Michelangelo Lovelace

(Cleveland, Ohio, 1960 - 2021, Cleveland, Ohio)

American

Michelangelo Lovelace’s paintings are acrylic-on-canvas reflections of his personal perspective, shaped by growing up poor in Cleveland’s King Kennedy housing project. He is best known for cityscapes that sometimes depict joyful everyday scenes—a carnival, a block party, a concert—but also include raw representations of crime, poverty, racism, and drug abuse.[1] Lovelace would often use the text of billboards or the names of shops and buildings as opportunities for social commentary, taking liberties to invent scenes and compositions that would allow him to get his point across. His images are consistently animated and vibrant, and he usually tipped the ground plane of his landscapes upward and exaggerated linear perspective to help plunge viewers into dense urban settings. Some works are allegorically imaginative, presenting here a scene of figures trapped inside a giant liquor bottle, or there a view of contestants on a game show spinning the “Wheel of Poverty.” In one clear expression of his artistic goals, Lovelace stated that “What I’m trying to do in my work is tell that urban, inner-city story of what it’s like growing up, dealing with poverty, dealing with crime, dealing with drugs, having so much to overcome to keep your dream alive.”[2]

 

Lovelace was named Michael when he was born, but he legally changed his name to Michelangelo to reflect the nickname that friends bestowed upon him for his obsession with art. He was accepted into the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1985 and studied there for a year and half, ultimately dropping out to support his growing family after getting married in 1986 (he had also dropped out of East Technical High School at age sixteen to help support his family).[3] A notable turning point came in 1993 when he met the East Cleveland outsider artist Reverend Albert Wagner, who became his mentor. “When I met him,” Lovelace recalled, “I was doing [paintings of] jazz and musicians. I was trying to do art that I thought people wanted.” Wagner did the opposite, filling his home with simple and compelling yet highly idiosyncratic paintings of biblical figures. “He had his message, he had his vision, and that’s how he changed my work,” Lovelace remembered, “Once I met him, I started looking at my environment.”[4]

 

The success of Lovelace’s career grew steadily but slowly. His death in 2021 came just three years after he achieved one of his biggest goals: A solo show at a high-visibility New York art gallery. Fort Gansevoort gallery, located in the gallery-rich Chelsea neighborhood on the lower West Side of Manhattan, gave him that honor in the spring of 2018, and the show sold out while receiving praise from The New York Times, The New Yorker, and ArtForum.[5] “He always said he wanted to show in New York,’' recalled his widow Shirley Lovelace, “When it happened, it was like, unbelievable, even to him. He felt like all the years he had put into it had finally paid off.” Throughout his life, the artist had a variety of jobs to support his family and earn an income apart from selling art, so as to maintain a free and independent creative viewpoint. At the end of his life, he had worked for 19 years in Skill Rehabilitation at MetroHealth Medical Center.

 

Lovelace’s work has been presented in solo exhibitions at Springfield Museum of Art in Ohio, Cleveland School of the Arts, Progressive Insurance Corporate Headquarters, and University of Illinois at Chicago. He has been included in group exhibitions at MOCA Cleveland, Cleveland State University Art Gallery, the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, and Case Western Reserve University. Lovelace won the Cleveland Arts Prize Mid-Career Artist in 2015 and multiple Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Grants for Painting. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art; Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa; JP Morgan Chase Art Collection in New York; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in North Carolina; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri; and Springfield Museum of Art in Ohio, among others.[6]

 

[1] Richard Sandomir, “Michelangelo Lovelace, Artist of Street Life in Cleveland, Dies at 60,” New York Times, 7 May 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/arts/michelangelo-lovelace-dead.html.

[2] Steven Litt, “Cleveland artist Michelangelo Lovelace savored big-time art world success briefly before his death in April,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, 9 May 2021, https://www.cleveland.com/news/2021/05/cleveland-artist-michelangelo-lovelace-savored-big-time-art-world-success-briefly-before-his-death-in-april.html.

[3] Litt, “Michelangelo Lovelace.”

[4] Erick Trickey, “Louder Than Words,” Cleveland Magazine,  22 August 2008, https://clevelandmagazine.com/entertainment/articles/louder-than-words.

[5] Litt, “Michelangelo Lovelace.”

[6] Fort Gansevoort Gallery, “Michelangelo Lovelace Estate, CV,” https://www.fortgansevoort.com/artists/michelangelo-lovelace-estate/cv.

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