Abstract
Artist Michaelangelo Lovelace (b. Michael Anthony Lovelace) discusses his personal background and career; including details on his family and art education, and insights on the intersection of art and race. Lovelace, a native Clevelander, describes the formative moments of his life, including his first encounters with racism, the mentorship of artist Reverend Albert Wagner, his art education experiences at Cuyahoga Community College and the Cleveland Institute of Art, his first art exhibit at Karamu House, the untimely death of his son, and the spiritual awakening that redirected him. Lovelace also recounts the trials of identifying as an artist within the African American community of his youth, where he was often accused of "acting white" and where art was seen as "something white people do." The artist describes thematic content in his work, which often depicts poverty and race, as well as his use of color, textured materials, and perspective. Also of note is the artist's recollection of the controversy surrounding his mural "My Hometown," which was installed at the Cleveland Clinic, but which was deemed racist by some employees of that institution, leading to aggressive coverage by local television media. The mural depicted Cleveland as a racially divided city, with blacks living on the east side and whites on the west side. In closing, Lovelace discusses his reaction to the historic candidacy of President Barack Obama, and describes its influence on his current work, "Stand Up and Be Counted."
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Interviewee
Lovelace, Michaelangelo (interviewee)
Interviewer
Dean, Sharon (interviewer)
Project
Cleveland Artists Foundation
Date
10-28-2008
Document Type
Oral History
Duration
46 minutes
Recommended Citation
"Michaelangelo Lovelace Interview, 28 October 2008" (2008). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 901015.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/219
Transcript
Sharon Dean [00:00:04] My name is Sharon Dean. I’m the director of the Cleveland Artists Foundation. And today I’m here with Michelangelo Lovelace, this wonderful artist from Cleveland, born June 15, 1960. It’s a pleasure to be here with you.
Michaelangelo Lovelace [00:00:19] Well, thank you for having me. I’m glad to be here.
Sharon Dean [00:00:23] I guess what I wanted to start with was part of what we were talking about in the hallway, which I think will lead in nicely. You mentioned that your grandfather, I guess your family is from Columbus, Georgia, right?
Michaelangelo Lovelace [00:00:36] My mother is from Columbus, Georgia. My father is from Preston, Mississippi.
Sharon Dean [00:00:42] And you were talking about your grandfather wanting to become an artist. What prohibited him?
Michaelangelo Lovelace [00:00:48] Well, coming from- My grandfather was from Georgia. Columbus, Georgia. And because of a Black man during his time. It was just not a feasible career that he could choose. He played the piano, he liked to draw and paint. My mother also told me that he was in a little band. But he ended up being a janitor for many years, and then he ended up being orderly at a hospital during the labor part of his years. So it wasn’t just something that he could do. It was always something he dreamt about, she said, and something I guess he just passed on to me.
Sharon Dean [00:01:22] So when did you first realize that you wanted to be an artist?
Michaelangelo Lovelace [00:01:26] I first came to my mind I was 19 years old. I had always been able to do art, even as an adolescent, even in elementary school. I would win awards and took art from the time I could remember. First grade, you know how they take art. But when I got into my late teens, I was 19. That’s when actually I didn’t realize it. Somebody else mentioned to me that you should be an artist because they saw some drawings I did, and they say you should be an artist. And that’s the first time I ever heard of a career or anything called being an artist.
Sharon Dean [00:01:56] A couple of years ago, when you did the Visual Tales exhibit at the Cleveland Artists Foundation, we talked a little bit about the kind of art you were making as a kid. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Michaelangelo Lovelace [00:02:07] You know, as a kid, I was doing- I was actually drawing things like, you know, like kids do. I kind of document my house and my family. I also did things like graffiti and stuff like that because I was always trying to find a way to express myself. Art started out as just a way of expressing my feelings about what I was going through growing up in a single-parent household in a community that, you know, violence was all around, drugs was all around, things that were going on that not necessarily you find in a traditional household. So I guess I just started doing art. That kind of just documented my feelings about what was going on around me.
Sharon Dean [00:02:48] I wonder if you can talk a little bit about after you decided to become an artist, how you studied to get there.
Michaelangelo Lovelace [00:02:54] Well, like most people, I was drawing out of magazines. I would draw out of girly magazines or LIFE magazines or Ebony magazine. Anything that I got that I liked. So I started doing that first. And then a friend of mine mentioned that you should go back to school. You know, I had dropped out of high school at 16. So I kind of did the street thing and hustling out in the streets from 16 to 20, 21. And somebody mentioned to me. A friend of mine mentioned to me I should go back to school. And I told him, well, I don’t have a high school diploma. I can’t go back to school. He said, well, you can go to Tri-C and study for your GED and study art. So that’s what I did. Once I found a way to get to school and found a way to pay for it, I went back to school and studied for my GED and started studying art. And just- I was already drawn with pastels and watercolors and just kind of doing things that I like. And that got me started doing the work that I’m doing. In a sense, I just kind of got back in school and started to just practice art.
