Michelangelo Lovelace: Art Saved My Life

When Michelangelo Lovelace (1960–2021) spoke about his life and career as an artist, he almost always began with this story: As a teenager growing up in Cleveland’s King Kennedy public housing complex, Lovelace dropped out of school to support his family. When he was nineteen, he was arrested for selling marijuana and appeared before a judge. In his own telling, the judge asked him “‘What can you do?’ So, I told him I could draw. He said ‘Well, you come back down here again, I’m sending you to prison. You’d better stick to drawing.’” Lovelace took that advice to heart: “I’m one of those people who say ‘Art saved my life,’ and it truly did.”

But art didn’t save Lovelace’s life just because it kept him out of prison, or just because it eventually allowed him to buy his own home. It did much more: “Art allows me to stay human, it allows me to have an opinion, it allows me to express myself, and through art I feel alive,” he said. “I feel like people are listening to me and appreciating what I have to say, and what I feel. So that’s how I stay human, I use art as my vehicle to stay alive.”

Lovelace’s art is proof that he meant what he said. In his twenties he attended the Cleveland Institute of Art, but again he dropped out of school, this time to make a living for his own children. Still, he crafted his own style, seeking energy and directness. He depicted crime, drugs, poverty, and sin, but also community, compassion, progress, and salvation. He portrayed the environment he knew—the bricks of public housing, advertising billboards, familiar intersections—but also political events, social allegories, and himself. As a dedicated and prolific painter, he hoped for ideas and experiences to flow straight from his mind to the canvas, as honestly and forthrightly as he could manage.

Lovelace recalled that an art teacher gave him another important piece of advice: “No matter what you go through, paint through it, do not stop painting.”