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At moCa, we support and amplify the work of artists who represent what's next— in Cleveland and beyond. moCa's Annual Fund directly supports day-to-day operations. Support Take home art! Donate Membership Annual Fund Institutional Giving Patrons Join us for a chance to take home an incredible work by an Ohio artist. Thu. NOV 14 6-9PM at the Shoreby Club 40 Shoreby Drive Bratenahl, OH 44108 $150/person includes: ◼ 1 Raffle Ticket ◼ Drinks ◼ Bites ◼ Valet Hosted by Steve Sokany, Katy Dix Brahler, and Kim Myers For more information, please contact: Zakia Frontz, Senior Advancement Officer 216.658.6934 zfrontz@moCacleveland.org

Ohio NOW: Benefit & Art Raffle Thank you for attending the Ohio NOW event in support of moCa Cleveland! Your generosity and spirit made for a wonderful evening of art and conversation. Spot yourself in the gallery below. Photos by Ned Sanders III @photocredned.

Thank you for attending this year's Palate/ette event in support of moCa Cleveland! Your generosity and spirit made for a wonderful evening of art and conversation. Spot yourself in your hues-of-blues in the gallery below. Photos by Natasha Herbert Photography and Asia Simmons.

Exhibitions ◼ NOW through Jan 4 ▶ Now Winter/Spring 2024 Opening Feb 2 Manabu Ikeda: Flowers from the Wreckage + more Project 04 Andrea Bowers: Exist, Flourish, Evolve + more Project 05 Ariel Vergez + more Now Clotilde Jiménez: Shapeshift +more Erykah Townsend: "Happy" Holidays +more Kelli Connell: Double Life +more Beverly Semmes: The Dresses +more Maggie Menghan Chen: Body Building Exercise +more ▶ Upcoming Exhibitions Ohio Now: State of Nature Jan 30–May 31, 2026 + more ◀ Past Exhibitions ▶ Upcoming Exhibitions Ohio Now: State of Nature + more Jan 30–May 31, 2026 ◀ Past Exhibitions Birthing Beautiful Communities: Dear + more Jan 24-Jun 1, 2025 Harminder Judge: Bootstrap Paradox + more Jan 24-Jun 1, 2025 Gala Porras-Kim: A Hand in Nature + more Jan 24-Jun 1, 2025 Message from Our Planet + more Jun 28-Dec 29, 2024 Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya: Skinchangers: Begotten of my Flesh + more Jun 28-Dec 29, 2024 A PLACE meant: co-organized with Lutheran Metropolitan Ministry + more Jun 28-Dec 29, 2024 Manabu Ikeda: Flowers from the Wreckage + more Feb 2-May 26, 2024 Andrea Bowers: Exist, Flourish, Evolve + more Feb 2-May 26, 2024 BlackBrain: SCRD GRDN + more Feb 2-May 26, 2024 A soft place to land + more Jul 7-Jan 7, 2024 Nina Chanel Abney: Cafeteria 2 + more Jan 27, 2023-Jan 7, 2024 Don't mind if I do + more Jul 7, 2023-Jan 7, 2024 ¡Juntos! (Together) + more Jul 7, 2023-Jan 7, 2024 Nina Chanel Abney: Big Butch Synergy + more Jan 27-Jun 11, 2023 Sam Falls: We Are Dust and Shadow + more Jan 27-Jun 11, 2023 Amber N. Ford: Someone, Somewhere, Something + more Jan 27-Jun 11, 2023 Bruno Casiano: Pieces of Me + more Jan 27-Jun 11, 2023 Renée Green: Contact + more Jul 16-Dec 31, 2022 Puppies Puppies (Jade Kuriki Olivo) + more Jan 28-Jun 5, 2022 Jerome AB: At Once Terrifying and Equally Freeing + more Jan 28-Jun 5, 2022 J.J. Adams: Flowers in Temporary Hands + more Jan 28-Jun 5, 2022 Honey Pierre: Bloodline + more Mar 18-Apr 17, 2022 Aram Han Sifuentes: Who Was This Built to Protect? + more Jan 28-Jun 5, 2022 Ryan Harris: Sincerely, Us + more Jan 29-Mar 6, 2022 Dana Oldfather: Flyfall + more Jan 28-Jun 5, 2022 Robert Banks and Dexter Davis: Color Me Boneface + more Mar 18-Jun 5, 2022 Where We Overlap + more Apr 29-Jun 5, 2022 Joyce Morrow Jones: Black Butterfly + more Nov 19, 2021-Jan 2, 2022 Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A. + more Jul 16, 2021-Jan 2, 2022 The National AIDS Memorial Quilt + more Oct 8, 2021-Jan 2, 2022 Terry Joshua: The Pinkest Hue + more Nov 19, 2021-Jan 2, 2022 Lawrence Baker: Taking Another Look + more Oct 8-Nov 7, 2021 Stina Aleah: "Helping" Hands + more Aug 27-Sep 26, 2021 Aawful Aaron by Aaron D. Williams + more Jul 16-Aug 15, 2021 Imagine Otherwise + more Feb 18-Jun 5, 2021 Martin Creed: Work No. 3398 EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT + more Jul 1, 2020-Jun 5, 2021 Naeem Mohaiemen: Monday, Day 3753 + more Feb 18-Jun 5, 2021 Temporary Spaces of Joy and Freedom + more Jan 31, 2020-Jan 2, 2021 Margaret Kilgallen: that’s where the beauty is. + more Jan 31, 2020-Jan 2, 2021 Nina Katchadourian: Monument to the Unelected + more Oct 22-Nov 29, 2020 Paul Ramírez Jonas: Public Trust + more Oct 8-Nov 7, 2020

