FRONT International Cleveland Triennial Abruptly Cancels 2025 Show, Will Shut Down Operations

FRONT International, the citywide triennial art exposition that aimed to boost Cleveland as a global arts destination since launching in 2018, will no longer be debuting new pieces.

Last week, its board of directors decided that the arts festival will cancel its 2025 show and subsequently shut down future operations, about a year and half before its planned opening date for the next event. Its directors, however, chose to still keep its non-profit entity, Front Exhibition Co., alive for future endeavors.

The reason for the abrupt end to its eight-year tenure in Northeast Ohio was mainly a financial issue, Fred Bidwell, FRONT’s founder and director, said in a statement released February 9.

“Public and private funding priorities have changed to focus on the critical needs of communities,” he and the board said. “Our priority is to ensure that we do not risk the investment our funders and supporters have made, or disappoint artists and audiences with an exhibition that is less that their expectations.”

In a phone interview Monday morning with Bidwell, the arts funder said that the organization’s fundraising results were “significantly lower” than their typical $5.5 million benchmark, as it was for shows in 2018 and 2022. (Bidwell declined to say exactly how short they were.)

The festival had made quite the impression when it debuted six years ago. Dozens of installations brought some 90,000 visitors to indoor and outdoor exhibition spaces across the city to see work from hundreds of regional, national and international artists.

Some that work still remains today: Julie Mehretu’s mural behind Old Stone Church  and Tony Taffett’s “Judy’s Hand” (that enormous silver palm right outside MOCA) were all FRONT commissions.

Spreads in Architectural Digest, ArtNet and the New York Times framed Bidwell’s citywide art-a-thon as a sure touristic boost. The New York Times, in 2018, compared FRONT’s potential to what Documenta did for Kassel. “If it can regularly bring tens of thousands of art lovers and internatoinal attemtion to a small, drab, industrial city in Germany, could art do the same thing in Cleveland?” the paper speculated.

At home, critics were a lot less myopic. Some saw FRONT’s dream of being an international beacon a little too international: only six regional artists were tapped for its first iteration. “Could the organizers have pushed harder for the attention of and participation from everyday Clevelanders?” a Scene writer wrote at the time.

Bidwell himself felt that, although the decision to end FRONT instead of running an underfunded show was a logical one, there remained a possibility of reviving it in other mediums in future years.

“We can do this, and we need to continue to do this,” he told Scene, “but in other forms, other formats, other venues.”