Works of Cleveland Artists from the Twenties and Thirties
on Display at the Kent State University Museum
   

What: The exhibition — The Kokoon Arts Club: Cleveland Revels

When: March 19, 2009, through February 28, 2010

Where: Kent State University Museum, Stager and Blum Galleries, in Rockwell Hall on the corner of East Main and South Lincoln Streets on the Kent State University campus.

Background: The Kokoon Arts Club of Cleveland, Ohio, was formed in 1911 by a small group of commercial artists employed at the Otis Lithograph Company. Meeting first at night in the studio of interior designer Louis Rorimer, Club members combined forces and finances to study and make art apart from (but indebted to) their commercial work, seek venues to display their artworks, and importantly, to be modern. The Club would become a fixture of the Cleveland art and social scene throughout the 1920s and 1930s, only to lose members and vitality during World War II and dissolve finally in 1953. During its heyday, however, the Kokoon Arts Club served as an important arbiter of Modernist artistic expression in Cleveland.

What members of the Kokoon Arts Club were famous-or rather, infamous-for were the annual masked balls they staged at venues around the city. Though excoriated for risqué dress and music as well as an instance in 1923 (during Prohibition) when the event was cancelled by the city's mayor, these masked balls were in actuality pedagogical exercises in Modernism. Members were given lists of books housed at Cleveland Public Library about art and culture of other places and times related to the annual theme; costume design was to be based on this exploration. Posters and tickets were designed by members who used their employment at one of the city's lithography companies to print these now-prized works. Jazz was the musical genre of choice; midnight often the starting hour of the revels. Several of the balls were broadcast over local radio, a fact that challenges interpretations of the Club's activities as decadent or reviled.

This exhibition focuses on the masked balls: the extraordinary posters and costumes worn by members. The exhibition is largely drawn from the Department of Special Collections of the Kent State University Library, with additional loans from the Western Reserve Historical Society and the Cleveland Artists Foundation.

Perhaps of greater import was the Kokoon Arts Club's outreach to the community. While the Club's headquarters provided studio and meeting space for its members and would move several times during the Club's heyday, the Club itself served as a center for avant garde thinking in the city, hosting, for example, exhibitions of artists' work from beyond the region and from Europe. The Club also featured lectures on art, theater, and literature. The poet E. E. Cummings exhibited his artwork at the Club in 1931; Garrettsville, Ohio-born poet Hart Crane was good friends with William Sommer, one of the Club's founders. Many Club members, as well as members of Cleveland's literary and cultural set, were constant, temporary inhabitants of Laukhuff's Bookstore, which featured the works and "little magazines" of Modernist intellectuals.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, members of the Kokoon Arts Club benefited from the New Deal's Federal Art Project, painting murals at the Cleveland Public Library and in other public buildings. Many members of the Club exhibited and won awards at the Cleveland Museum of Art's annual May Show (established in 1919). Club members helped themselves, however, by hosting "curb marts" with other of the area's arts institutions and clubs as well as gallery shows. In this way they brought art to the people (who could merely look rather than buy) as well as offered respite from economic dislocation. These, like the annual masked balls, were signal events in Cleveland's cultural history.

Dr. Shirley Teresa Wajda is the guest curator of the exhibition. High resolution photographs are available on request. Contact Jean L. Druesedow at jdruesed@kent.edu or (330) 672-0303.

The Kent State University Museum is open Wednesday, Friday and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4:45 p.m.; Thursday from 10 a.m. to 8:45 p.m.; and Sunday from noon to 4:45 p.m. It is closed on Monday and Tuesday.

The Museum is located in Rockwell Hall on the corner of East Main and South Lincoln Streets on the Kent State University campus. Special guided tours are available for groups by reservation. Free on-site motor coach parking is available.

For additional information about the Kent State University Museum, go to www.kent.edu/museum, or call 330. 672.3450.
   

# # #