Making Connections
Meet Jodi Kanter: Fiber Artist and Impressaria

"I exist for what I do," says the bright-eyed, red-haired Jodi Kanter. "Each person is many parts: you the character, you the artist, you the whatever-you-do, all of these you's are one big creation. Like part of a weaving, a tapestry." Sometimes her smile seems larger than her face.

Jodi is a native Clevelander and always knew she would be an artist, even if she wasn't too sure of what kind at the beginning. Lessons at the Cleveland Institute of Art nourished her interest in visual arts, while ballet lessons encouraged her love of classical music. Both are still with her in her everyday life.

Her Dad is a dentist, as was his dad, and subsequently, his son. The family, which included three other daughters, lived in Lyndhurst, where Mom ran Dad’s office. Jodi and her siblings attended Brush High School, and from there, it was an easy bus ride to University Circle and CIA. Dad was also a camera bug, big-time. Jodi remembers, “He was always buying cameras, taking pictures and working in his dark room.” These days, the other siblings are all on the West coast.

She laughs as she relates an early experience. “My first ceramic sculpture was a torso. I was just 13, and they wouldn’t let me have a live nude model at CIA, so I had to work from a skeleton instead, to get the proportions right. It was my first real art class, and then following that, I took drawing and painting. There was a big fiber studio, with lots of looms. But, high school students were not allowed to take weaving classes.” She laughs and more words tumble out of her. “But I found a teacher, someone who was a weaver, and who lived in my neighborhood. Then, I found an old loom in the attic at Brush High—and they let me take it home! I had good art teachers there, too, though. And an especially good teacher for perspective. An artist needs to be able to see and visualize their skills in different directions, and for weaving especially, you need math, especially geometry. There’s a lot of calculating.”

“That came in useful later on,” she muses. “I had a commission for a temple in Cleveland, in memory of someone, and it was big. A mural 10 feet wide of Jerusalem. I really used lots of perspective for that one!”

After graduation, it was off to college to learn the profession of weaving and fiber art. Jodi attended the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY. It was known as the School for American Craftsmen in the early 70s. “Their photography program was major, subsidized as it was by Eastman Kodak—they had 90 student dark rooms! Part of my one year of photography was a quarter year of film making. It involved creating in space—telling a story, and then making all the visuals necessary to tell it.”

After RIT, she spent a year-and-a-half apprenticing in fiber art, in Sweden, France and Barcelona, Spain. All of these artists were doing large architectural works – sometimes 10’ by 15’ or bigger. These works were made all in one chunk in a warehouse, with 6 people working at one time. She smiles wistfully, remembering. “First, it was four months in Sweden. I spent five months in Paris, and then, my 21st birthday was spent hitch-hiking to Barcelona. It was a great place to be an artist, or to be studying to become an artist.” In the time-honored manner of students everywhere, she adds simply, “I came home. I had no more money, and no place else to go.”

But, after she came home, she found opportunities, and discovered she had no need to go elsewhere. “I knew people and after all, I have connections here.” (There’s that word again!)“One of the first things I did was a weaving 10 feet tall and 4 feet wide that I entered in the May Show, at the Cleveland Museum of Art. It was accepted, and sold after the show. I’ve always been busy since then. Of course, it isn’t easy. I have to go looking for work, even though it does sometimes come to me.” She married (and divorced) and had a son, Ari, who helps her now with her music programs.

“After the May Show when I sold that first weaving, I started getting commissions, and soon I was working 7 days a week. I had to hire assistants!” These commissions were for homes, synagogues, hospitals, libraries and corporations. Of course, I asked if she had anything at Progressive Insurance – the area’s largest collection of contemporary art. “No,” she replied with a smile. “I’m not cutting edge enough for Progressive. And that’s okay – it’s just not my thing.”

While at CIA, she’d met another student. They were both 17, and in a figure-drawing class with a nude model. “Steve Szilagyi was so good at drawing, much better than I. He tried life as an illustrator in NYC, but found it too hard to make a living, so he turned to writing, and earned a degree from Columbia. We met again when I went to NY some years later, and he was working at HBO.” This time it clicked, and they’ve been together now for 17 years. a gifted writer, Steve's novel “Photographing Fairies” was made into a film. He’s now a senior editor at the Cleveland Clinic.

Jodi’s second studio was in Cleveland Heights, in a big old home owned by the Cleveland Society of Artists. This was a great group of older gentlemen who were artists of varying kinds, including cartoonists. They’d mostly studied at CIA before it even had that name. Some had been students during the Kokoon Club era: Bill Coombs was an artist and president at that time and he’d been a student of Viktor Schreckengost. John Szilagyi (Steve’s father) was a younger member of the group. Jodi says, “They’d bring in a model once a month. They rented me a studio there. Dorothy Fuldheim lived across Kenilworth, at the top of Cedar Hill. It was a fun place to have a studio! It was another valuable connection, too, for an artist. If I wanted to take a break from weaving, I’d go look at the paintings by the famous artists of the Cleveland School that were just laying around, all over the place.”

Okay, but what about the music? Where—or when—did that enter this picture?

“Well, I’ve always loved music, mostly as a listener, although I did take ballet lessons as a teenager. That's where I learned to love classical music, especially.” But in the last several years, she’s turned into an impressaria—producing unique and intriguing chamber music recitals in various locations around Cleveland. “Lately, I’m spending so much time on music, there’s not enough time for artwork.” Actually, that’s M.U.S.i.C. (Musical Upcoming Stars in the Classics). How did this come about?