Jun 27, 2025-Jan 4, 2026 Kelli Connell Double Life Jun 27, 2025-Jan 4, 2026 Kelli Connell, Negotiation , 2025. Begun in 2002, Kelli Connell’s Double Life is an ongoing and complex body of work that studies our relationship with ourselves. The series appears to portray a close relationship between two women; however, closer looking reveals that these images are digitally creations of a single model, Kiba Jacobson who portrays both characters in each photograph. As such, Double Life is a poetic study of our interior life, one filled with contrasting desires, struggles, insecurities, and achievements. It also captures the expansive, complex, and emotionally significant moments of our lives, embodying the true nature of empathy: using how we care for, argue with, forgive, and love ourselves to guide how we engage with and care for others. Each year, the Mayfield Village-based insurance company The Progressive Corporation commissions an artist or group of artists to create artworks that interpret their annual report theme. This theme and its unique visual presentation embody a companywide focus for the coming year. Progressive commissioned Connell to continue her Double Life series for the 2024 annual report based on the theme “Empathy.” These photographs, presented at moCa June 28, 2025-January 4, 2026, join Progressive’s globally recognized contemporary art collection. Co-organized with The Progressive Corporation . Additional support provided by the Anselm Talalay Photography Endowment. About the Artist Kelli Connell Kelli Connell Kelli Connell’s work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, J Paul Getty Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Dallas Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, among others. Publications include Kelli Connell: Pictures for Charis (Aperture and Center for Creative Photography, March 2024 ), PhotoWork: Forty Photographers on Process and Practice (Aperture), Photo Art: The New World of Photography (Aperture), and the monograph Kelli Connell: Double Life (DECODE Books). Connell has received fellowships and residencies from The Guggenheim Foundation, MacDowell, PLAYA, Peaked Hill Trust, LATITUDE, Light Work and The Center for Creative Photography. Connell is a professor at Columbia College Chicago.

