Darius Steward | Moving On

The Bonfoey Gallery, in partnership with Thomas French Fine Art, announces Moving On, an exhibition of new works by Darius Steward. The paintings will be on view from September 13th to October 12th in Bonfoey’s street level gallery. The opening reception with the artist will be Friday, September 13th from 5:00 p.m. to 7:30 pm. Darius Steward will be giving a gallery talk on Saturday, September 14th at 10:30 a.m.
Concurrently, other Steward works can be seen in America’s Well Armed Militias, opening August 16th at SPACES, 2900 Detroit Avenue, and in seenUNseen, opening September 20th at the Artists Archives of the Western Reserve, 1834 E. 123rd Street.
Thomas French Fine Art is the exclusive representative of the works of Darius Steward. In business since 1978, Thomas French Fine Art specializes in selling master prints, drawings, paintings and Japanese color woodcuts. Bonfoey is pleased to partner with Thomas French for this exhibition.
Cleveland artist, Darius Steward works in watercolor to express social issues of identity, commodity, race, and the placement of African Americans in western culture. Steward believes that visual communication is an agent for change. As he states “I primarily use watercolor on Yupo paper to achieve a stark whiteness against my saturated subjects. I also often use my subject matter metaphorically to address what is going on culturally. Each and every person I paint is a stand in for myself or for the community. I use watercolor portraiture to bring a voice to social injustices which are going on in the world.”
His work has recently become the subject of critical success throughout Cleveland and the United States. He was the focus of two solo shows at the Swope Art Museum in Terre Haute, Indiana in the spring of 2019 and at the Canton Art Museum in 2018. Additionally, in 2018, he was the recipient of the Emerging Artist Award of the Cleveland Arts Prize, and was selected for inclusion in FRONT International’s The Great Lakes Research show at the Cleveland Institute of Art.
This past fall, he was selected to create a work for the award-winning podcast, Serial, which focused on the Cleveland justice system. The podcast has been downloaded over fifty million times. Choices (Push and Pull) was created for use in an animation sequence for the podcast.
Steward’s works are included in the permanent collection of the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Akron Art Museum, Canton Art Museum of Art, Metro Health Hospital Collection, Summa Health Collection, Davis Art Museum at Wellesley College, Flint Institute of Arts, Joel and Lila Harnett Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Eskenazi Museum of Art (Indiana University), Stanley Museum of Art (University of Iowa), University of Delaware Museum, and the Swope Art Museum.
For more information about Moving On, or upcoming exhibitions, please contact the Bonfoey Gallery, 216.621.0178, or visit the company website at www.bonfoey.com.