CLEVELAND, OH.- In partnership with Cleveland Print Room, the Cleveland Museum of Art presents Improper Frames at Transformer Station, the museum’s satellite location in Ohio City’s Hingetown neighborhood. On view from February 14 through May 10, 2026, this free exhibition brings together artists and photographers working through Cleveland’s internal boundaries, partial views, and shifting frames. Their works engage a city recently rendered legible through a comprehensive property inventory, classifying and evaluating land across the city. The exhibition features work by Amber Ford, Jon Gott, Michael Indriolo, Da’Shaunae Marisa, Vivica Satterwhite, and Alejandro Vergara, and is curated by Theodossis Issaias.

Original Property Inventory

Between 2022 and 2023, a citywide property inventory was conducted by municipal and nonprofit partners. Two-person teams walked every street, day after day, for six months. Equipped with tablets and a GIS-linked survey application, they moved parcel by parcel through the city, documenting conditions, classifications, and risks from the public right-of-way. This exhaustive survey recorded approximately 162,000 parcels and buildings across Cleveland. As an administrative instrument, the inventory presents itself as a factual account of what exists. Yet in quietly assembling data, images, and categories, it also participates in shaping how Cleveland narrates its future—what can be seen, valued, developed, or left aside.

“Property inventories do more than document space,” said Theodossis Issaias, co-curator of Improper Frames. “They convert lived environments into data—parcels, conditions, and use codes that can be compared, ranked, and acted upon. Generated by governing authorities and circulated across planning, development, and policy, such data rarely announces its consequences. Its effects are incremental and procedural, guiding decisions that unfold unevenly across neighborhoods, blocks, and thresholds.”

Photography formed a required component of this process, with at least one image recorded for each parcel, captured in real time and embedded directly into a database designed to support enforcement decisions, demolition assessments, and reinvestment strategies.

“The photograph functioned less as representation than as verification: a visual trace anchoring numeric assessments and spatial metrics,” said Kerry Davis, director, Cleveland Print Room. “Surveyors’ shadows slip into frame. Windows glare white. Focus drifts. Fingers obscure lenses. Later, license plates are algorithmically blurred. Fatigue, glare, haste, and weather register unintentionally, exposing the bodily and logistical circumstances of data collection. They are not evidence of conditions so much as evidence of the conditions under which evidence is produced.”

Improper Frames

Across Improper Frames, irreverent trees defy property lines, photographic assemblies gather displaced stories, and dust builds an index inside a home—material traces that the property survey does not account for. A vacant lot appears not only as a parcel for development but as a former cosmetology school, a church, the site of a first fleeting kiss. A stream flows without regard for ownership. Such scenes introduce counterevidence: lives, residues, intimacies, and temporalities that resist classification.

“Here, photography operates as a record—situated, partial, fallible, and shaped by proximity,” continued Davis. “Developed through an open call, workshops, and sustained, iterative work across the city’s shifting terrain, the projects gathered in Improper Frames use photographic practice to register what escapes administrative description.”

“Together, artists Amber Ford, Jon Gott, Michael Indriolo, Da’Shaunae Marisa, Vivica Satterwhite, and Alejandro Vergara propose improper frames not as errors, but as necessary openings: ways of accounting for a city that cannot be fully contained by the documents that seek to define it,” said Issaias.