LAKEWOOD, Ohio — Featuring works by artists Tracey Lind and Danté Rodriguez, Beck Center for the Arts’ Cultural Heritage Exhibition 2025 is running now through Oct. 31 at the Lakewood venue.
The free exhibition annually finds the Beck Center featuring visual artists inspired by their culture, lifestyle or heritage.
“I’m grateful for another opportunity to showcase my work at the Beck Center, a wonderful organization on the West Side that promotes arts and culture in Cleveland,” said Rodriguez, who after spending more than 15 years as a mount maker at the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) now serves as its community arts center’s outreach manager.
“This new body of work explores a new interest in the digital aesthetics of pixel art. I enjoy the abstraction and the challenge of creating images with minimal marks, or pixels. In this process, every detail matters — the placement of a single pixel can transform the look, form and meaning of my ideas which fascinates me.”
Inspired by his familial and cultural roots, Rodriguez’s displayed artwork blends a narrative of retro-gaming nostalgia with personal memory.
Made from one-inch stickers on gypsum board, they transform a simple, childlike material into a shared language of color and form.
Each piece reflects how small repeatable units, like individual memories and relationships, can gather into larger stories.
The work invites viewers to experience artmaking as joyful, accessible and profoundly collective.
“I hope visitors to the Beck Center will see the joy and fun I had creating pixel art with stickers,” he said.
As for Lind, she said photography is a combination of art, storytelling, political action and spiritual practice.
Her first display at the Beck Center includes the collage “Holy Ground” and what she described as an altar of intersections.
The former is a collection of photographs taken on a 2004 pilgrimage to the Holy Land during the Second Intifada.
“Presented in the shape of a cruciform, these images present the joy and pain, anguish and terror, hope and desperation of modern-day Israel and Palestine,” said Lind, who for nearly two decades served as dean of Trinity Cathedral in downtown Cleveland.
“My altar of intersections is a collection of photos from 1992 to 2022 that explores the paradoxes of light and darkness and the borderlands and boundary waters of the margins. These double-sided images, which are printed on inkjet paper and then sealed onto roughly painted wood blocks, mounted on metal stands and separated by plumbing hardware, form an interactive altarpiece.”
The artist invites viewers to touch the altarpiece, turn the photos and make their own storyboard.
“During this very complicated, conflicted and critical time in our nation’s history, I hope that the audience will think about these and other intersections and paradoxes and reflect on how they can be bridge builders in their personal, professional and public lives,” she said.
A free artists reception celebrating Lind’s work is scheduled from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Oct. 3 in the Hoffman-Stach Gallery.
Rodriguez’s reception takes place from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Oct. 24 at the Beck Center.
“Tracey and Danté are both inspired by the roots of their cultural experience, but have very different artistic approaches,” said Beck Center Associate Director of Visual Arts Melinda Placko in a press release.
“Danté offers a new series of handmade, pixelated art that is playful and nostalgic. Tracey engages our understanding of walls and intersections through poetic street photography, providing a safe space for quiet reflection on a tumultuous topic.”
Read more news from the Sun Post Herald here.
If you purchase a product or register for an account through a link on our site, we may receive compensation. By using this site, you consent to our User Agreement and agree that your clicks, interactions, and personal information may be collected, recorded, and/or stored by us and social media and other third-party partners in accordance with our Privacy Policy.
