color the sky blue with your crayons if you live in Cleveland. Typically the sky is some shade of gray. I have come to appreciate the subtleties of the color gray and check the sky daily to see which hue the day brings. There is the gray that is almost white (like today), but I can tell it’s not white only because the gulls contrast it. Sometimes the sky is steel gray and factory smoke looks white against it. There is the gray that makes the day look dusky and everyone’s automatic headlights come on. My favorite gray sky is when there is a broad wash of palest gray that is gets pushed aside by invading almost-black clouds as they are blown rapidly across the lake; this gray comes complete with a wind soundscape.

Yesterday there was a fire in my neighborhood. Someone told me that the house that burned was vacant. The damage is not good, but I met many of my neighbors for the first time as we watched it burn.

I just started reading the novel, The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread. This novel is by former Cleveland Press writer Don Robertson. I first read about this book from the Cleveland History Blog. I checked it out from the library and just finished the first chapter. It's a page-turner already.