“Some years ago at Severance Hall, there was a party for the duo-piano team of Hecht and Shapiro, and I met Peter Takacs from Oberlin. (He’s a professor of piano.) It was my first real connection to a person in the music business. As we talked, he told me he wanted to do chamber music recitals in homes.” Hmm. Jodi continues. “I knew people with homes big enough to host such an event. So we combined our efforts. We wanted to give students an opportunity to play with professionals, and provide audiences the opportunity to hear chamber music as it was meant to be heard.” It worked.

Steve is on the Advisory Board of the Cleveland International Piano Competition, where he meets young artists who need these opportunities. “Music is a big inspirational source,” adds Jodi. “Putting together a musical program takes a lot of creative effort, like weaving, sort of. I’m not formally trained in music, but I’ve learned so much along the way. But I needed a new source of inspiration. I’ve been doing it for five years now. At the Intercontinental Hotel and the Hanna Perkins Center and private homes – chamber music in chambers!”

Of course, her art flourished in the meantime, too. “I competed for big public art projects around the country. One of the biggest was from the University of Connecticut at Storrs, for the then-new Gampel Pavilion. It was maybe the biggest fiber sculpture ever, because it was more than two tons! It took a year to finish, even with five assistants. It was in four sections, of hanging panels and cylinders that were ten feet tall. It hung from the domed ceiling in the basketball arena, and took two weeks to install. Riggers came from New York with special equipment to help install it.”

“It had figures of basketball players woven into it, in somewhat stylized figures—not any one person in particular. They were round more than skinny, but some of the players complained. ‘You make us look so fat!’ I had a hard time trying to convince them these were generic figures, not real ones.” She sighed. “The piece hung there for 7 to 8 years, and you could see it very easily during televised ball games. I think Geno Auriemma came there the year after the installation, and when his teams started winning, (the UConn women won their sixth NCAA Division One Championship this year with a 39-0 record for the year) and they were turning away people who wanted to buy tickets, well – the sculpture had to come down, so they could put in more seats. Last I heard, it was still in storage. Maybe someday,” she adds wistfully.

Locally, three of her pieces, based on Mayan art and architecture, is in the rain forest at the Zoo. Another 6’ x 9’ nature scene is in the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel on the Cleveland Clinic main campus. “I love doing public art—matching the idea to the location.” At the Nottingham Public Library branch on Lake Shore Blvd, which was the site of Euclid Beach Park, there is a weaving of a Ferris wheel and sailboats, with sun shining on the books.

A trickier one is at the Orange Branch of the Cuyahoga County Library – light comes through the piece from outside, so if you’re inside the building you see the exact same thing as someone outside the building at the same time!

Another piece – a mural 42 foot long, at a swimming pool in Iowa, required the help of sail makers to get it right. A weaving for her brother’s dental office in Seattle features world rhythms, because he’s into jazz and drums. A similar type piece with molecules and geometry is in the Parma Library. (This branch specializes in Technical books). On the other hand, the Beachwood branch has scenes of Cleveland.

She loves nature in all forms, and has done various species of butterflies in a woven, sculptural format (hard to describe) for exhibitions at both the Natural History Museum and the Botanical Gardens. She studied close-up photos of butterfly wings for several years in order to get the patterns and textures just right.

Her interest in Japanese textiles and stylized nature scenes reflects itself in her Kimono series. After weaving the body, she lays the piece out flat on her living room floor to study it for a few days, before painting a coordinating design on the fringe, which is left long after weaving and then trimmed to a manageable length. One Kimono that had been on display at CCF is now at their Lakewood location, with yet another at Hillcrest. She’s recently completed a new Kimono for the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in downtown Cleveland, and one for the Agricultural Research and Development Center of OSU, located in Wooster. “They do Botany and research world-wide, so I’m combining a compass and the DNA helix in that one.” Another cityscape sculpture is at the Forest City Enterprises office in downtown Cleveland.

But M.U.S.i.C. occupies a good chunk of her time. There is a hard-working board, all of whom chip in time and energy to make the recitals the special events that they are. Frequently there is a reception with refreshments afterward where the audience members can meet and chat with the musicians. Local merchants donate merchandise that is used for door-prizes or raffles, raising a few more dollars, which is a never-ending concern, because all the performers are paid. They are professionals, after all.

“Thanks to the Legal Clinic at CASE, we were able to create a non-profit organization, which helps,” Jodi adds. “We’re working on a web-site, and a few other details, so we can expand our fund-raising into new directions. It’s really enjoyable when new people appear, and I wasn’t expecting that to happen! I try to develop a theme and then find the performers, although sometimes it’s the performer who comes to me and says ‘I’d like to try such and such, what do you think?’ And eventually, we have a program. Pretty much we use CIM and Oberlin students and faculties as performers, with the occasional professionals as guest artists.”

You can attend the next performance sponsored by M.U.S.i.C. this Sunday, June 7 at 4PM, at the Hanna Perkins Center, 19910 Malvern Rd., Shaker Heights. Tickets are: $40. for Patrons; $25. General and $15. for Students. Reservations may be made by calling 991-4472.

And what will you hear? The program is titled “Classical Comes to America” and features music by seven immigrant composers, as performed by seven outstanding young professional musicians, most currently living in Cleveland. For further information, send an e-mail to: stars@intheclassics.org

Also, you may see (or purchase) one of Jodi Kanter’s woven Kimonos, on display through the end of June in the front window of Metropolitan Gallery at Shaker Square. Visit metropolitan Galleries online at http://www.MetropolitanGalleries.net. Visit Kanter at http://www.JodiKanter.com.

From Cool Cleveland contributor Kelly Ferjutz artswriterATroadrunner.com
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