‘Dream’ residency targets emerging artists

By Carlo Wolff

Maxmillian Peralta ’21 was just the person to create the residency program feverdream, a new Cleveland-based organization dedicated to nurturing the careers of emerging artists.
As a feverdream co-founder and the organization’s program director, Peralta gets to help develop artists like himself who are establishing their practices and finding their way in the business of art.

Peralta performed the research that led to the establishment of feverdream in summer 2022. He also designed its website and participated in the selection of Nolan Meyer ’20 for its inaugural residency. Both Peralta and Meyer are Painting graduates. The second residency went to painter Elizabeth Lax, who completed it in March.

Feverdream is founded on the principles that quality is the one true credential and that the people who run the program should be on the same playing field as the residents. Its target
age is 18 to 30.

“I’m an emerging artist, just like how all the residents are emerging artists,” Peralta says.

Peralta has known Meyer since their CIA Pre-College program days together. Although he had never met Lax before she applied to feverdream, “there was still that peer-to-peer (connection). There was no power dynamic or hierarchy.

“I think that with a lot of charities and nonprofit organizations, there’s a separation between who they’re serving and who does the serving,” says Peralta. As a younger artist, he says, he understands “what artists want and what’s easiest for them.”

Feverdream’s $4,500 residencies last three months, offer a $600 supplies stipend, and provide studio space in a building in Cleveland’s Tremont neighborhood. That retrofit is the headquarters of J Roc Development, a company that creates luxury and mixed-use projects like Electric Gardens, the high-end live-work space next door. For now, J Roc is bankrolling feverdream, although feverdream is in the process of seeking nonprofit, tax-exempt status.

Meyer, a line cook at Cleveland Vegan in Lakewood, Ohio, enjoyed his time at feverdream.

“It’s a larger space to work that they give you,” he says. “It’s a bunch of money I wouldn’t have otherwise that let me take time off from my job and just make work. And, it sort of felt like CIA again.”

The fruits of his residency are visible on an exterior wall of The Shoreway Apartments, a historic building on West 76th Street in Cleveland that J Roc repurposed as luxury apartments. Based on an original Meyer painting of 14 by 38 inches, Meyer’s 14-by-38-foot “Lighthouse” mural features a lighthouse, a moonlit sea and a large squid. Creation of a mural is part of the feverdream commitment. Lax’s will replace Meyer’s soon.

As a CIA Painting major—he says the department is “awesome”—Meyer was grounded in professional practices. The feverdream residency offered him a place to explore freely.

“I think it’s really important to communicate your ideas properly, and that’s what [professors] like to prep you for,” Meyer says. “But it was kind of cool to not think about that at all and just make work.”

“While CIA helped me hone many skills that are required of me for this job,” Peralta says, “what CIA really did was cement my obsession with the arts and wanting to see myself, my peers and other artists succeed in supporting ourselves with our passion.”