The Ohio Artist Registry (OAR) is an exciting opportunity for artists to share their work, connect with the creative community, and establish an online presence—all on a free, virtual platform! The OAR encourages artists working in all art forms, throughout Ohio and beyond, to create a profile, which allows them to better promote themselves and their work. Being listed in the OAR provides artists with new opportunities to share their work with clients, galleries, patrons, and audiences. A listing in the OAR does not confer an endorsement, approval, or verification by the Ohio Arts Council.
For more information, contact Kathy Signorino, artist programs director, at kathy.signorino@oac.ohio.gov or 614-728-6140.
2024 Ohio Artist Registry Juried Exhibition
Andrew Reach
ArtistCleveland OH 44102 United States Website: Andrew Reach – Artist Working in the Realm of Digital Media
Bio
(Born 1961 Miami Beach) Andrew Reach is an abstract artist working in the realm of digital media. He received a degree in Architecture from Pratt Institute in New York and had a successful 20 year career as an architect, practicing in New York City, Los Angeles and Miami. His last building as project architect with HOK Architects was the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University in Miami. In 2003, a spine disease resulted in a spinal fusion of most of his spine and in the fall of 2004, due to complications, at the commencement of construction of the Frost Art Museum, he would undergo a lifesaving surgery marking an end and a new beginning; reinvention from architect to visual artist.
To have some creative outlet he so needed, at the urging of his husband Bruce Baumwoll, he began to learn photoshop to make cards appropriating images from Bruce’s vintage ephemera for his paper ephemera business. But unexpectedly, he began making his own art from scratch. Prior to his disability, Reach’s artistic abilities were always in service to the making of buildings. Now he found himself creating art on a computer program as if the works of art had been inside him all along, waiting for the day technology would come around to realize them. Each of the early works that followed revealed a hidden physical and psychological drama playing out in his body. The richness of the imagery that sprang forth with a limited Photoshop repertoire taught him that more important than whatever tool, it is the imagination, which is foremost— being the source of all creativity. In the spirit of discovery he began to investigate aspects in his art that would give him a way out of his physical self and this art making/art therapy continues as his art has evolved to the present.
Reach’s work has been exhibited in the United States in solo and group exhibitions including a solo exhibition at the Frost Art Museum. His work is in private, corporate and institutional collections, among them the Permanent Collection of the Frost Art Museum, University Hospitals Art Collection, Summa Health Healing Arts Collection and the Cleveland Clinic Art Collection. His work in public art includes a permanent installation at the LGBT Community Center of Greater Cleveland and most recently he was commissioned by the Cleveland Public Library in partnership with Land Studio to create “QUADRATALUX’, a 10 x 30 foot art wall for one of its branches as part of CPL’s “SEE ALSO” public art initiative.
Artist Statement
I was an architect for over 20 years, when in 2005, a progressive spine disease left me disabled and unable to continue practicing. I had practiced in those years on a wide range of projects culminating ironically (as my future as an artist was untold) with the Frost Art Museum at Florida International University in Miami. This marked an end and a rebirth, when on a self-taught journey of discovery, I began to use the computer to make art as therapy to help me cope with pain and depression.
Balance is a constant in life. We all struggle to achieve it. When life and the world is in balance, existence benefits. Having balance in my life is an everyday endeavor to strive for. Some days I do better than others in its pursuit. What helps me achieve this more than anything is being creative. My art making is a balancing act of pain and joy as I counteract the pain I’m in with the joy of making art. As these opposing forces simultaneously intermingle, they merge together and somehow become balanced and bring together what is needed to for me create and go on.
I like to think of my work being my alter egos, proxies for me to express joy, energy, movement. I may not be able to have unbridled energy and movement in my physical body but I can through my art. I express these things with geometric forms and vibrant color. An outgrowth from my architecture, the tenants I learned about making buildings; structure, composition and the grid, to name some, are relevant to making art as well and they are my guiding principles. Putting shapes together in new ways is the part of the process that taps me into my architectural brain cells.
Digital technology is a gift to the disabled, allowing expression that can be too physically demanding with traditional tools. Digital technology allows me to make art that would be too physically demanding with only the movement of a mouse.
In my new work, I’m working in both 2d and 3d. In 2d, I am printing on rigid substrates, acrylic and aluminum and being rigid allows me to cut them on a cnc router, letting the geometry escape the confines of the square and rectangular formats traditional digital prints. In 3d, I’m exploring sculpture of geometric expression. Working with Think[box] Innovation Center at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, my 3d prints, among them “MODEL CITIZENS”, “#” and “# PAVILLION”, are starting points. I envision them as large scale public art and visualizing them virtually in the open source 3d creation platform BLENDER.
Each artwork I make is a joyous visual song representing a little piece of me that has been freed to soar.