From July 17 to 19, the 2nd Annual Larchmere Cultural Arts Festival (LCAF) will take place at Larchmere Arts at 12726 Larchmere Blvd. in Cleveland.
This year, the three-day weekend arts celebration will feature an opening reception and visual art exhibition, a digital photography exhibition, short plays, short films, a poetry showcase, author’s forum, artist recognition, food vendors and music events.
For $27.38, visitors can purchase a pass to attend all events throughout the three days of the festival.
“The whole idea of the festival is to shine the light on artists in our community, particularly those who don’t get an opportunity to show their work or to be acknowledged,” explained Vince Robinson, president and CEO of Larchmere Cultural Arts.
Involved in arts activism since the early 2000s, Robinson, an accomplished jazz pianist, emphasized that it’s important for him to amplify what artists in Cleveland are creating and achieving.
“We do so much that, in many cases, we don’t get the acknowledgement we deserve, so the festival is just one way to share with the community what our artists are doing,” he said.
Robinson, who co-founded his gallery space in 2019, added that the path for visual artists can be especially difficult because there is so much competition and so few spaces for painters, photographers and other visual artists to show their work.
“I’ve always taken an organic approach to create opportunities for artists to show their work because it’s not that complicated with me,” he said. “I don’t require a whole bunch of red tape, where ‘You gotta have this and you gotta have that.’ No, let’s just talk about how we can make it happen and let’s do it. So that’s what I’ve done.”
Mary Weems, Ph.D., a poet, playwright and scholar in Cleveland, added that the festival is especially important at this time.
“People need opportunities to experience art, and artists need opportunities to create art for audiences to experience,” she said.
The LCAF began when Weems suggested to Robinson showcasing the work of visual artists Bonnie Venable and Rodney Carpenter, along with her poetry and hand-crafted quilts. The four artists met as a committee to discuss the idea. Two weeks later, Robinson came back to them with the idea for a larger-scale festival that premiered last July.
For Weems, the festival provides a highly visible opportunity for African American artists in the community to exhibit the fruits of their creative talents.
“Typically, Black artists struggle to get their work out there, to be acknowledged, Weems said. “Anytime we have an opportunity to showcase our art, it increases our visibility and chances for other folk to say, ‘Hey, I’d like a painting or a poem.’ If you never see or hear us, it’s easy to think there are just a few Black artists, when actually there are a lot of us.”
Bonnie Venable, whose artworks were featured last year and will be prominently displayed this year, along with about 10 or 11 other visual artists, believed last year’s festival was an important community event.
“The Larchmere festival gives a nice glimpse into the African American culture, which is what Vince wanted to do,” she said. “The main purpose is to honor the variety and provide an idea of the range of arts – painting, music, poetry, writing, film – going on in the community that you don’t realize there’s so much talent at your fingertips.”
This year’s festival
On Friday July 17 at 6 p.m., the first day of the festival will unveil an art exhibition entitled “Of the Diaspora: Melanin in Motion.” Once again, Venable and Carpenter will be featured, along with Alsie Clay, Chester Hoplins-Bey, Craig B. Sullivan and others.
At 8 p.m., a musical performance will close the day, with Vince Robinson & The Jazz Poets taking the stage.
Day two will kick off at 1 p.m. with an author showcase, “Cleveland Writers Making a Difference With Words.” The event will feature a panel discussion and book fair with Alan K. Nevel, Andrea D. Campbell and Dr. Rosary Joyce-Kennedy.
“I’m going to talk to them about their books and give them an opportunity to share their books with the public to become familiar with what they’ve written,” Robinson said.
At 4 p.m., there will be a short film festival of works by Wayne Smith, Patience Katushabe of Uganda, Matthew Thomas, Evan Faal and additional films.
At 6 p.m., a short play event curated by Mary Weems will feature the works of several playwrights from her group The Second Act, including her play “Ghostlight,” along with “A Little Home Cookin’” by Michael Oatman and “Oasis” by Arlen Hodges.
“Poetry Unplugged: A Spoken Word Showcase” by the Cleveland poetry collective Sparrow’s Fortune will cap off Saturday evening.
On Sunday, July 19, the festival will conclude with the digital photography exhibition and artist talk “Reflections of a Sepia Reality.”
The day will include The Larchmere Cultural Arts Artist Recognition Program.
As part of the event, Robinson has designed a retrospective of Cleveland’s first Transformative Arts Fund [TAF] projects that were completed in 2025 with $3 million in American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds. TAF took shape with a collaboration between the City of Cleveland, the Assembly for the Arts and artist teams that each had an institutional partner from the community.
That program will include videos that were shown in a public event at Cleveland Public Library’s Martin Luther King, Jr. branch in University Circle last October.
“I’ve acquired as many of those videos as I could so that people will be able to see what those TAF projects were about and get a better feeling about the impact those projects have had on Cleveland,” he said.
Additionally, other Cleveland-area artists will be recognized for achievements in the art and culture landscape in Northeast Ohio.
“We’re going to shout out folks who deserve some shine as my way of highlighting artists that I think deserve recognition,” Robinson said. “We can’t mention everybody, so we’re just going to curate some names, but next year, we plan to open it up to the public so we can include artists they would like to acknowledge.”
At 7 p.m., LACF will close with a musical event spotlighting vocalist Ida Weston.
A highlight from last year
For Venable, one of the most fun and memorable moments from last year’s festival occurred when Robinson organized an ekphrastic poetry exercise for festival attendees who were viewing the visual artists’ works.
Ekphrastic poetry asks the viewer of a painting, photograph, sculpture or other artwork to write a vivid description or a poem about the work.
For LCAF, the participants selected the piece that moved them most, wrote their short poem about the work, and then shared their writing about the different visual artworks.
“It was a good opportunity for people to express what the artwork meant to them, because often the interpretation of the person viewing it may be different from what the artist was thinking when they created it,” said Venable, who works in a variety of media, primarily painting, but also sculpture, fabrics and jewelry. “So, it was a new way to see some of my artwork through someone else’s interpretation.”
Reflecting on the impacts of LCAF
For Lori Ingraham, poet, writer and actor from Cleveland, who recently moved back to her hometown after a decade in Hollywood, Florida, attending the festival feels like being home.
“All of the artwork and creative work that different people that you know have these talents and those talents are shown at Larchmere Cultural Arts Festival,” she said. “So you get to see what they have created, whatever their art form, and everybody’s a professional, so it’s very intimate.”
Her advice to first-time attendees?
“They should keep an open mind and go to as many pieces of the festival as they can, and come every day,” Ingraham said. “There’s something new for everyone to do, and the more people that show up, the greater amount of vibe we have, so it just makes it better.”
Weems is excited about the second annual LCAF and knows they will continue to develop, grow and shape the grassroots community arts festival each year.
“We’ll see how year two goes,” she said. “A lot of this decision-making is on Vince because it’s his space, but my hope is that it will be just as successful, if not more successful than the last one, so that we can keep it going for the foreseeable future.”
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