FRONT: Canvas City

The Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) is excited to announce a new, free virtual reality app (VR) designed for FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art.

Highlights:
-FRONT Canvas City enables users to virtually view murals—a part of the FRONT exhibition but not yet completed—at their locations around downtown Cleveland.
-General information about the FRONT festival is easily findable on the app’s initial landing screen, including an interactive map with icons on the future mural locations.
-Users can tap on these icons to view the mural images overlaid on the appropriate building surfaces. This VR view also allows users to see a 360-degree photo of the site with the mural—so they can be experienced from anywhere.

The FRONT Canvas City mural project consists of two exhibitions across several sites in downtown Cleveland, including the downtown Arcade and walls surrounding Winton Manor at the corner of Prospect Avenue and East 9th Street. This location is the wellspring for the exhibition, conceived to emulate the 1973 public art beautification project City Canvases, during which ten outdoor murals were commissioned for empty walls between Public Square and Cleveland State University by Cleveland-based artists and designers. Among those artists were several faculty members of the Cleveland Institute of Art, including Julian Stanczak (1928-2017). Stanczak's urgent Op art design graced the twelve-story brick facade for years.

Now repainted for FRONT over forty years later, Stanczak's mural belongs to a tightly conceived outdoor exhibition on abstract painting by leading international artists Heimo Zoebering, Sarah Morris, Kay Rosen, and Odili Donald Odita. FRONT has revived the original painting as a legacy project, connecting early public art efforts to new currents and introducing artists whose work will engage in conversation across downtown Cleveland for the next five years.

In the downtown Arcade, a historic exhibition of screen prints by the ten original mural artists is on display, accompanied by project documentation as well as a preview of a forthcoming print portfolio of hand-pulled prints of the mural designs.