LAByrinth events gather cornucopia of Cleveland artists

In the same way labyrinths feature a complex, sometimes circuitous but single path that leads to the center, LAByrinth transformative arts enclave events in Cleveland always lead directly to founder Jimmie Woody. A theater and visual artist, Woody produces evenings that provide total immersion, where participants and guests are surrounded by a smorgasbord of music, performance and contemporary art.

Since 2000, Woody has organized and directed the LAByrinth get-togethers whenever time and the fates allow him to assemble his extensive network of Cleveland artists for one evening. These artists come from multiple disciplines: film and video, literature, music, dance, poetry and visual art. Ideally, the space they gather in includes multiple rooms, each featuring a different artist and a different art

“The LAByrinth is a great way to showcase your work,” says Sequoia Bostick, engagement manager at Zygote Press, who has known Woody since 2016 and has participated in several LAByrinths as an artist. “It’s cool to collaborate with other Cleveland artists, and the fact that everyone does something a little different makes it super interesting and a great way to learn something new.”

Brittany Benton, aka DJ Red-I, who has worked the DJ deck at several LAByrinths, says she met artists while attending her first event 13 years ago that she still collaborates with today.

“I remember walking in and it was a feast for the eyes,” says Benton, a musician who teaches Spanish and electronic media at Hawken Upper School in Gates Mills. “The walls were painted in bright, vibrant colors, and there were people doing live art everywhere you looked. You could smell a mix of paint and incense, and it was just cool people hanging out, talking and sharing a lot of artistic vibes.” 

How it got started

A second-team all conference wide receiver at Kent State University, Woody flirted briefly with a career in the NFL, until he injured his knee in his final game as a senior. Instead, he chose to attend graduate school at Columbia University to pursue a career in acting.

While living in New York from 1995 to 1998, Woody had a visual artist friend who introduced him to the Thought Forms Underground arts events in Lower Manhattan, not far from the old World Trade Center. There, in the basement of a warehouse building, he enjoyed an eclectic evening of visual, performing and vegan culinary arts while rubbing shoulders with members of The Roots, now Jimmy Fallon’s house band, singer-songwriter Erykah Badhu, and hip-hop artist and actor Mos Def.

“All these different artists would be there, and they weren’t full blown yet but were all rising,” Woody remembers. “What I loved about it was the vibe. It wasn’t pretentious, just a bunch of good people.”

By August 1998, Woody had graduated with his MFA in acting with a special concentration in directing. He was being considered for a regular role on the daytime drama “Guiding Light,” and was performing the role of the Spaniard, sharing the stage with Michael C. Hall and Liev Schreiber in the Shakespeare in the Park production of “Cymbeline” at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. 

Then he received a call from his family that his father was dying of colon cancer.

He returned home to Cleveland to spend quality time with his dad, mom and family. He was up for the part of Future in the film “8 Mile” but wasn’t able to attend the callback auditions in Detroit. His agent dropped him as a client.

After his father died, Woody wrestled with what to do next. He lived in the building at Harvard and E. 138th St. that his father used for their home and his corner grocery store and ice cream shop. While he didn’t want to take those over, he did want to continue his father’s entrepreneurial commitment to his neighborhood, but apply it to his beloved arts. 

“Upstairs in my father’s building, there were 18 different rooms, and I loved what I experienced at the Thought Forms Underground, so I wanted to do something like that,” Woody says. “I did the first one in 2000, and three friends helped me, and we set it up to have different Cleveland artists in each room. It was people like DJ Red-I as our first DJ, Rafiq “RA” Washington showing his artwork and doing performances, and poet Daniel Gray-Kontar doing performance poetry. It was all these young Black and white artists who came and did their art or just hung out together.”

Unexpected twists in the path

For many years, LAByrinth events grew in popularity and rocked long into the night. It got to the point where Woody would tell everyone to turn the lights out when they left, go to bed, then wake up the next morning with artists still working or deep in conversations. Then, in 2020, everything collapsed. Literally.

As John Lennon famously said, “Life’s what happens while you’re making other plans.”

There was a big gap from 2020, when COVID-19 hit, until Woody produced the “Rooms to Let” event in an abandoned building in Slavic Village in July 2023 to relaunch the LAByrinth.

During the pandemic, Woody raised roughly $15,000 through a GoFundMe campaign to refurbish his father’s building into the Woody Restoration Arts Incubator Project. At the start of that project, according to Woody, a contractor he had paid $13,500 did some work that allowed water to damage the foundation. While the contractor was attempting to repair the cracked foundation, it led to significant further damage and collapsed walls, enough to have the City of Cleveland condemn the structure as unsafe. The city demolished his father’s building, Woody’s childhood home, on July 5, 2021.

“It shook me,” Woody says. “I’m trying to do something that brings arts and culture into Cleveland, and sometimes it just feels like there are systemic barriers and an entity, be it spiritual or not, that is preventing me.”

Woody’s ultimate goal extends beyond bringing transformative arts to Cleveland. The goal is to revive his beloved Lee-Harvard neighborhood by replicating what Cleveland Public Theatre achieved starting in the 1980s. CPT became the anchor entity for the revival of the Detroit-Shoreway neighborhood and what became the Gordon Square Arts District.

During several years of legal wrangling and lawsuits, Woody learned the contractor’s insurance company had fired them as a client. He and his attorney, who took his case pro bono, were finally able to depose a couple of the contractor personnel. He received a small settlement.

“The $5,000 I received has mostly sealed the legal matter, although there may still be additional legal options I could explore,” Woody says.

Throughout, Woody has worked in arts-related positions. He started at the Center for Arts-Inspired Learning (CAL) in 2006 and remained there for 13 years as a resident teaching theater before transitioning to teach film for six years at the Cleveland High School for Digital Arts. During that same period, he also taught acting at Tri-C for 14 years before being laid off in 2020. 

After the pandemic slowed, Tri-C offered him the same position, but he did not take the contract. For a couple of years, he served as Director of Community Programming for CAL until July 2023, when he became Community Ambassador & Content Creator for the center.

No end to the LAByrinth

Woody held the most recent LAByrinth event in his studio in Slavic Village in October 2024. Now he is ready to relaunch the LAByrinth again with an event at The Hildebrandt Building in the Clark-Fulton neighborhood on Saturday, April 26. Other scheduled LAByrinth dates include Zygote Press on August 30 and The Brownhoist building on November 22.

Melinda Placko, associate director of visual arts at Beck Center in Lakewood, has been a LAByrinth regular for a decade and taught with Woody at CAL. She is excited that the upcoming event will take place in the building where her studio has been for the past nine years as a member of the Hildebrandt Artists Collective.

“Jimmie is resilient, and he is dedicated to creativity and embracing artists and encouraging all of us,” she says. “He is a creative force for sure.”

Woody continues to search for a new building to host the LAByrinth. He has received ongoing support from Elaine Gohlstin, president and CEO of the Harvard Community Services Center Community Development Corporation, who understands the importance of his project for that neighborhood. He is also in discussions with the Miles Park Masonic Temple that needs to be completely restored, but could be an ideal location. 

While not everything has gone as smoothly as he hoped, the irrepressible artist keeps plugging along.

“I’ve got passion, and I’m trying to keep things moving forward, knowing the tables are going to turn,” Woody concludes. “It’s been a longer road than I ever thought, and a bit of a spiritual and physical trial, but I just keep moving everything“ forward. It will work.”