Passing away at the age of 60 in May 2021, Michelangelo Lovelace was a Cleveland-based artist renowned for his vibrant paintings depicting quotidian scenes of urban life, policing, poverty, war, and personal investigations of Black Identity. Undoubtedly one of the city’s most expressive painters, his work is included in museum collections throughout the United States.

Cleveland by Night, a new exhibition at Fort Gansevoort, New York, spans a period of his work from 1998 to 2020, and illuminates the mysterious and animating qualities of the night as synthesised by Lovelace. The early hours, for many, a time for rest, leisure, or amusement, for the late artist these hours were a critical time for creative productivity and contemplation.

Attracting critical praise in his lifetime for intimate depictions of Cleveland’s Black community and its built world, Lovelace’s subject matter explored topics of law and order, community deprivation, international war, and the state of American healthcare, all replete with deep personal expressions of Black Identity and shaped by his immersion in art as an antidote to the effects of poverty and addiction.

Through a fiery colour palette and somewhat of an eccentric, approach to spatial perspective, Lovelace’s art imbued his subjects with immediacy and relatability, enticing the viewer to join him in examining the struggles of urban communities as well as their resilience and energy.

Depicting nocturnal city life in Cleveland, Ohio, capturing the city where he was born and lived for all of his life, Cleveland by Night by Michelangelo Lovelace is a powerful body of work from a vital component of the country’s contemporary counterculture. Remaining on show at Fort Gansevoort New York until 30 March 2024, the exhibition precedes the upcoming Michelangelo Lovelace: Art Saved My Life, which will open at Akron Art Museum 4 May, 2024, and represent the first museum retrospective of the artist’s work.

@fortgansevoort

Chasing Fireflies, 2019
43 × 60 in
Acrylic on canvas

Color Count, 2001
34.75 × 50.5 in
Acrylic on textured canvas

The Boogie Nights, 2003
30 × 40 in
Acrylic on canvas