Sharon Dean [00:04:01] I know that you’ve had some interesting life experiences which have helped you find your voice as an artist as to what you wanted to do. I wonder if you can talk about some of your experiences in life that have influenced the kind of art today.
Michaelangelo Lovelace [00:04:17] Well, for me, I grew up. I was born in the ’60s. I call myself a ’60s child. Born in June … 1960, during the turbulence times where the things were changing. I remember being a kid and during the Glenville riots where my grandmother lived off of 160 and Harvard. And during those times, it was sort of like the good neighborhood. And I lived off 105 and the Empire where the riots were happening. So I grew up during the time where I saw the National Guard riding down the street. I remember the buildings burning up. I remember the panic that was in my mother’s house where everybody was trying to get, get us out of the house and out of the neighborhood. The things were happening. And that’s just at a lesson. I might have been about eight or nine when that happened. And then as I got older, just growing up in a community where anything could happen at any time. I seen a lot of my- First person I saw get murdered when I was about 10 years old, where, you know, there was a guy who was murdered and he was laying in the driveway and we come outside thinking we just going to the store and we walking down the street and here some bloody body laying in the driveway. Those are the type of things that kind of stuck to me as an adolescent growing up. Then I got out of school, I dropped out of school at 16 and started getting into the street life and seeing a lot of things that happened during that experience. Kind of got me thinking about what was going on in my community and what was going in my environment. And so as I started experiencing those things, other kind of, you know, hardships that kind of formed me. Just these are the things that helped me start developing my own vision of how to explain to people what was actually going on in a visual sense in my neighborhood. So those are just a few of the experiences that helped me kind of form my vision to where I’m going now with my work.
Sharon Dean [00:06:14] I know you have a deep emotion in your work too. It’s not just sort of this explanatory voice. It’s more of a personal tragedies, personal sadness that’s coming through. I wonder if you can.
Michaelangelo Lovelace [00:06:26] Well, I’ve dealt with some things. You know, my older brother, who has cerebral palsy, couldn’t walk, couldn’t talk. We had to feed him through a bottle and everything. At 15, we found him in the house, dead. I had one of my own children at 4 years old die in my arms. You know, I’ve had a lot of- My mother or grandmother passed away early in life. Those are some of the things that, because things are so personal, when things happen to you personally, it gets you, for me at least got me in touch with my emotional feelings. So when I put my message down on my art, I am tapping into those emotional experiences that are so powerful that it’s almost like a spiritual thing that you’re tapping into that allows me to get to the root of it, to the message of it. So that my art, not only is it visually entertaining, but the message that it carries is very thought provoking and spiritual in a sense. That allows you to deep. To touch into some emotions that maybe you’ve been hiding, you know, or suppressing. And because I’ve been through, I got three ex-wives and baby mama and been divorced three times. And you go through these hardships and for me, I draw on them hardships. A lot of my friends would tell me, Michael, you like drama in your life because you feed off that drama, you’re able to use that drama or that difficulty to create art from. And so I’ve kind of learned how to create art. And I gotta say that part of that learning how to do that come from mentorship I had with Reverend Wagner. I have to mention him because he allowed me to understand that it was okay to draw on that emotion. And what most people tell you, don’t think about it, don’t feel it, ignore it, pretend it, don’t be there, suppress it. He encouraged me to deal, to deal with it head on and to use it to motivate and to express myself through.
Sharon Dean [00:08:35] Well, you bring up two other questions for me. One is the traditional form of education that other people go through and you sort of circuitously went through studying art. I wonder if you can talk about if you feel a formal education helped or hindered you.