Jan 24-Jun 1, 2025 Gala Porras-Kim A Hand in Nature Jan 24-Jun 1, 2025 Gala Porras-Kim: A Hand in Nature . Installation view at MCA Denver, 2024. Photo: Wes Magyar Multi-disciplinary artist Gala Porras-Kim’s practice questions how knowledge is acquired and tests the potential for artworks and objects to function as meaning-makers outside of traditional museum contexts. For her exhibition, A Hand in Nature , which originated at MCA Denver, Porras-Kim extends lines of questioning into conservation, preservation, and care to the broader natural world and lived environment. The artworks on view distill natural processes into sculptures, paintings and drawings that will grow, evolve or degrade throughout the span of the exhibition. From sculptures rendered with salt-saturated concrete or copal resin wetted with local rainwater, to paintings created from slow drips of water drawing from the museum’s humidity and projections from light refractions off of brass panels, Porras-Kim’s work imagines what might be possible if natural forces and phenomena had the agency to self-determine. Generous support provided by The Robert H. Reakirt Foundation. This exhibition is organized by Leilani Lynch, Associate Curator, the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. Installation Images Gala Porras-Kim, A Hand in Nature. Installation views at moCa Cleveland, 2025. Photos: Jacob Koestler About the Artist Gala Porras-Kim Gala Porras-Kim Gala Porras-Kim lives and works in Los Angeles and London. Her work is about how the social and political contexts that influence history have been framed through the fields of linguistics, history and conservation. The work considers the way institutions shape inherited codes and forms and conversely, how objects can shape the contexts in which they are placed. Porras-Kim has had solo exhibitions at the MCA, Denver; Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York; Museo delle Civilita, Rome in 2024; Leeum and MMCA Seoul; the Fowler Museum, Los Angeles; Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Sevilla; MUAC, Mexico City; in 2023; Gasworks, London, Amant Foundation, Brooklyn, and Kadist in 2022, and the MOCA, Los Angeles in 2019 among others. Her work has been included in the Liverpool Biennial (2023), and Gwangju and Sao Paulo Biennales (2021), Whitney Biennial and Ural Industrial Biennial (2019). She was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (2019) and the artist-in-residence at the Getty Research Institute (2020-22).

Jan 28-Jun 5, 2022 J.J. Adams Flowers in Temporary Hands Jan 28-Jun 5, 2022 J.J. Adams, Booker (by the creek) , 1959. Courtesy the artist's family archives J.J. Adams’s Flowers In Temporary Hands explores the role that privilege and race play into an assemblage of any one identity. With four distinct iterations–an artist book, video performance, sound, and sculptural landscape–Flowers In Temporary Hands abstractly layers images as language, culling from a steeply personal and concealed post generational memory. Through a staircased soundscape, the audience is guided into a layered installation of images mounted on a labyrinthine chain-link fence, an echo of the artist’s most significant detainment as a teenage child. Flowers In Temporary Hands addresses legacy through photographs from Adams’s estranged grandfather’s archive, pages from Adams’s teenage journal while institutionalized, and newly produced poems that reflect on the artist’s past state of mind. All come together to reveal a striking but not uncommon portrait of a boy whose narrative of self has been mostly shaped by their single white mother. A series of tender gestures paired with visceral critical inquiry, Flowers In Temporary Hands reminds us that identity, just like history, is both contingent and incomplete. This series of stories has been built from a myriad of people, places, and moments in time. About the Book J.J. Adams’s first publication, Flowers In Temporary Hands , pairs images with language to establish a symbolic universe that mixes personal memory, loss, and desire. Composed of three sections that address different periods in the artist’s life, Flowers in Temporary Hands acts as a timestamp to closure. In The Toothpaste Diaries , Adams shares pages of their journal: a collection of drawings, collages, and writing created during a defining moment of teenage incarceration. These richly layered pieces are juxtaposed with works from the Gregory Adams Archive . This collection of black and white photographs taken by the artist’s estranged grandfather document his own collegial life, from the playing field to the classroom. Poignantly capturing two distinct moments in time, The Toothpaste Diaries and the Gregory Adams Archive are threaded together by Boys Like Us: Part One , a series of formatted and densely layered poems that reflect on J.J. Adams’s past and the construction of family vs. identity. J.J. Adams’s Flowers In Temporary Hands is organized by Puppies Puppies (Jade Kuriki Olivo) as part of Toby’s Prize, a biennial award made possible by Toby Devan Lewis. About the Artist Jesse Hoffman Jesse Hoffman (b. 1989, San Francisco, CA) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles, CA. Hoffman’s practice is rooted in the examination of the transitional passages of self-acceptance, belonging, and image over time. With a background in performance, still life photography, and commercial set design, Hoffman uses the archive, the object, and the portrait as form. Hoffman’s work lays bare the complication inherent in identity, emphasizing the poignant resilience and fugue in image/world making.

