Arabella Proffer, Beloved Cleveland Artist, Passes Away at the Age of 45

“No good story ever started with someone saying, ‘It was a work night, so I went to bed early.’ Leave your house. Do something. Create. Because you really never know what can happen.” — Arabella Proffer

Arabella Proffer, Cleveland artist, author, and co-founder of the indie label Elephant Stone Records, passed away Tuesday evening at the age of 45 after a long battle with a rare and inoperable form of cancer. She had been in remission many years ago, but a trip to the hospital following some pain in her leg led to the unfortunate diagnosis that the cancer had reared its ugly head again. This was in 2020, amid a global pandemic.

Her husband and writer, Ben Vendetta posted on Instagram Tuesday evening, “The light has gone out. My beautiful wife, the love of my life passed away early this evening. I have no words right now, but I will be talking about her forever.” Her death happened just a few days after her final exhibition at The Artists Archives of the Western Reserve, which opened this past Thursday and which Proffer attended.

“So tragic for her to have died so young and what a good fight she has put up for many years,” said Mindy Tousley, Executive Director of AAWR. “Her contributions to the arts community of Northeast Ohio will be sorely missed, and the tragedy of such an early death makes me wonder about what she could have accomplished if she had a chance for a longer life. I do believe that she took the time that she had and really made the most of her life in the last few years. She travelled to the places she wanted to see, spent time with her loved ones and threw caution to the wind and started painting in oils again. A remarkable woman and a remarkable artist. We will do our best to see that her artistic legacy survives.”

An Ann Arbor, Michigan native before her family relocated to California following her father’s death in 1984, Proffer then lived in Los Angeles for a while where she exhibited and started the record label before moving to Cleveland with Vendetta in 2004. Her first solo exhibition was hosted at the former Asterisks Gallery in the heart of the Tremont neighborhood in 2007, owned by well-known Cleveland artist Dana Depew.

I spoke with Depew last night, who said, “It’s really a big loss to the art community, because she was such a highly respected artist. Her portraiture was incredibly well rendered and more importantly, her style was her signature. I also admire and respect her because of how prolific and courageous she was. She was painting about and throughout her struggles and I think this was incredibly endearing. The art was a vehicle to comment on her strains and later in her career, possibly influenced by her illness. Her work became very biological and morphed into something different from her portraiture with her biomorphic pieces. It was a commentary on her battles, I think.”

Shortly before she was again diagnosed with terminal cancer, Proffer pivoted from her neo-gothic portraiture to her biomorphic forms, gardens and still lifes. Forms which Proffer was shocked to find resembled the tumors plaguing her body — she said that she had been painting these biomorphic figures even before her diagnosis. According to her website, Proffer’s early work portrayed loose narrative themes revolving around a fascination with punk rock, aristocracy, Renaissance fashions, aging socialites, gothic divas, and medical history. Later she began to experiment with these globular fictional forms and alien flora and fauna.

Towards the end of her life, Proffer began making NFTs and had done talks on the subject, always enthusiastic about the possibilities for artists diversifying their income stream. Her brainchild, the Super Psychedelic Sisters, consisting of Proffer and two other young women (artist Tessa LeBaron and artist and musician Jenna Fournier) hosted an exhibition called “Garden of Venus” which included several TVs displaying NFTs in the little apartment above Mahall’s in Lakewood. She was determined to share her enthusiasm about NFTs with artists and gallery-goers. “NFTs have become a way for women to yield more power in the arts and tech, Proffer said in the booklet she put out for the exhibition. :While women have always been at the forefront of art and technology, blockchain allows them to take ownership.”

Fournier, who in addition to being a painter, has a solo project called Kid Tigrrr and is the principal song writer in Cleveland band Kniights, said: “We bonded over shoegaze, pop surrealism and feminism. I admired her incredible oil paintings and talent, but what inspired me the most about Arabella was her fierce strength, a quality I imagine anyone who knew her would speak to.” 

LeBaron, who also displayed her work in “Garden of Venus,” said, “Arabella had a trailblazing spirit and an unwavering dedication to her work. She inspired me and my work with her dreamy landscapes and pop-punk realism portraiture.”

CAN Art Journal’s Michael Gill has followed her career since the exhibition at Asterisks. “Arabella first came to my attention with her exhibit of portraits of imagined aristocrats—The National Portrait Gallery of Kessa—at Dana Depew’s now defunct Asterisk Gallery in Tremont, in 2007,” said Gill. “It was a truly great concept, poking fun at the idea of aristocracy by celebrating the made-up royals of a made-up country. It was a brilliant send-up of renaissance style, too, giving her aristocrats mohawks and spiked hair, piercings and tattoos. But of course her work evolved dramatically and profoundly as her health changed.  Brittany Hudak wrote about her repeatedly for CAN Journal, including her realization that the biomorphic forms she had somewhat mysteriously begun to paint were in some way representative of the cancer that had begun to encroach on her body. And through that she became a truly inspiring person through her refusal to stop creating as she went to battle against it. I was a spectator to all this. I knew Arabella, but we didn’t hang out. But her strength and the resilience of her creation were impossible to miss.”

Friend, painter, musician, and contemporary Michelle Anne Muldrow posted on Facebook: “I just started to believe she was bionic, immortal, that nothing would take her down, even after so many triumphs and fake outs with the fucking duels in death and cancer… my dear powerful force of nature friend Arabella Proffer has left this mortal coil and I am so angry that cancer won. I have never met a person so fucking driven to embrace life, embrace being an artist, embrace her friends and dearly embrace and champion the love of her life, Ben, god fucking damn it, this is so fucking unfair.”

Proffer attended Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA before receiving her BFA from California Institute of the Arts and has participated in solo and group exhibitions throughout North America, Europe, parts of the Middle East, and Australia. Her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Plain Dealer, Juxtapoz Magazine, SF Weekly, CinWeekly, Cincinnati Magazine, Scene Magazine, The LA Times, The Dallas Arts Review, Living Proof, GOOD Magazine, The Harvard Gazette, Snob, and more.

She was awarded an Ohio Arts Council grant in 2016, Akron Soul Train Fellowship in 2019, a Rauschenberg Foundation award, and a Satellite Award from the Andy Warhol Foundation and SPACES in 2020. Proffer has been recognized by both the Ohio House and Senate for Exemplary Attainment in the arts. Among many others, her influences included: Tamara de Lempicka, David Miretsky, Vivian Greven, Heather Merckle, Jaime Treadwell, and Christina Nicodema.

I have had the pleasure to know Arabella since 2007. Arabella was astute, metropolitan, classy, sarcastic, shrewd, hilarious, and opinionated. She was compassionate, fun, adventurous, tenacious, self-aware and had just enough of a punk ethos. You wanted her at your cocktail party. She was a blossom in the Cleveland arts community and was like so many stunning spring flowers which blossom so fiercely before their blooms retreat until the next season. As the community mourns, it also is grateful to have her as part of its collective lineage. Her influence as a person and as a force will live on in her work and through the people who loved her.

Correction: An original version of this article reported Arabella Proffer was 46. She was 45.

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