Opening reception

SPACES opens its first major exhibitions in the Van Rooy Coffee Building with artists who are exploring issues of local and international significance. The opening reception is FREE + open to the public.

Published from the 1930s until the passage of civil rights legislation in the 1960s made it obsolete, "The Green Book" was an ever-evolving index of boarding houses, service stations, restaurants, beauty parlors, and everything in between that black motorists could safely patronize during their travels. In Havens, Imani Roach (Philadelphia, PA) will explore the sites of Cleveland's own forgotten safe havens, and what they mean today.

In recent years the American criminal justice system has increasingly used private prison corporations to house a growing inmate population. Within this new outsourcing of the state prison function, inmates are used as labor to produce goods in privately owned factories. This merging of a state function and an economic system is the focus of Anthony Warnick's (Cleveland, OH) Except as Punishment for Crime, for which he has participated at an arm's length distance in the prison industrial complex via a convict-leasing program.

SPACES presents four episodes of Soda_Jerk's (NYC) Astro Black, an ongoing video series thatuses sampled material to consider the origins and politics of Sun Ra's mythology. Informed by cultural theories of Afrofuturism, this speculative history draws out the nexus of science fiction and social politics in Black Atlantic sonic culture.