Michaelangelo Lovelace [00:08:54] Well, I feel like I benefited from both. Like I say, I dropped out of high school at 16. Well, actually I dropped out of high school at 14 because from 14 to 16 I very rarely went to school and I got suspended 11 times when I was 14. I grew up angry because I was in a single parent household and there was no male role model. So there was a lot of things that I saw that I probably shouldn’t have seen. A lot of things I did that I probably shouldn’t have did. But by, by dropping out of high school at 16 and living the life I lived before I went to school, it kind of got me ready for school. So when I did, I went to Tri-C and there was a teacher named David Hoffman who talked to me a lot about painting, fed my dream, encouraged me. So I benefited from going to school in that sense. Even though I was already painting when I got there, already drawing. He kind of got me thinking that I was truly trying to be a professional artist. So that kind of allowed me to take myself seriously than I would have normally probably did. And then I went to, I got accepted. I worked there for two and a half years at about two years at Tri-C, prepared myself and applied for the Cleveland Institute of Art. During that time I didn’t know nothing about outsider art. So everybody was like, go to the Institute. That’s where you’re supposed to be if you want to be an artist. So I said, oh, that’s what I should do. And I applied for the institute. I put together a portfolio for about 250 pieces and I submitted maybe 50 out of those pieces and they accepted me as a second year student. And I was just thrilled, because I thought I was following the road that an artist is supposed to follow, which is go to school, go to art school, and then you become an artist. Well, when I got to the Institute, I just didn’t fit in. I was still living in the housing projects. All my friends were still selling dope, and they was like, Michael, you know, why you ain’t hanging with us? And I was trying to live in this environment that was not fostering anything about art. That was just something like a joke. You know, people were like, you trying to be white? You trying to, you know, be different, be better than us? You know, I heard all of that. And so it became a tug of war between going home and going to school. And eventually the environment won over. I was 25. I had three kids. I had been through, you know, a divorce, and I had this big dream of being an artist. And so I was trying to balance all this out, and it just didn’t balance out for me. So I ended up leaving Cleveland Institute of Art after about a year and a half. I did my first year, which I got accepted in as a second-year student, did my first year, did half of the second year, and came out. Dropping out of art school. Well, before I dropped out, there was a teacher named Katherine Redmond, and she took me to lunch. And I’ll never forget this, because this is one of the reasons why I’m still painting today. She said, no matter what you go through, paint through it. Because most people, what they do is when their problems come, they quit painting or quit doing whatever they do to focus on their life problems, and then it’s difficult to get restarted. So she said, no matter what you do, pay through it, because you are a great artist. Never forget that. We was having hamburger, french fries at this little cafe that used to be across the street at the institute, at the factory. So I dropped out after that, and I kind of wandered around for about a year or two. And my son, he was four years old, he died in my arms of some kind of illness that happened to him. My best friend died two weeks later, you know, and so I kind of drifted around for about a year, maybe two, maybe even close to three. And that’s when, for whatever reason, I met Reverend Albert Wagner. And it took a little bit before our relationship jailed, but I can remember him being there for some reason, and he just kind of encouraged me in the same way Katherine Redmond did to just do what I do, that I was a great artist. I mean, people was telling me these things, and I kind of like, you know, you supposed to come from a fluent neighborhood to be considered that. Everybody I ever heard about never came from the ghetto, you know. You know, when these people were telling me that, you. You can do this, you can do this. So he just started encouraging me, and that’s where I went from being taught, from going to school through mentorship, because it was 13 years of mentorship with Reverend Albert Wagner. And he just encouraged me to tell my story the way God brung it to me, the way life had brung it to me. And don’t try to make it prettier than what it is. Don’t try to make it uglier than what it is. Just tell it like you testifying in that kind of way. So that’s what I did. So I benefited, yes, from both going to school and learning from people who had degrees and was teaching, and both from being mentored from someone that they consider an outsider.
Sharon Dean [00:13:56] Well, I wonder if you can elaborate on something you said when we were talking, which is the first part, sounds like. And I want to ask you more about your influences from people from different artists, but you keep coming back to spirituality, and I wonder if you can talk a bit about a moment in your life when you realize that there’s something bigger than me and I have to give back.