Feb 2-May 26, 2024 BlackBrain SCRD GRDN Feb 2-May 26, 2024 BlackBrain, Diamond Heart , mural in process, 2024. SCRD GRDN is a new project by BlackBrain and guest artists from Julia de Burgos Cultural Arts Center, Unidos por el Arte. Representing a metamorphosis from lone artist into collective creative force and guided by the mantra "go fast, go alone; go far, go together," BlackBrain Group transforms solitary endeavors into dynamic collaborations grounded in a shared passion for storytelling through art. SCRD GRDN is an immersive painting installation about the resolute human spirit and its existential journey through oppression, justice, prosperity, and divine understanding. Fusing artistic styles and techniques, the series meditates on the interplay and influence between the inner self and the external forces that shape our existence. Each work includes symbolic, complex images floating within black voids, suggesting fertile seeds of existence that hold and balance tensions such as joy and melancholy, control and chaos, movement and stillness. Drawing inspiration from the awe and grandeur of Renaissance frescoes and monumental stained glass windows, the installation seeks to embody and express sacred meaning today. Comprehensively, SCRD GRDN creates a visual sanctuary where the diverse voices and experiences of the artists–and also, importantly, audience members–converge, intermingle, and resonate. As the artists’ encourage, “Join us on this visual odyssey—a journey that surpasses the conventional, ushering in a new era of shared experiences and inner growth.” SCRD GRDN is a project of moCa’s institutional and early career artist residency with the Julia De Burgos Cultural Arts Center (JDBCAC) from January 2023-May 2024. Situated within the heart of Cleveland’s Brooklyn Centre neighborhood, JDBCAC is an organization committed to the transformational power of preserving, educating, and promoting Latino heritage through history, culture, and the arts. JDBCAC occupies and engages spaces on moCa’s first and third floors in relation to its mission and work, and co-designs programming with moCa aimed at nurturing the next generation of artistic voices, providing a platform for Cuyahoga County-based residency artists to present their creations in a group exhibition at moCa Cleveland last season. advance the work of Latino/a/x artists and artists of color and provide new professional development opportunities. In 2023, BlackBrain artist Ariel Vergez took on the role of mentor artist to a new generation of artist voices involved in the moCa/JDBCAC early career artist residency, providing a platform for Cuyahoga County-based residency artists to present their creations in the group exhibition ¡Juntos! last year. Vergez, with his experience and innovative spirit, guided these emerging artists, illustrating the reciprocal relationship between mentor and mentee. Generous support provided by Margaret Cohen & Kevin Rahilly, The Cleveland Foundation, and the Callahan Foundation Installation Images BlackBrain, SCRD GRDN. Installation views at moCa Cleveland, 2024. Photos: Jacob Koestler About the Artist BlackBrain Ariel Vergez, aka BlackBrain, is a seasoned artist with a rich heritage and a passion for storytelling through art. Born in the Dominican Republic and raised in Florida, BlackBrain is the child of two immigrants who came to the United States in search of opportunity and met each other while working in the service industry. Growing up in a household where art was a daily presence, BlackBrain pursued his passion for art at the collegiate level, studying Industrial Design at the Cleveland Institute of Art. With a background in product and graphic design, BlackBrain has worked with world-class brands and has a keen understanding of the importance of storytelling in design. He has fused that experience towards his first love art. This experience is evident in BlackBrain’s art series, which feature unique narratives, a cross-wiring of pop culture icons, and a vuja dé feeling of nostalgia. BlackBrain layers allegory, pop culture, and history to create new and at times, bizarre stories that inflect on the ‘remembered.’ Over the past decade, BlackBrain has been featured in a plethora of shows and has created a range of concentration of subject matter. He has completed a slew of murals worldwide, many of them focused in Los Angeles and Miami, his previous homes. BlackBrain is particularly known for his ability to tell stories through his art, which is a reflection of his pursuit to expound parody and symbolism as key tools to his method of creating rich visual stories. With a portfolio that spans across different mediums and styles, BlackBrain continues to push the boundaries of what art can be and challenge our perceptions of the world around us. His art is a dissection of ancient and pop cultural story telling. It work has a diversity that makes his art so unique and relate-able while maintaing mystery and depth.

