Updates from the PAR-Projects blog...

Elena Masrour was born on May 5, 1990 in Tehran, Iran. She received her BFA in Fabric & Textile Design from Tehran University of Art in 2013 and received her Master of Fine Arts in Painting from Kansas State University in 2022. She currently lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio where she is a visiting faculty-in-residence at the Cleveland Institute of Art.   Masrour was interested in art from a young age, especially as a legacy artist. She recalls being ten years old and attempting to copy a self-portrait her grandfather completed, to her grandfather’s great amusement. In high school, she was afforded the opportunity to take several elective drawing classes and soon realized that artist was to be her path in life. At Tehran University of Art, Masrour initially studied fashion design. However, she encountered great difficulties in the field, finding few real opportunities for creative enterprise due to the strict dress code enforced by the Irian government. She recalls a experience in

What's in a photo? As the old saying goes, ‘a picture is worth a thousand words.’  This is still true in today’s galleries as artists work to maintain the delicate balance between self, story, and subject as they attempt to share untold stories and perspectives with the world. I had the wonderful opportunity to interview Raymond Thompson, Jr., an artist disguised as a photojournalist, whose project “Appalachian Ghosts” is on display in the Gallery @Studeo-PAR through July 2022. We chatted candidly about how he sojourns this path using his background in journalism to root his work creating subjective archives of the Black experience in American history. On his journey to photojournalism: “When I started school I wanted to be a biologist… something practical… so I stumbled through trying to find something super practical.  But Northern Virginia Community College had a photography class.  So I started taking those darkroom classes and it was like ‘ooh this is cool.’ I fell in love wit

Most of our conversations, at least the most memorable ones, happened over lunch. Soup and salad; that's what we did. We chatted about which fresh vegetables from the garden made it into that day's lunch and we chatted about techniques that were perfected for that day’s soup. “Remember Jonathan, always save a little of your stock for the next batch. That’s how the French do it. It keeps your flavors alive — balanced.” The Dr. Driskell I knew was a humble man — an artist of media and an artist of life. And while we hung out in his Hyattsville studio from time to time, woodblock printing and encaustics weren’t really my thing, so our connections were much more about finding ways to live and breath as an artist. From time to time, he’d give me a lead on some art finds — a rare Romare Bearden for example — but really, most chats of ours were just about life. Still, he knew I was an obsessive maker in the digital media/sculpture realm, so from time to time he’d make sure to note tha

If you were around to remember . . . You may recognize the scene in the photo above. It's from our original scramble — the one that created the energy that led to the creation of PAR-Projects. We had just been illegally evicted from our original gallery space and 4,124 days ago, Cincinnati Enquirer thought you should know about it. To those of you who have been following along since those early days, thank you. When that photo was taken, all we were trying to do was figure out how to exhibit the year's worth of programming that we had planned. And well, as fate would have it, those two UHAUL trucks, a generator, some hazard lighting, a few hand-built stairs & a bridge proved to be a noteworthy solution. The crazy thing is in 10 years (+ 1 COVID year), that 300 square feet of mobile rental space has grown into over 20,000 square feet of indoor space & over 10,000 sq/ft of outdoor space . . . that we are thankfully able to own. Yep! That's the future of our campus pi

  Somehow an entire year has passed, but COVID has not. The majority of our programming is now being scheduled for next year, 2022. That said, we do have some exciting things we'll start sharing here soon!

Yep. COVID-19.