Michaelangelo Lovelace [00:14:22] Well, one experience that really formed me and changed my life was- Keep talking? Okay. One of the things that kind of formed my life was I never really- I always even find it hard to tell people now, that God talked to me and that there was a night- Where do I explain this? I had went through a divorce. I was living in this little studio, this little bitty apartment. I mean, it was almost like living in a closet. And I was trying to keep my dream alive, keep my vision alive. And I was drinking heavy and I was going through a lot of problems trying to find out who I was. And my best friend had died, my son had died. I was coming off the streets where I was hanging out with people selling drugs and everything. And it got to a point where I didn’t want to live that life no more. I just was tired of it. It got to a point where I was tired of, you know, always looking over my shoulder, always wondering who was trying to walk up on you. And it just didn’t fascinate me no more. I had lived this life from the time I was 16 to the time I was 28 when I stopped. But. But it got to be a point where I think I was about 26. I just was tired of it. And I saw- I was in school, out of school. I was painting. I wasn’t painting. I was in the streets hustling. And then I was DJing and running in the bars and all of that. And it just got to a point where I just didn’t want to do it no more. And once my son died, it affected me in such a way that to watch your child die in your arms and you can’t do anything about just hurt me to the point where I didn’t want to- I didn’t want- I just wanted to change my life. And I can remember praying, asking God, you got to show me a way to change my life. I cannot continue to live like this. I knew that I would end up in prison. I knew I would end up dead, carrying guns and just dealing with people. That- That was a life- That was just like thug life. Let’s just, you know. And I was drawing and painting, but never showing it to anybody because it was just something I wasn’t- I was just doing it to comfort myself. But this one night, I vividly remember praying, asking God to show me a way out of this. And could hear that voice telling me, if you do it my way, you can have anything you want. You can be what you want. I don’t know whether it was the drugs or whether it was just- I was just tired and I thought I was hearing voices, but I heard- I heard that voice inside of me, or I heard, like, it was somebody talking to me in the same room that I cannot live like this. But the voice told me, if you do it my way, you could be what you want. You can have anything. And from that day, I might have been, like I say, 26, 27 years old when that happened. And that changed my life. For whatever reason, it got me to focus on my dream. And from that point on, it got me to think of myself as more than just a thug. That I’m supposed to be out here hustling, thugging, selling drugs, living their life. And I started just staying home, drawing. I started telling people when they come over, I didn’t want no company. My wife was- My first wife would tell me I would lock myself up in the attic. I would lock myself up and close the door and actually lock the door and lock myself into this room that was an attic. [tapping mic] And I would just be up there painting. And then when I would come out, I had done four, five paintings, small paintings, bad paintings, but I would be painting. And that started me on the road to where I’m on now. Because I just couldn’t live the life that I was living at that time anymore.
Erin Bell [00:18:15] I’m just gonna interrupt for a moment.
Michelangelo Lovelace [00:18:16] Oh, yes. Okay.
Erin Bell [00:18:17] Everyone does it.
Sharon Dean [00:18:19] I wonder if you can talk about some of the themes in your work that you started to pursue.
Michaelangelo Lovelace [00:18:24] I- Well, I started, you know, because I started actually just looking at my environment. When I started painting, I wanted to tell the story of what it was like growing up in the hood, you know, growing up in a community where there were good things that happened, but yet there was bad things. So I talked about racism. I can remember being maybe 19, maybe even younger than that. I’ll start back- I was about- When I first got exposed to racism, I was a caddy at a country club, Beechmont Country Club, and I worked out there as a caddy. And I never really felt racism until then because I got around people who wasn’t from my neighborhood and they lived a different type of life and different culture and everything. And I can remember being 12 and having, being called “boy” all the time. I was like, okay, I’m a boy. I know that. But then it started coming to a point where it was not the same kind of boy. It was kind of like you were less than them boy, you know, because I was cad. I was shining shoes, and I just thought I was making money. But then as I got about 14, I was still doing it. I started really starting to, you know, see that. Wait a minute. You- You talking down to me. And that is one of the subjects I talk about in my work. I talk about racism. I talk about poverty. I talk about- I try to explain what it’s like growing up and not having enough. We. I grew up on the welfare system because my. Like I said, I was growing single-parent household. So I know what it’s like to come 20th of the month and there’s no food in the house. I know what it’s like for my mother to sit back and wait on the check to come. So I started talking about poverty in my work. I wanted to express what it was like growing up poor. I talk about police brutality. I talk about joblessness. I talk about homelessness. I talk about things like that in my work. I try to deal with the issues of my day and time, issues of. Of- Of just- I said my homelessness. I know what it’s like to, to, to be in a situation where you’re not sure where you’re going to live at or where you’re going to sleep at, and you’re trying to figure out, you know, Who I can call to spend the night over their house or something like that. So those are the issues that I still deal with in my work. And I try to do it in a way that can visually put the viewer in those shoes so that they’re kind of walking as a homeless person, or they’re kind of- They’re a Black person dealing with racism. Or- Or I got one painting called Color Line, which shows both sides of the aisle where you got people who are racist and people who are fighting against racism. And then you also have a middle ground where people come together, because I’ve always, throughout my life, remember whether. Whether they white or Black people helping me achieve my goal. So I talk about all these different subjects in my work.
Sharon Dean [00:21:18] But I can’t help thinking that a lot of your materials and your paints are part of those issues that you’re talking about when you talk about the materials and paints.