Jun 27, 2025-Jan 4, 2026 Clotilde Jiménez Shapeshift Jun 27, 2025-Jan 4, 2026 Clotilde Jiménez, Pose No. 12 , 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim (Chicago, Paris, Mexico City). Clotilde Jiménez’s art is driven by an exploration of materiality and transformation. His work highlights the societal limitations imposed on the body through race, gender, and sexuality, challenging and reshaping these constructs with subtlety and a playful sense of humor. Drawing from both ancient and contemporary sources, Jiménez incorporates everyday materials such as wallpaper, clothing, magazine clippings, and Mexican craft paper, connecting his diverse inspirations across time and culture. At the heart of Jiménez’s practice is a relentless state of evolution and transformation. Moving through mediums like ceramics, sculpture, collage, and painting, he layers materials to create works that speak to multiple narratives simultaneously. Each material introduced into his practice marks a shift—an expansion of understanding, a personal reckoning. The superimposition of textures and elements mirrors his own life, where every addition is not just a formal choice but a reflection of change within himself. As he navigates identity, history, and self-discovery, his materials evolve in parallel, embodying the fluidity of becoming. Working primarily with collage, Jiménez forges connections between disparate elements. He weaves together fragments, creating cohesive figures that embody interconnectedness and collective strength. Clotilde Jiménez: Shapeshift will be the most extensive presentation of Jiménez’s work to date, showcasing newly commissioned pieces alongside previously unseen drawings and process materials. Spanning his entire career, the exhibition will include early works from his time as a student at the Cleveland Institute of Art, providing a clear trajectory of his artistic evolution and the continuous transformation of his practice. Major support provided by the Kulas Foundation. Additional support provided by Gary Metzner & Scott Johnson. Select Images Clotilde Jiménez, Boxer (Aluminum) , 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim; Clotilde Jiménez, Hamaca (Arrobamiento) , 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim; Clotilde Jiménez, Victor’s Secret , 2016. Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim. About the Artist Artist Portrait of Clotilde Jiménez, 2023. Photo by Mariam Wo Ching. Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim. Born in 1990 in Honolulu, Hawaii, Clotilde Jiménez now lives and works in Mexico City. He earned his MFA from The Slade School of Fine Art and his BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art.

Oct 8-Nov 7, 2020 Paul Ramírez Jonas Public Trust Oct 8-Nov 7, 2020 Paul Ramírez Jonas, Public Trust , 2016. Marquee, table, sacred and civic texts, oaths, 950 promises from private individuals, 84 promises from public figures, graphite and paper, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Now and There. Photo: Field Studio Artist Paul Ramírez Jonas’s interactive artwork Public Trust (2016–ongoing) invites participants to examine the value we grant to our words through the promises we make to each other and to ourselves. All ages are asked to make a promise, which is recorded in a drawing they can keep, and as part of the declaration, they are called on to swear—in a manner consistent with their own beliefs—that they will keep their word. Each promise is also published on a large marquee outside the museum alongside daily pledges from news headlines made by politicians, scientists, economists, and weather forecasters. Presented as part of moCa Cleveland’s exhibition F as in Frank , a show that will unfold as a series of chapters throughout 2020 and 2021, Ramírez Jonas’s Public Trust will be installed outside moCa on Toby’s Plaza from October 8 through November 7, 2020. Activated during the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election (on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays from 12–4PM), the piece offers us the opportunity to collectively shape an artwork about the promises and acts of speech that keep a society together. moCa’s exhibition F as in Frank brings artists together to reflect on the power of being frank. Defined as the willingness to speak candidly, openly, and honestly, the word “frank” reinforces the power that comes from communicating directly and sincerely to address uncomfortable truths. Thinking through the exhibition framework in an expanded way the show unfolds slowly over time, raising poignant questions about love and loss, the construction of power, our environment, and what the future holds.

