The View From Julie Ezelle-Patton's Art-Project Apartment Building

Cleveland Magazine's Sheehan Hannan talks to poet and artist Julie Ezelle-Patton, who is watching construction workers from her dining room table in Glenville, a neighborhood that has always been one of "Cleveland art world’s best-kept secrets, a haven for artists, musicians, poets and Bohemians," and which is now under serious development. From this story:

Outside, it is camouflaged, one of 12 red brick structures along East Boulevard, across the street from the jogging paths and rustling treetops of Rockefeller Park. Its entryway is like so many others on the East Side, a simple number perched atop a concrete prewar arch. 

But inside, the eight apartments have hosted a miniature Harlem Renaissance. Since Julie bought shares in an apartment there in 1987, she has maintained the building as an ongoing art project. Part residence, part community center, part arts incubator, it morphs and re-forms, harmonizing with the artistic needs of whomever has taken up residence. 

“This is University Circle, squared,” Julie says. “We have music, we have natural history, we have a botanical garden, we have art and we have history going back to the 19th century.”

Dozens of creative people, in the rising action or denouement of their careers, have passed through its walls: RA Washington, Daniel Gray-Kontar, Marjorie Witt-Johnson and Nina Sarnelle. They slept on its couches and held salons in its living rooms, grew food in its garden and hung paintings in its basement. 

“We’re basically caretakers of these legacies, with the hope of keeping them safe,” Julie says.

The article discusses the community that grew around Patton and the building, and goes into the legacy also left by Patton's mother, painter Virgie Ezelle-Patton. "After Virgie died, Julie assembled hundreds of her canvases, drawings, journal pages and sculptures into an apartment-wide art installation as a living legacy to the mother she loved deeply." Read on here.