Michaelangelo Lovelace [00:21:27] Well, I paint with acrylic paint because it just allows me to work quicker with my ideas, because a lot of ideas come into my mind, I want to put them down. So I work with acrylic. I’ve always been taught to work on canvas, so I work on canvas. I also use paper, but I also learned to build up my surface using a lot of paints, and I use sawdust. And mainly I was taught to use the materials that I could find that would allow me to express the idea the greater, to make it more powerful. And sometimes when I did my graffiti, my Rodney King series, I used brick panel boards because I wanted people to see and feel the urban experience. And for me, coming out of the housing projects, there were brick everywhere. Brick walls in your bedroom, brick walls on the outside. Everything was brick. So that’s why we called it a brick city. So I used something to represent that environment in my paintings. I do now that I call my Growing up in the Hood series. I used sawdust in it because I wanted texture. Because life had been rough. There was never any smooth, easy roles or easy choices. Sometimes a lot of times it was very rough, so I wanted to use rough materials. So I’d use sawdust and modeling paste and things like that. And I choose my colors. It goes back to when I started doing art. I started looking at cartoons and colors from comic books. And even as a child, I can remember drawing comics. So I started using pure reds and blues and contrary, contramentary colors with each other and taking my primaries and let my primaries dominate my surface so that colors kind of bounce off each other. So what I use depends on my subject. My subject is talking about violence, then I want it to be rough. And so I’ll use sawdust in it. I’ll use sand in it. I use modeling paste to thicken it up to make it a rough surface. If I’m talking about a day at the beach, I want to be bright colors. I think about my colors and how I want them to transcend that message that it’s a beautiful day or it’s a bright day. So I kind of think about my materials based on what subject I’m talking about.
Sharon Dean [00:23:59] I noticed something else in your paintings which is- And I know people always probably come to you and say what they see. But there is a perspective that you have where you’re not quite in the scene, but you’re looking at the scene a lot of times from above. So I wonder if you feel doubly marginalized in a way where you’re from the hood, but you’re not. So I wonder if you can talk about where you are in your paintings.
Michaelangelo Lovelace [00:24:29] Well, what I try to do is I see myself as being in the situation, but yet I try to take myself out of it as a viewer. So the perspective a lot of times is from a bird’s-eye view. It’s from looking down on a situation. Because there were times when, wow. I can just point to one incident. My mother had a boyfriend, name was J.C., he was an alcoholic and he would beat up on my mother. And I can remember as a child sleeping on the bunk beds in my room and hearing them fighting or whatever and looking from the top bunk, looking out the door, and I could kind of see down. And I always visualize myself as being able to be above it and looking down on it and coming looking from an aerial view. And so I don’t know if that implanted anything in me in the long run, but I kind of take myself not where I’m in it, but I’m looking from above perspective. And I think that kind of creeped into my psychic. So a lot of times unconsciously I’ll do a drawing and work on a painting. And it’s got that perspective in it. And a couple times people have pointed it out to me and I really believe it’s something self-conscious that just was in me that allowed that to happen. Also, I have done a lot of reading and I got a couple of books that talk about perspectives and bird’s-eye view and how to use your vantage point and how to make it more powerful, but based on the vantage point that you come from that might also play a role. A lot of times I believe that things happen for me in my art more spiritually than anything. I unconsciously make these decisions that is based on some life experience. So I can’t say I sit here and deliberately always make that viewpoint because that’s what I’m trying to do. It just seemed to happen all the time.
Sharon Dean [00:26:41] I wonder if you can talk about the first show you had and what you felt at that time and how your career has progressed.
