Two juniors at the Cleveland Institute of Art are starting difficult conversations with their art at Cleveland Heights’ Cain Park.
Amongst the jogging, dog walking and skateboarding, the park has a gallery inside a deceptively small three-room house. The pair’s first solo exhibitions fill the space with oil paintings, photographs and watercolors.
Ashley Olszewski’s “Room for Dessert” and Tion “Toast” Best’s “Let the Hood Cry” are on view in the Feinberg Gallery until Aug. 2. The gallery is open during any scheduled event at Cain Park, starting 30 minutes before performances and ending 30 minutes past intermission.
While Best and Olszewski focus on different subject matter, they find common ground in conviction, reflecting upon contemporary issues with a personal twist.
"We both have very strong directions of where our work is going and a very strong passion for bringing awareness to something," Olszewski said.
‘Let the Hood Cry’
Hailing from Chicago’s South Side, Best’s paintings focus on the modern Black diaspora and navigating harsh living environments.
“To other people on the outside, just like how any culture is, it can be surprising to see the way people behave,” Best said. “But it's because their environment kind of requires acting in certain ways.”
“Let the Hood Cry” draws from music created during Chicago’s early 2010s to explore the psychology of being on the fringe. Closely tied to gangsta rap, drill music grew out of frustration with Chicago’s racially-targeted legislation — project housing, redlining, over policing — and depicts the hardships of trying to survive street life.
“This is an era that had a large surge in creativity alongside a very heavy surge in violence,” Best said.
To anchor viewers, Best focuses on youth. Many of the pieces are portraits of real-life drill musicians, children and teens facing hostile environments. The visual language is rife with weaponry, gang signs and looming threats of death.
“It becomes more about why they're behaving this way,” Best said.
In “Pediatrician 2,” Best tells a story inspired by Joseph J. Coleman, or Lil JoJo, an 18-year-old rapper shot by a rival gang for his diss track. Coleman was pronounced dead at a children’s hospital.
“You get this juxtaposition of a kid who's gone from something really violent in a space meant for children,” Best said.
Best’s work reimagines the child as surviving instead of dying. From the hospital bed, he continues to emulate a macho, hyperconfident performance.
“How people react to these sorts of situations, it's not necessarily with a lot of sensitivity,” Best said. “It's more so, ‘You survived, you got to get back to work.’ You don't want people to think you're weak either, because then you become even more of a target.”
“Untitled” is a painting of teenager Gakirah Barnes, one of the only female drill artists and alleged to be involved in multiple shootings. Surrounded by an abstract domestic background, sketched loosely over flat hot pink, the sharply rendered Barnes points a gun directly at the viewer.
“I feel like that has to do with her gender and the way she felt the need to navigate this heavily masculine-dominant space,” Best said.
Other pieces explore reprieve. “The Story of Yummy” depicts Robert “Yummy” Sandifer, an 11-year-old boy assassinated by members of his own gang. Best paints Sandifer snacking by his bike on a summer’s day, while children behind him play jump rope and basketball.
“If you look him up, the only pictures you can find [are] his mug shot and then his casket,” Best said. “This is to give him his innocence back a little bit.”
For Best, the exhibit is a chance to look back at his community during the drill movement, which began when he was just an elementary school student.
“So, a bit of it is nostalgia and also [to] learn more about myself and my own culture and my city,” he said, adding that he hopes outsiders can learn something too.
‘Room for Dessert’
“Room for Dessert” is the culmination of a longtime fascination with food that began for Olszewski during her childhood in Milwaukee. Diagnosed with anorexia in her mid-teens, she turned to art as an outlet.
"It was really hard for me to explain what [anorexia] was like, and my artwork really helped me," Olszewski said. "It was like, ‘This is how I'm feeling, and this is what I'm showing you.’"
“Room for Dessert” scales up that empathic experience, evoking a range of responses to food — memory, culture, illness — whether positive or negative.
Olszewski said she finds it interesting how people can have many different relationships with a need as basic as food. In “Fruit Pastry,” Olszewski exploits food’s ability to overwhelm by blowing up a familiar treat to larger-than-life size.
“Most of my work is sweets and desserts,” Olszewski said. “I purposefully do that because it incorporates the reward system. Like, if you do this, you get a sweet treat or things like that. And in the eating disorder community, desserts are a big challenge.”
“Brookie,” on the other hand, tests the capacity to be enticed. Using digital editing software, Olszewski rearranges familiar textures — crumbly cake, creamy icing — within a geometric grid pattern, making the concoction’s shape illegible.
The process of creating these works has played a key role in Olszewski’s recovery.
“I take pictures of things that I've struggled with in the past, things that I currently struggle with, and painting that helps me disassociate it a little,” Olszewski said.
Her time at the CIA brought that process to the next level. Olszewski was encouraged to experiment, mimicking frosting's texture with spackle and using a palette knife and piping bags instead of brushes.
“It breaks me away from having it to be realistic because I'm such a perfectionist,” she said.
While Olszewski said she wants viewers to find personal resonance in her work, she also hopes to go beyond that limit.
"I want them to think about how their relationship with food is not universal,” she said.
