Ian Petroni
Artist and designer, Cleveland, Ohio. Production manager of Parade the Circle at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Twenty-five years of building what other people imagined: for a museum, an opera company, a library, a canal, and a street full of strangers every June.
Statement
I build with found objects and recycled materials. What I make is handmade, organic and intentionally imperfect, and that is a decision rather than a limitation. The dominant aesthetic of our moment is smooth, repeatable and machine-finished, and I am not interested in adding to it. I would rather you could see where a hand was.
Functionality matters to me as much as form. Before I design anything I study the specific situation the piece has to interface with: the room, the street, the performer, the weather, the doorway it has to come through. A thing that cannot do its job is not finished, however good it looks in a drawing.
But I am not building machines either. The material shows. The seam shows. Salvage brings its own history into the piece and I would rather work with that than sand it off.
What I am after, in the end, is simple. I want people to walk away from something I made feeling that the world around them is not fixed, that it is something they are allowed to participate in creating.
I want people to feel their world is something they can participate in creating.
Ian Petroni, artist statement
Selected history
- 2001 Came to Cleveland on a college friend’s recommendation to assist Wendy Mahon on Parade the Circle at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Built a giant dandelion in the first week.
- 2005 Moved to Cleveland permanently, for the community and for the work.
- 2001– Parade the Circle, Cleveland Museum of Art. Every year since. Assistant, then artist, now production manager.
- n.d. Cleveland Museum of Art, Women’s Council. Staff artist, translating their design into a production.
- n.d. Les Délices. Puppet designer for Into the Labyrinth and The White Cat. Bunraku-style and rod puppetry from 17th-century French sources.
- n.d. Cleveland Public Library, South Branch. Lead artist, community art project.
- 2026 Bessie. Canalway Partners, Towpath Trail Lantern Parade, with Eddie “Trash Fish” Olschansky.
Range
Sculpture, installation, puppetry, sets, props, parade design, decorative work and custom residential furniture. Twenty-five years of it, nearly all of it made in Cleveland with other people in the room.