Michaelangelo Lovelace [00:26:47] Yeah, the first real show I had, I think I was at Karamu House. That was. It was. It was weird because I was so excited. I thought this was the breakthrough that I would need. Finally, I’m in the Karamu House. All this history, all these people who have come through here, and I felt like finally I was part of a group, you know, I knew what it felt like to be part of the criminal crowd. I knew the rewards that came with it, whether it was women, money, everybody knowing your name, people celebrating like you are a local hero because you are either ran in with the right crowd, or that crowd that people were afraid of, or that crowd that people knew was kept money all the time, or, you know, y’all threw parties all the time or whatever. I mean, it’s weird because even if you got the best weed, you know, people will be celebrating you like you the man. But when I got my first show and I was out of that life and I wasn’t dealing with those people, I felt like I was belonging to a crowd that was legendary. In a sense, I knew that being an artist connected me to Michelangelo and it connected me to Leonardo and it connected me to Van Gogh. So I felt like I had stopped, stepped away from this negative crowd to now I was an artist. I was doing shows. I was at Karamu. So the pride and the self-esteem it gave me, it just- It just kind of even made me more hungry and hungry to put, do more work and to put it out there. So hopefully people would accept me as Michelangelo the artist and not Michael the thug or the street person. So it just lit a candle or lit a light in me that of self-esteem and pride. And I felt like I could now, you know, walk among people and tell them that I’m an artist, you know. So that first show really put me in a frame of mind more than I didn’t make any money from the first show. I didn’t sell anything, but I was, to this day, when I think back on that, I think was so much. How much it did for Me in my spirit, you know, And. Oh, God, this is a weird one. I had called two people. I called Carrie Moo and asked for an interview with them to have them come to my studio. She. She told me, well, bring some of your work up here. Bring a portfolio. Let me look at it. I also had made an appointment with Bill Buster to come to his gallery and show him some work. I asked a friend of mine to work with me to drop me off at Bill Bustas, because actually, it was supposed to be at Bill Busta’s before I went to Karamu. Well, on the way to Bill Busta’s, the brakes went out on the car and we couldn’t stop the car. And we ran two lights and ended up running into a fence. It was like a wall where a little wire fence at. So the only way we could stop the car was to run into this fence. And we ran into the fence and right up in this yard. We didn’t hit nobody, didn’t tear up nothing but the fence. And that’s how the car stopped. But I spent the time I was supposed to be at Bill Busta’s trying to get my nerves back together from this experience and trying to get the car out of the yard that we had ran into and ended up missing. Bill Busta ended up going to Karamu’s appointment. And that’s how I got the Karamu show.
Sharon Dean [00:30:13] Well, you never know where fate will take it.
Michaelangelo Lovelace [00:30:15] Yeah. So.
Sharon Dean [00:30:16] So do you consider yourself an artist representing the African American community, or do you consider yourself just an artist who happens to be African American?
Michaelangelo Lovelace [00:30:33] Now? When I first started out, I felt like I had to represent my neighborhood, you know, I mean, because for a long time, the hardest criticism I got came from my neighborhood, came from my people, came from my family. They felt like I was trying to be white. They felt like I was trying to sell them out. They felt like I was trying to somehow wanting to be something more than people were saying I was supposed to be, was selling out my neighborhood. So I felt like if I represented black people, if I represented my community, that they would respect me and understand that I’m not trading them in to be white. I’m just trying to live my dream. Something I hid away from them because they didn’t. You know, whenever I would mention somebody I wanted to be an artist, they would look at me like, you fool. You know, you crazy. White folks do art. Black folks don’t do art. You know, what you trying to do? You know, I was nine years old when I first told my grandmother I wanted to be an artist. She told me artists were fags. You didn’t want to be no fag. And that’s just the way they thought because they thought that art was something Black folks didn’t do. You work the fields, you work hard, you owe the job. You work steel mill, you work ford, you work post office. You don’t do no bBack folks paint and make a living. So I thought at first I was supposed to represent my community, to get them to respect me and to understand I was not selling them out. As I got older and as I realized I’m an artist, I’m just- Who just so happened to be Black. But I’m an artist. That’s what I am. I’m not an African American artist. I mean, even though you can put me in that category, because I am an African American, I consider myself just an artist. And I try to just be an artist doing great art and not so much be responsible for representing my community or this big notion that I’m supposed to be the example for the- You know, I’m just an artist trying to do great art.
Sharon Dean [00:32:28] I wonder if you can talk about the change in your work as you’ve come to this conclusion.
Michaelangelo Lovelace [00:32:36] When I first started out, I was trying to just tell the story of growing up in the hood and tell about what’s going on in Cleveland, what’s going on in my small community, the drugs, the crime, you know, the poverty. And as I’ve gotten over. It’s been almost 25 years for me, since I was 19, I first came. Or probably more. Yeah, more than 25.
Sharon Dean [00:32:59] You’re getting older.
Michaelangelo Lovelace [00:32:59] You’re getting older. Since I first got that vision of being an artist, and that dream started really lighting up inside me. So I went from just trying to talk about what’s going on in the hood and what’s going on in my immediate community to now I’m broadening to my- To what’s going on in America. What’s going on in inner cities across America. What’s going on? I just finished a painting called Stand and Be Counted, which talks about Obama and the whole movement of bringing America together, getting that unity within races and that, you know, not limiting anyone, whether male, female, to what they can and cannot do. So I’m talking about broader issues now. I’m talking about not just Cleveland, but across America, across the world. I’m trying to deal with more worldly issues. I tell people all the time my style of painting has changed here and there a little bit here, a little bit there. I still like using my colors in the primary sense, but my subject matter has changed. I’m no longer focusing just on Cleveland and just on the happenings in the hood, but I’m talking about worldly issues, more now, and worldly experiences.