Jan 27, 2023-Jan 7, 2024 Nina Chanel Abney Cafeteria 2 Jan 27, 2023-Jan 7, 2024 Nina Chanel Abney, Cafeteria 2 , installation view at moCa Cleveland, 2023. Site-specific vinyl mural, 313.5 x 536.5 in (796.29 x 1362.71 cm). Courtesy the artist. About the Exhibition Nina Chanel Abney’s site-specific mural, Cafeteria 2 , was first unveiled alongside her solo exhibition at moCa, Big Butch Synergy (Jan 27-Jun 11, 2023). This mural incorporates elements from Big Butch Synergy and expands on Fishing Was His Life , her series of collages inspired by Gordon Parks’s photographs documenting the 1940s fishing industry in Gloucester, MA and at New York City’s Fulton Fish Market. Abney transports audiences to a bustling cafeteria to explore themes of desire, loathing, and personal value in relation to gender and racial identity. Within this marketplace, sneakers, basketballs, and other goods are balanced by images of figures and price tags. She encourages visitors to think about how these goods are often read as masculine, contributing to the social dynamics that impact gender performance. Price tags connecting to the objects and figures highlight capitalism as a dominant power structure that we use to assign value to individuals based on race, class, gender, and social status. At the base of this larger-than-life image, the artist includes “I AM,” paying homage to the pivotal “I Am A Man” signage used in the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike during the Civil Rights Movement. By notably omitting the word “man,” Abney leaves space for her experiences; she shines a light on discriminatory systems that work to maintain heteronormative ideals–beliefs that assume heterosexuality as the default sexual orientation–while also highlighting how the objects depicted have supported the formation of her identity as a Black, queer, masculine-of-center woman. This omission opens up the phrase as a resource for self-advocacy, while also reminding us about how our biased systems continue to center certain identities over others. Lead support for Cafeteria 2 provided by Joanne Cohen & Morris Wheeler. Additional support provided by The Dominion Energy Charitable Foundation. Installation Images Nina Chanel Abney, Cafeteria 2 . Installation view at moCa Cleveland, 2023. Photo: Jacob Koestler About the Artist NIna Chanel Abney Nina Chanel Abney Nina Chanel Abney (b. 1982, Chicago) strives to signal narratives that speak to topics on politics, heritage, race, sexuality, and celebrity. The figures in her works typically appear as heavily stylized, graphic, geometric shapes against vivid backgrounds overlaid with symbols and patterns. Known for her frenetic, large-scale paintings, Abney has recently been commissioned to transform the Lincoln Center’s new David Geffen Hall’s façade in New York, drawing from the cultural heritage of the neighborhood previously known as San Juan Hill that comprised African American, Afro-Caribbean, and Puerto Rican families, which she similarly did recently for a public mural at the new Miami World Center inspired by Overtown, a historic Black neighborhood in Miami. Her first solo exhibition debuted in 2017 at Nasher Museum of Art, North Carolina, and subsequently toured to Chicago Cultural Center; Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the California African American Museum; and the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York. Recent exhibitions include The Gordon Parks Institute (2022), The Art Gallery of New South Wales (2021), ICA Boston (2020), The Contemporary Dayton (2019), The Norton Museum of Art (2019), and Palais de Tokyo (2018). Her work is in the collections of MoMA New York, The Rubell Family Collection, The Brooklyn Museum, Bronx Museum and the Burger Collection, Hong Kong. Exhibition Materials ▶ Wall Text ▶ Gallery Guide ▶ Videos

Jan 29-Mar 6, 2022 Ryan Harris Sincerely, Us Jan 29-Mar 6, 2022 Ryan Harris, Du Rags II , 2021. Lustre print, 16 x 20 in framed (40.64 x 50.8 cm). Courtesy the artist Presented in partnership w/ Museum of Creative Human Art and moCa Cleveland The Museum of Creative Human Art presents photographer Ryan Harris’s third solo exhibition, Sincerely, Us. Bringing together new and older works, this exhibition captures various nuances of the black experience. Harris uses imagery to share his story with audiences, from the beginning of his photographic journey through the present. Presented in partnership w/ About the Artist Ryan Harris Ryan Harris Ryan Harris is a self-taught photographer from Cleveland, Ohio. His love for photography began in 11th grade when he took his first and only course on the basics of photography and 35mm film. Like many millennial males, he had childhood aspirations of becoming a rapper so naturally his love for photography took a back seat to music. In 2015 after deciding to retire his musical aspirations, he shifted his focus back to photography. Since then, he has started his own photography business and has been published in numerous publications including Cleveland’s Scene Magazine , The Akron Beacon Journal , and PEOPLE Magazine . When not doing freelance photography under his business imprint, Ryan captures what feeds his spirit creatively. His passion for documenting the rawness in urban decay and beauty within the black experience is unwavering.