Fairfax Oral History: David Ramsey

David Ramsey is a dedicated and experienced curator and creative director passionate about showcasing the contemporary narrative of Black Americans through art and culture. He was born and raised in the Fairfax neighborhood, attended St. Adalbert School, and is now lead curator for Deep Roots Arts Experience, an art gallery focusing on Black and Brown artists located at E. 79th St. and Central Ave. He serves as regional coordinator for MyCom Cleveland and Art Director of Environmental Health Watch’s FreshFest event.  

I was born and raised on the east side of Cleveland. I went to Fairfax Rec for basketball camps and summer league stuff. I went to St. Adalbert school, which is still open. I went there from kindergarten through eighth grade. This community, I kind of grew up here. This is where I found, or at least started to find, who I would be – how important sports and athletics were to me, writing, and really, some of my early artistic expressions happened over here. I still have families of friends who still live in the neighborhood from when I was growing up here. My mom still lives in our house at 93rd and Woodland on Rosehill, on the border of Fairfax and Buckeye. 

There are expectations that there were fights and craziness happening because of the east side of Cleveland’s reputation. But I grew up with a very close family. I have three older sisters. So, we understood the community. So it afforded us the chance to have a really fun childhood. I grew up playing basketball. I mentioned Fairfax (Recreation Center), and that was the place to go until Zelma George Rec Center opened. We spent hours after school with our basketball coach, Coach Earl, whose son actually ended up playing in the NBA for a number of years. His son would come out and spend time with us on the court. It was great. You don’t realize the things that you don’t have available or the differences until you’re in spaces where those differences are amplified. The socioeconomic makeup of the community was so similar for everyone, that there wasn’t a sense of what you didn’t have. 

I didn’t start to realize that stuff until I got into high school. I went to St. Peter’s Chanel for high school. It’s out in Bedford. They tore it down. I took three buses, an hour and a half every morning, to get there. That was really what started to highlight the differences in communities for me, and really started the desire to come back to the community and start to invest and provide some of the things that I would have liked to see growing up. 

I’ve always been a reader, and poetry, creative writing, short stories, music, these things have always been up my avenue. When I was 12 or 13, my mom took me to Cleveland State University to see Nikki Giovanni live. That was kind of the thing that made me realize, “Oh, you can do artistic things and make a living.” Her story of being an authentically pure black woman, of having her own identity, is really what resonated with me, and encouraged me to take it a little bit more seriously. I will say, from that point, I didn’t have a lot of visuals as to what it looked like to be a black person and operate professionally in the art world. It wasn’t until years later that I realized I could take art and create a community around it more seriously. 

I went to Atlanta. My good friend Mr. Soul invited me to Atlanta, and this was around the time we had very first met. I do believe that he thought I was bullshitting about actually coming. But he had told me about this festival that they did in Atlanta, and I went down, and I had never seen anything like it. There were thousands of people in just one city block. There were no fights, no arguments, they were all just there enjoying the art. I had never seen anything like that. It occurred to me that the demographic structure of Cleveland really was one that could do something similar. There were different people, different communities, different cultures, different races, different genders, all just centered around exploring and experiencing his art. Personally, I had not seen something of that scale happen in the city of Cleveland. 

When we came back, it was really like, “Alright, well, how do we do this?” From the classes we were teaching, we didn’t have anywhere for youth to plug into to take the art more seriously. For a lot of people, art feels like just an after-school activity or something like that. For some of these young people, they really get drawn into it, and having a space that we can take them to plug into, so that they can continue to pursue and continue to learn and continue to see different things, that started to become a priority. That’s really how this space came to operate. 

Growing up, we spent all our time in the neighborhood. Walking the community. That corner store, I forget the name of it, but it’s been there as long as I can remember. It’s right up on Quincy, I think 86th and Quincy, but it’s been there forever. That was the place that my sisters would walk to when I was really too young to go with them, and so the only way they could go was if they took me. That was my first chance to explore the neighborhood. As I got a little bit older, I realized how many of my friends lived in the neighborhood. 