Sharon Dean [00:34:10] Do you have one piece of work that stands out to you that’s either your favorite or has the most meaning for you?
Michaelangelo Lovelace [00:34:17] Yeah, I have my most infamous painting. It’s called My Hometown. And my hometown is a painting that is 91 feet long by 64 feet wide. It’s a painting that documents my hometown. You see images of the Rock and Roll hall of Fame, Gonorrhea, the Cubes. The Cube. You talk about the cabs, you talk about the Browns. It talk about east side of town, west side of town, and it kind of paint a picture of Cleveland as it is for me and for a lot of folks. And I talk about that love I have for my hometown. How the painting came about was me and a friend named Omar Shahid had drove cross country to LA. And in that experience, I got to see a lot of things I never saw before. How other people live and how a big city twice the size of Cleveland, how things happen in there. So after going to LA and seeing how this big-city function and all these different things, I had never seen homelessness on that level. I mean, it was just tons and tons of people sleeping in a park, sleeping on street. As you walk down a street, people laying on the sidewalk just sleep. I had never seen anything like that. So when I got back to Cleveland, I realized that Cleveland ain’t so bad, that this is my hometown, and no matter where I go, I represent Cleveland. So I had to paint my town. That I thought in a way that was true. That was with love and respect. But at the same time, I kind of had to paint the truth about my city. So when I designed it, I designed East Side, which has always been predominantly Black, west side, which has always been predominantly white. And people met in the middle from both sides of town. And that’s the way I painted it and the way it became my most important painting. And what I consider probably my greatest painting is that when I put it out and got a chance to show it at the Cleveland Clinic, it started a lot of controversy. And what I try to do with my work is I want my work to start conversations. I want a person to look at my painting and have a thought. Because what I’m actually expressing is a moment in time and a thought through each painting. Each painting is Like a small story, a thought. And I’m hoping that the viewer not only see the painting, but becoming engaged in the painting and allows them to start conversations with themselves or with the painting or with other people. So I think this is one of my most powerful paintings. That accomplishes this, accomplishes that.
Sharon Dean [00:37:19] So what happened with that controversy? I know that they wanted to take it down, but talk about that a little bit.
Michaelangelo Lovelace [00:37:24] Well, with that controversy, actually it became the most exposure I’ve had ever as an artist in 20 something years. What happened was they came and got the painting. They hung it on the October, August 28, and within four hours they took it down. What happened was someone maybe, from what I come to understand about three employees complained that they felt the painting was racially dividing the city. And they felt that it was racially somehow not representing Black people in the way that they should be. They felt that I was making fun of Black people or dividing the city, I think. And what I come to find out later on is that they didn’t know who I was. They thought I was because of my name, Michelangelo, that I was a white artist making fun of Black people. So anyway, they called Channel 19, Channel 19 came out to see the painting, but Cleveland Clinic wouldn’t let them look at it and refused to let them in to see the painting. And they took it down to keep them from seeing the painting. So that kicked off a story with Channel 19. Somehow they came to my job. They found out where I worked, they came to my job. They asked me to do an interview. I had to go through the Metro people trying. They called me to find out what was going on and ended up doing an interview with Channel 19 explaining my side of the story as far as my painting and why I did the painting. That kicked off a news article in the paper, that kicked off editorial articles in the editorial department section of the paper. And it actually went from Cleveland. I got calls from LA, I got calls from New York, I got calls from throughout Ohio. You got emails from different people who picked up on the story. And it just got his own legs and it just ran for itself. And it really wasn’t nothing that I did, but actually just put the painting out there. The painting was only out there, I say, four hours. It was supposed to been out there from August 28, 2006 to December. But the painting, to this day has still got me. I got two interviews with the Cleveland Magazine. That has happened since then. I’m pretty sure it got me a couple sales and it got me a lot of recognition. So it ended up taking legs of its own and became a story that just grew for itself.
Sharon Dean [00:39:58] Where’s the painting now?
Michaelangelo Lovelace [00:40:00] The painting is in my studio. Looking for a place to be hung. A home is looking for her.
Sharon Dean [00:40:05] Well, I wonder if you can talk a little bit about your name. Were you born Michelangelo Lovelace?
Michaelangelo Lovelace [00:40:12] I was born Michael Anthony Lovelace. My friends would tease me and call me Michelangelo because, you know, it was a joke to them that I wanted to be an artist. So we all knew about Michelangelo, Leonardo, Van Gogh, Picasso, because those are the artists that he was always taught about in school. So they would call- Because my name was Michael Anthony, they would call me Michelangelo because I was the only Black kid who was crazy about art. And, you know, I could draw your picture, sit there and draw you, and then say, here, here’s your picture, you know? And so they called me Michelangelo. And because of that, once I decided to leave the streets alone and started to get serious about being an artist, I decided that I was no longer Michael Anthony, that I was Michelangelo. I was the great artist. I was going to be, you know, like Van Gogh and Picasso. And so I legally changed my name to Michelangelo in 1986.
