The Smoker’s Etiquette
Social Complexities at a Designated Smoke Table

"The Smoke Table" by Daly Horton

The Smoker’s Etiquette is a group exhibition that explores the nuances of designated smoking areas and how they create opportunities for connection and community. Our individual and collective relationships to smoking can be straightforward or very complex. We are interested in the complex; despite the health implications, friendships form and ideas are shared. This exhibition examines the regular visitors at the designated smoking space behind the Cleveland Institute of Art through various mediums and explores the behaviors, interactions and intersectionality that are experienced—positive, opposed, vulnerable, meaningful. What can we learn from the etiquette of sharing a cigarette, a lighter, a hit, a bum, a moment together? As artists and participants in this circle, we examined this behavior and our hope is that we can include our viewer in this examination, and take the practices of smoking etiquette into other spaces to encourage community elsewhere.

An opening reception for The Smoker’s Etiquette will be held from 6 to 8pm Friday, July 28 at the Feinberg Art Gallery at Cain Park (14591 Superior Road, Cleveland Heights). It will remain on view through Saturday, September 22.

The exhibition concept was developed by Cleveland Institute of Art student Daly Horton as part of CIA's Creativity Works program, which is supported by the Fenn Educational Fund and the G.R. Lincoln Family Foundation.

Participating artists include Horton and fellow CIA artists Elly Arvisu, Bentley, Liana Gonzalez, Layla Harris, Ryan Kreitzer, Arfil Parajillaga, Xander Ristofski, Sebastian Schenz, Ross Sheely, Thomas Smith and Rex Young.

Feinberg Gallery exhibits well-known, established artists alongside up-and-coming artists in the area. The gallery continues to build partnerships, including with CIA, to exhibit the very best art and explore the newest concepts hitting the local art scene.

Cain Park is rich in history and is the premier fine arts park in Ohio. The brainchild of Heights High School drama teacher Dr. Dina Rees Evans and Cleveland Heights Mayor Frank C. Cain, Cain Park's original purpose remains unaltered. Owned and operated by the City of Cleveland Heights, it is the living symbol of the city's commitment to nurturing quality programming in the arts for an area population that undeniably thrives on it. It is one of the city's most visible ways of saying that Cleveland Heights is a wonderful place to live, work and raise families.

For more info, contact Feinberg Gallery curator Michelle Barnicky Stachnik at michelle.stachnik@att.net or 216.780.0183.

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