Gina Washington is a product of exposure.
In 2024, Gina’s work was in five exhibits around Greater Cleveland and Akron, including last year’s Black History Month celebration at Cleveland City Hall, curated by Senior Arts Strategist and native Clevelander Rhonda Brown, and the Universal Child exhibit at Akron Soul Train, which explored the poem she grew up with, Monday’s Child.
Gina is very active in the arts community; she regularly attends exhibitions and workshops in Cleveland. She works for arts organizations and serves on several local boards of Directors, including High Art Fridays (HAF). She is the co-founder of The Visit Arts Collective. Gina is one of the recent recipients of the prestigious Ohio Art Council’s Individual Excellence 2025 award.
Her most significant project to date is Opus: 3.20.27, a triptych featuring her mother, daughter, and herself posing in her mother’s prom dress; three generations wearing one Prom dress symbolize a soul bond connection that activates a speculative narrative of a family’s past, present, and future. Each panel is 60 x 100 inches and is a dye sublimation on Starline fabric. This mural imagines infinite possibilities of collaboration and innovation through the extraordinary power of transformation.
Opus: 3.20.27 was installed late last year inside the Midtown Collaboration Center (MCC), the new 95,000-square-foot building at East 66th and Euclid Avenue. Artist Bruno Casiano displays his Creative Wheels and Celebration of Culture pieces at MCC alongside Gina. MCC is at the heart of the Health Tech Corridor, adjacent to the headquarters of the Cleveland Foundation. The Corridor is home to more than 170 health-tech and high-tech companies.
An official grand opening of the building is scheduled for the summer of 2025.
Gina Washington is an exceptionally talented artist whom I’ve had the privilege of knowing for many years. The Cleveland Foundation is deeply honored to showcase her new, remarkable, site-specific installation. This powerful triptych in the lobby of the MidTown Collaboration Center is a stunning, generational tribute to the women in her family. This piece offers every visitor a chance to engage with a story of legacy and transformation. We are immensely proud that the MCC not only harnesses the power of space to bring people together, but also uses the transformative power of art—through Gina Washington’s work and Bruce Casiano’s pieces in the main conference room—to inspire and uplift all who visit. Lillian Kuri – President & CEO, Cleveland Foundation
HAF: Tell me about the artwork recently installed at the Midtown Collaboration Center.
Gina: It’s a triptych, a series of three photographs of my mom, myself, and my daughter wearing my mom’s prom dress. It’s pretty large and encapsulates all the Cleveland Foundation stands for. The piece represents collaboration, the future, and innovation. My mom is looking toward the right, I’m looking straight ahead, and my daughter is looking to the left. So, we have all the directions covered, making the piece synonymous with the meaning of Sankofa.
I call the piece Opus: 3.20.27, and it’s a compilation of the birth dates of my mom, sister, myself, and my daughter.
The piece isn’t accessible to stand in front of but can be viewed from below, above, and from a balcony. It’s located across from the Cleveland Institute of Art’s Interactive Media Lab, and I share the space with the works of another local artist, Bruno Casiano.
HAF: What do you consider your creative start?
Gina: My awakening to creating my own art came about from a field trip to the Fairmount Center while I attended Chambers Elementary School in East Cleveland. I participated in a darkroom photography workshop there – and I instantly fell in love with the process.
My mom was a Renaissance woman and a teacher. She had a different mindset on how children should be raised, and she Involved my sister and me in music and dance when I was 3 years old because she knew those disciplines would help our cognitive development. My mother was also an artist and what I like to call a tinker fairy. At one point in her life, she used to weld torpedoes.
HAF: What inspires you?
Gina: A great deal of my work is inspired by the poem, Monday’s Child.
I worked with that poem when I was in grad school, and my original creation was just me enacting the elements of the poem. Eventually, I came up with a different incarnation: looking at the birth dates of people I knew and to see if the poem rings true to those people.
Things come to me intuitively…I make art by any means necessary, and that means that if the idea is outside of my expertise, I learn it or collaborate to create it. Honestly, the art visually comes to me, and I have to figure out how to create it.
Born and raised in East Cleveland, Nate Paige has contributed more than 30 years to local journalism. He got his professional start at the Cleveland Call & Post and spent over 20 years at Cleveland.com. He currently handles social media for the city of Shaker Heights and writes for their quarterly magazine, Shaker Life. He also freelances for several local publications.
photo credit: Jeff Ivey, USA