Sharon Dean [00:41:03] Do you feel you’re going to have a lot more to say about different kinds of issues as you continue?
Michaelangelo Lovelace [00:41:07] Oh, yeah. You know, I’ll continue to grow, continue to have life experiences. A lot of my work is based on life experiences. So as I live and I experience things, and like I say, my new painting is Stand and Be Counted, which is dealing with the Obama movement and becoming the first black president and becoming president. And so I’m dealing with the nation coming together and hope.
Sharon Dean [00:41:32] Talk about what that means to you.
Michaelangelo Lovelace [00:41:34] Oh, for me, it means I represent my father. This means for my father, my grandfather, my grandmother, all my ancestors who passed, you know, they’re not here to see this happen. Who in their day never could envision this happening for an African American or to America? I mean, America is now stepping forward and kind of represent leaving this negative past alone and leaving it behind us. So to be here, I think that it’s not just for me. It’s for all those people who lived and died thinking that this could never happen. You know, there could never be a man qualified for the highest office in America to lead American people, not just black people, but lead American people to a better way of living. You know, bring unity to America. Like I say, I’ve been. I’ve benefited from both white and black, encouraging me to do what I do. I benefited from Having people who went through school and had degrees and taught me, who gave me good advice, I benefited from people who didn’t go to school, who gave me good advice. So I see it as I benefited from the Martin Luther King era of the 60s, who fought for our civil rights and everything. And now I’m able to be alive and to be a part of this new movement of bringing the country together in a more unifying way through this man’s journey to become president of the United States. So I just feel like I’m living in a special time in the history of America. New century. I tell people all the time, think about 1909 and what America was like in 1909. Think about what America was like in 1809. So we now into this century, this new century, to where when they say 3009, you know, all this stuff is leading towards that. So we are part of this great history. So I feel. I feel very special to be alive at this time.
Sharon Dean [00:43:39] Is there anything else you want to add that we didn’t talk about?
Michaelangelo Lovelace [00:43:41] You know, I’m just thankful in a spiritual way, in a humble way, in a human way, to have had the opportunity. That’s why I love Cleveland. A lot of people say things about Cleveland, especially when I go visit my people in Chicago or down South. You know, they think that we just crazy up here. But Cleveland has given me the opportunity to be what I wanted to be. If I never show again, I’m so proud to have had the opportunity to become the Michelangelo that I am, proud to say I am and not that person that grew up angry and mad because it felt like the world hated me, so I hated the world, you know? So now to be at this point, now where I’m sitting here with you, getting ready to do this show, to be put in this type of position where people can really understand that I was. I had something to say, and to be in a position where people actually listened to me and appreciated my work, I am just- I’m just thrilled.
Sharon Dean [00:44:45] Well, there is one other question I had, which is you’re now doing a show that you spent your career sort of removing yourself from the African American community, and now this show is putting you back in the African American community. What does it mean to do a show with artists, artists that, like you had worked from 1970 to 2005 and have developed so much?
Michaelangelo Lovelace [00:45:10] Well, it’s almost like going back home. It’s like you. You had to leave home. You know, I had to stop to kind of take myself out of that thought process that I was just an African American artist to get appreciated and to have people see me as an artist. And I spent a lot of years trying to get people to recognize me. I am an artist, not an African American artist. Nobody ever told van Gogh, you’re a Dutch artist. You know, nobody tell Picasso, you’re a Spanish artist. You come from Spain, you a Spanish artist. Nobody told Leonardo or Michelangelo you’re Italian artist. You know, they just called them artists. So as an African American, I feel like now with this show, I’ve come full circle. Now I can go back home and be among African American artists and be appreciated as an African American artist, knowing that people know that I’m an artist, even though I’m an African American artist, even though I’m showing what African American artists in an African American artist context of where we fit in the big picture of art history in this region. But it’s kind of like a homecoming to me, you know? And I feel very proud to be showing in a show that they say we celebrate African American artists, because I know it’s all in the big context of where we belong in art in this region.
Sharon Dean [00:46:28] And I’m honored to have interviewed you. Thank you so much.
Michaelangelo Lovelace [00:46:31] Hi, Sharon. Thank you. Love you.
Sharon Dean [00:46:33] I love you too. I love your work.
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