"I AM" Identity Workshop with Gina Washington and Ed Parker
Event Information
About this event
As part of The Sculpture Center's exhibition Crossroads: Still We Rise, participating artist Gina Washington will lead an identity-building workshop. Unleash your magic and tap into your soul with two of the most powerful words to be spoken, "I Am." Plan to ground your energy and express your creative self. Group conversation will lead from there.
This event will be held at the Ed Parker Creative Complex in East Cleveland. Following the workshop, Ed Parker will guide visitors on a tour of the complex. Artist and entrepreneur Ed Parker built the Creative Complex in 1984. It includes gallery, classroom , and meeting spaces, and is a predominant cultural asset in the East Cleveland neighborhood.
About Gina Washington
Gina Washington is a photographer born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. She received her Master’s in Fine Arts in Photography from Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, and has won numerous awards for her portraiture and multi-medium art. She works with The Visit Arts Collaborative and engages with the community by spreading art to all. By working and connecting with artists of all walks of life, Gina wishes to make art accessible to everyone. Gina has selected the Forest Hill Park Footbridge in East Cleveland as the site for her AR experience.
“I was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, and graduated with an MFA in Photography from Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. I consider myself “a child of the Universe” and have traveled to many places collecting images and connecting artists. I have won awards for portraiture and I create art “by any means necessary” combining many different mediums. As a master collaborator, I co-created an exhibition at the Ingenuity Fest Cleveland in 2010 that showcased poetry, storytelling, music, and visual arts with a group we now call The Visit Arts Collective. My goal is to make art accessible to everyone. I teach, I create and I hope to inspire future students as they discover their passions and soar.”
About Ed Parker
Ed Parker is an artist, educator, and entrepreneur born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and raised in Toledo, Ohio. He earned his BA from Central State University and his MFA from Kent State University. Throughout his career, Ed has worked in classrooms, studios, galleries, and museums in America, Africa, and Europe. He began teaching art in Cleveland Public Schools and moved on to teach at the Cuyahoga Community College for nearly twenty years before retiring in 1999 and founding the Snickerfritz Cultural Workshop for the Arts in 1984. In 2017, he expanded the Snickerfritz to include the Edward E. Parker Creative Arts Complex. The Complex includes gallery and classroom spaces and a number of small businesses. Parker’s artistic achievements include numerous one-man and group shows in Ohio, and commissions from Cleveland’s Cuyahoga Community College and Florida Memorial College.
“I AM” Identity Workshop is free to attend! Registration is required.
Organizer The Sculpture Center
Organizer of "I AM" Identity Workshop with Gina Washington and Ed Parker
Since its founding in 1989 by Cleveland artist David E. Davis and Bernice S, The Sculpture Center (TSC) has provided early-career sculptors, originally from Ohio and now from the greater region, with the opportunity to create work for a solo exhibition. This keystone program, called Revealed, is an open call to artists in the first ten years of their career working in three-dimensional forms, mixed media, installation, expanded media, relational aesthetics, and performance. Revealed has advanced the careers of sculptors by leveraging gallery representation, direct grant funding, university positions, tenure, and most importantly, the creation of work without commercial constraints. TSC contextualizes the four to six annual Revealed artists with exhibitions of rigorous work by mid-career sculptors. This vital exploration of contemporary art practices enriches opportunities not available otherwise to early career artists and improves the region’s cultural, historical, and aesthetic landscape.
In 2000 TSC founded the Ohio Outdoor Sculpture (OOS) database following its participation in Save Outdoor Sculpture!. OOS is the largest online collection of images, historical data and condition information of a growing list of 1,500 publicly accessible outdoor sculptures in Ohio. OOS encourages communities to recognize, appreciate, and preserve their outdoor public sculpture.
TSC supports the community of sculptors in our region through the formation of SculptureX (SX). Established in 2010 SX is an annual symposium that develops closer connections among teaching institutions, faculty, and students of visual arts programs of sculpture in our region. As the nexus of SX, TSC impacts networking, artistic dialogue and career growth for the member organizations.
Through a year-round program of exhibitions, talks, and educational events, TSC is a creative oasis and meeting ground where ideas, risk-taking, and artistic dialogue connect artists, communities and audiences locally and internationally.