Christopher Pekoc, Visual Artist

2007 Mid-Career Artist Winner in Visual Arts

Christopher Pekoc was given a major retrospective exhibition at Cleveland’s Convivium33 Gallery in January 2007, titled Christopher Pekoc – Evolution 1964-2006. Evolution is the key word, as Pekoc has progressed from the painting and drawing he studied at Kent State University, through airbrush, pastels, collage and photography – and which, in the words of Case Western Reserve University art history professor and former curator of American Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art, Henry Adams, “created a visual mixture of drawing and painting – a sort of drawing which combines the gesture of the hand with a ghostly sense of tone, like that of a developing photograph." The exhibit displayed more than 40 years of Pekoc’s work, including major pieces that have not been shown in decades, such as his surreal Kent State Triptych, called The Events of May 4th 1970 Are Truly Without Precedent, based on his eyewitness experience of the shooting of student protesters by the National Guard in 1970.

Now known for his experimental mixed-media work, he creates complex collages of materials and photographs. He works with photographs that he has taken himself or cut from magazines – often of fragments of body parts and objects such as thorns, spikes, and severed wings – and then manipulates them in a variety of ways, such as scratching, crumpling, sanding and/or covering with paint, varnish or shellac. He then cuts them up and literally stitches them together.

Pekoc, who has taught creative drawing at Case Western Reserve University since 1988, has been awarded five fellowships by the Ohio Arts Council and a two-month overseas residency in the Czech Republic. His work has appeared in more than 100 solo and group shows at institutions, including the Cleveland Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Australia, the Ueda Gallery in Tokyo, several galleries in New York City, the Akron Art Institute and the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art.

His work is also in permanent collections at the Cleveland Museum of Art, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Czech Center of Photography, Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts, Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida. His late-1970s mural Night Sky is in the main hall of the downtown Cleveland’s Public Library.

Pekoc’s photography was featured in a limited edition publication, 21st: The Journal of Contemporary Photography, Vol. V – Strange Genius (2002), which showcased new directions in photography. John Wood, photography historian and editor of 21st: The Journal of Contemporary Photography, has compared Pekoc’s works to the “shimmering mosaics of Ravenna” and “the paintings of Gustav Klimt.”

Born in the Cleveland area, Pekoc has said that his early exposure to tools and construction projects in his family’s hardware store a (his father was the third generation to operate the business) ignited his interest in the art of assemblage. Plain Dealer art critic Steven Litt wrote, “Over the past decade and a half, Pekoc has consistently produced beautiful and compelling work that captures something essential about Cleveland's psyche.”