FRONT International

FRONT International was founded in 2018 by Fred Bidwell — a Cleveland-based contemporary art collector, philanthropist, and arts administrator who had previously co-founded the Transformer Station contemporary art venue in Cleveland (with Laura Bidwell, 2013) — and the Cleveland cultural-philanthropic establishment, anchored by the Cleveland Foundation (one of the founding American community foundations, established 1914). The founding institutional argument was that the Northeast Ohio cultural infrastructure — anchored by the Cleveland Museum of Art (founded 1913, one of the American major museums), the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (MOCA Cleveland), the Akron Art Museum, the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College (one of the American college art museums), and the network of Northeast Ohio cultural institutions — warranted a international contemporary art triennial that would make this infrastructure internationally legible.

The structural context for the founding institutional argument was the Rust Belt post-industrial conversation. Cleveland, Akron, and the Northeast Ohio region had been major American industrial centres across the twentieth century (Cleveland as steel-and-manufacturing centre; Akron as rubber-industry centre); the post-1970s American deindustrialisation had reshaped the regional economic-cultural conditions, with population loss (Cleveland's population fell from approximately 914,000 in 1950 to approximately 372,000 by 2020), industrial-infrastructure abandonment, and continuing economic-political pressure. The post-2000 Cleveland Foundation cultural-policy programme had supported cultural-institutional infrastructure as component of Rust Belt cultural-led recovery; FRONT International was conceived as a extension of that programme into the international biennial form.

The 1st FRONT International (14 July – 30 September 2018), An American City: Eleven Cultural Exercises, was curated by Michelle Grabner — the American artist and curator who had been one of three co-curators of the 2014 Whitney Biennial. The founding edition programmed across more than 25 venues in Cleveland, Akron, and Oberlin, with commissioned and presented work by approximately 100 artists. The 1st edition's An American City framing engaged Cleveland as a case study of the post-industrial American cultural-political conversation. The founding edition established the institutional argument and produced the visitor flow that the founding philanthropic programme had projected.

The 2nd FRONT International (16 July – 2 October 2022), Oh, Gods of Dust and Rainbows, was curated by Prem Krishnamurthy — the American designer and curator and co-founder of the Project Projects studio. The 2nd edition was postponed from 2021 by Covid-19 and operated under continuing pandemic conditions. The Krishnamurthy curatorial work framed art as a vehicle of healing and extended the FRONT institutional argument into engagement with post-2020 American cultural-political conditions, particularly questions of racial justice, cultural memory, and the question of who American cultural institutions serve.

On 12 February 2024 the FRONT Exhibition Company announced that the planned 3rd edition — scheduled for summer 2025 — had been cancelled and that the organisation would wind down operations. In statements to The Art Newspaper, Artforum and the Cleveland press, Fred Bidwell attributed the closure to a sharp post-2020 shift in the American philanthropic environment, with FRONT's fund-raising falling significantly short of the roughly $5.5 million benchmark required to produce the triennial at its previous scale. The 2018 edition had drawn approximately 90,000 visitors and the 2022 edition approximately 75,000; the cancellation closed the FRONT institutional history at two completed editions.

The wind-down has prompted continuing conversation in the Cleveland and national cultural press about what the Rust Belt biennial form can and cannot sustain. The post-2020 American cultural-philanthropic environment shifted in ways the founding 2018 institutional architecture did not anticipate; the founders have not announced any successor programme. Whether the Cleveland Foundation, the Cleveland Museum of Art, or other Northeast Ohio cultural institutions will absorb elements of the FRONT model into a smaller continuing programme is the open question the 2024 cancellation has left.

The institutional architecture

FRONT International is organised by the FRONT Exhibition Company, a non-profit cultural organisation founded in 2017 by Fred Bidwell and the Cleveland cultural-philanthropic establishment. Continuing institutional support comes from private and corporate philanthropic partners (the Cleveland Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the Ohio Arts Council), the Northeast Ohio museum-and-cultural-institutional partners (Cleveland Museum of Art, MOCA Cleveland, Akron Art Museum, Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, and other Northeast Ohio cultural institutions), and individual patron support.