In 1940, the Woodhill Homes housing project was constructed on the 35-acre
site of an amusement complex called Luna Park. Luna was Cleveland’s answer to Coney Island. Woodhill was the first project in the City and in time, became the largest. In 1969, my mother separated from my father, who had contracted MS. She, my two brothers, two sisters and I moved into Woodhill. We were Jewish, poor, and the only white family in Woodhill. I was the eldest girl, a young teenager.
Luna Windows is work that symbolizes my twoandahalf
years in the projects. The title, in my mind, captures the irony of the fantasy of an amusement park transcending to the wretched realism of a housing project. It is a narrative of broken homes, broken dreams, and the despair of being a prisoner, trapped by fear, pressed against the window looking out at a world I was not part of. I was an outsider in many ways; a white girl in a complex black world, the only Jewish student in a Polish Catholic dominated high school, a poor Jew in a city with a large middle and upper class Jewish community.
These were the three worlds where I, as well as my family, were not accepted.
Through our efforts with Jewish Family service, my family moved to a home at the edge of Shaker Heights. I received a scholarship to the Cleveland Institute of Art with the help of the only Jewish person in my high school, the art teacher. I wanted to be an artist, a painter, but I had to earn a living as well as help my mother. I started a successful career as an art director in advertising before returning to school and earning a Master’s degree in Fine Arts. My siblings succeeded as well. One brother became an electrical engineer; the other a Rabbi and my two sisters are lawyers.
Although the projects are far behind me in every way, I still carry the frustration of those days, and feel helpless before it. Today, Cleveland is the second poorest city in the United States, a reminder for me of Woodhill and the multitudes of people unable to break the mold in the thousands of like projects and pockets of poverty throughout the richest country in the world.
Luna Windows are physically presented in a darkened room. Pin spotlights focus on the soft sculptures hanging on the lines. Projected in the windows are rotating images of old family pictures, and yearly statistics of poverty in the USA dating from 1970 to the present.