Courthouse starts the new year with art
Akron artist Danny Ratcliff has done many art shows regionally throughout his career, including in Columbus and Detroit.
But he's had just one gallery show in Akron before now, at the Dr. Shirla R. Mcclain Gallery of Akron Black History and Culture at the University of Akron in 2015.
“Akron, it just hasn't catered to African American artists,” he said. “For the most part, we do our own thing.”
Now, Ratcliff, 67, has 20 works featured in a show at the Summit County Courthouse through Curated Courthouse.
A goal of the Curated Courthouse project is to highlight diverse artists that represent the people of Summit County.
Ratcliff 's show, which kicks off Curated Courthouse's 2021 art displays, continues through mid-june.
Curated Courthouse, the brain child of Probate Judge Elinore Marsh Stormer, is a collaboration between Summit County Probate Court and the Akron nonprofit Curated Storefront. The project is supported by a $50,000 Knight Arts Challenge grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation in 2019.
“It's been very rare that I get a showcase opportunity like the one they're giving me here,” in Akron, said Ratcliff, who worked with Courtney Cable of Curated Storefront on his art installation Jan. 5.
Ratcliff, who has studied extensively in the classical realism style of the European masters, doesn't have the luxury of time to create in his home studio without the financial security of a paid commission.
He pays the bills by running the concrete masonry contracting company Ratcliff and Sons, which he took over from his father about 15 years ago.
“An interesting paradigm for an artist,” Ratcliff, who studied at Cleveland Institute of Art and several other schools, commented by phone Jan. 8.
Lisa Mansfield, community outreach specialist for Summit County Probate Court, said Curated Courhouse is looking for local artists who are diverse in age, race, ethnicity and more.
“We're trying really hard to pull in the art of people of color and also artists who are female or artists that are local,” she said.
Ratcliff 's artwork can be seen throughout the first floor of the Summit County Courthouse, which crosses through a 1906 building, 1930s building and 2005 atrium. He works in oils, charcoals and pastels.
“The whole idea of the project is to provide respite in a really stressful environment. Even if you're coming in here for a happy reason, which marriage licenses would obviously be, it's daunting in the courthouse, so we want it to be someplace where people feel comfortable,” Mansfield said.
Ratcliff's striking charcoal portrait of Akron superstar Lebron James sits opposite the highly trafficked marriage license department and next to Judge Stormer's Probate Courtroom. In it, James is seated in a contemplative pose with his head down and his hands clasped and elbows on his thighs.
“It's never been seen,” Cavs fan Ratcliff said of the work, which features James in his Cavaliers jersey. “This is the first show it's ever been in.”
Just around the corner in the oldest part of the courthouse is a centurion sculpture, with two busts of Athena nearby.
“So we're blending contemporary and historic” with the placement of the Lebron work, Cable said.
A common theme in Ratcliff's portraits are family and love. Those portrait subjects fit well with a family-related probate court that handles adoptions, guardianships and estates, Mansfield said.
She pointed to the energy of a dancing couple in Ratcliff 's “Sunset Dancers.”
“There's a lot of celebration in the painting and a lot of love represented,” Mansfield said.
Ratcliff has created a series of six oil paintings, some of his most popular creations, that depicts his own family reunions. They happen every other year, drawing as many as 500 family members to celebrations in parks everywhere from Akron to Mississippi, Houston and San Francisco.
In the striking “We Family Love,” family members are gathered around a beautiful older woman clad in all white, whom Ratcliff said is his Aunt Rachel Hamilton, 91, the oldest member of his family. The reunion took place about 12 years ago at Belle Isle Park in Detroit, where Ratcliff was born and lived until he moved to Akron with his family at age 7.
Curated Courthouse has purchased an original print of Ratcliff's “We Family Love” for its permanent collection.
Judge Stormer met Ratfcliff about 12 years ago when he did a show at First Congregational Church of Akron. He had created a painting for the church called “Christ and Children,” picturing a Jesus of color holding children of multiple races.
Stormer loved his work.
Last summer, she and Mansfield invited Ratcliff to the courthouse to talk and decided to do a preview of three of his works in a staircase that had never had art in it before. A sign announced that his full show would open in January.
Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, Summit County Probate Court was never closed. The court, which continued to have decent foot traffic in its area, was committed to putting up a new show.
“The show is special to me because it really is kind of a revival for my career as an artist,” Ratcliff said.
The bulk of the Knight Arts Challenge grant goes toward buying pieces of art for Curated Courthouse. A large, fanciful Don Drumm sculpture was recently bought for outside the Grand Jury. Now, Ratcliff 's “We Family Love” is being reproduced on canvas and he will embellish it, adding oil paint to create more dimension to create an original print for Curated Courthouse.
Curated Courthouse pays artists for their shows, and their artwork is for sale to the public. In the last show, “Look Beyond: An Art Show for All Abilities” with Summit DD, four pieces were sold.
Curated Courthouse is in the process of commissioning several more works from regional artists over the next six months. It also will be getting a print of Thomas Wilmer Dewing's 1900 “Symphony in Green and Gold,” whose reproduction used to sit in front of the courthouse as part of the Akron Art Museum's Inside/out project.
Matching funds raised for the Knight Arts Challenge are primarly used for art transport and installation, which includes lighting, easels, display boards and hanging systems, Mansfield said. Curated Courthouse made its first match of $25,000 in 2020 to receive $25,000 of the grant last year and will work on the match for the other $25,000 this year.
Now, within the halls of justice, folks can enjoy the beauty of Ratcliff 's Black contemporary figures enjoying picnic scenes in the park that European painters made popular hundreds of years ago.
“I love putting together people in space and landscape-type scenery, much like the old masters would do in some of their picnic scenes and paintings in open atmosphere,” said Ratcliff. “That's how I get my beauty and the ambiance I'm after.”
The artist stressed that honing his discipline is a lifelong process: “It's always a practice. There's something I gain and/or learn with everything I endeavor.”