There was real active engagement in the community. One of the things that’s cool about Cleveland is it has pockets of home ownership. You can tell it’s home ownership because of the differences in the way the culture of the neighborhood and street feels. You had some areas that felt a bit more in flux, with more rental homes, so you saw people coming in and out, you saw less investment in the upkeep of the community. Then you had a street right next to it that had homeownership. So, you saw people cutting their grass, you saw more attention to detail. And that is exactly what you see over here now. You can drive down Quincy, and you’ll see a street that might have some abandoned houses, while the next street over, you’ve got new builds, and the next street over, you’ve got older homes that have been sustained over the years. These are 30-40 year residents of this community, who have made it a point to ensure that they stayed and took ownership of the community. 

We’ve started doing work with Fairfax (Renaissance Development Corporation). In some of the community cleanups, I see people that I remember growing up walking past their house. I am very confident that so much of the successes that we’ve had are because there is a genuine relationship with the community. I know some of these people, and if I don’t know them in an intimate way, I know them in a cultural way. I understand what their experiences are. I understand what their goals and accomplishments are. I understand what’s available to them. 

This neighborhood has always been absent of fresh food access, as far back as I can remember. I understand the struggles of having corner stores that sell microwavable food and some old produce, but not really having a walkable place where you can pick up fresh foods. While the new Meijer is a beautiful store, and it is accessible to some residents, for this part of the neighborhood it is still a distance to get to, it’s still a bus ride to get to. And it’s those types of things that impact the different parts of the neighborhood, that can make a difference in what part of the neighborhood feels homeownership, feels pride, and what part feels a disconnect because it’s a temporary solution.

St. Adelbert was very much a family. I remember teachers from when I was in kindergarten. I remember Mr. Todd Schminke, who was my sixth grade teacher. Me and my best friend, who I still am best friends with today, I talk to him every day, his name’s Garrett, me and G learned to play Magic the Gathering from Mr. Schminke. We spent hours playing it. Mr. Rock, Joseph Rock, who was our seventh and eighth grade teacher at St. Adalbert, I remember his desire to be engaged. He invited his mother out, his mother would come to the class and she would hang out with us. I remember she would make cookies, and just randomly pop up with cookies for the class. When I was there, there were tons of field trips and road trips organized by parents. So my mother and a woman named Miss Pettis would organize trips to different places. Canada, Detroit, DC. There was really a community within the school and the church that extended outside and pulled the rest of the community in to be engaged and involved in all of the things that were going on. 

My youngest older sister is six years older than me, whereas my oldest sister is 12 years older than me, so there are generations of my family that had the same types of experience, which is what made this neighborhood so important to me. We all can remember a time where this was the base. Although I don’t identify as Catholic, my first introduction was through the school. We had masses, and we had conversations. In college, my minor was philosophy, which was centered around religious studies. That was birthed from my experience there having questions. Father Jerry was the priest at the time. I remember I would ask questions. There were spaces that I could not ask questions. I felt like I could ask questions with him. And they were tough questions, right? Questions like, “Why are saints a thing? What does that mean? How does that shape the community? What does that say about where we are? Why is the school completely fenced in? What are we protecting ourselves from or trying to keep from from coming in?” We would go across the street to Fairfax Rec, for gym, for practice. I would ask, “Why doesn’t the school have their own facility? What’s the relationship with Fairfax?” 

We’re working on introducing some art classes to some of the students at Fairfax Rec. Asia Armour, one of Cleveland’s emerging artists, her son does boxing out of that gym. It’s always been a really important part of the community, for me, but going back to the school and the church itself, that was really where I formed my inquisitive nature, around faith, around community, around culture, and how those things intersected. 

I never really left. When I had my son, we had conversations like, “Well, do we want him to go to St. Adalbert?” I’ve never been too far from it. We were doing programs at the detention center, which is right down Quincy. Some of those kids are from the neighborhood. I’ve always stayed connected in some way. It wasn’t until I was in my late 20s that I felt a bit more in control of my life to start to make decisions that this is where I want to invest in, this is what I’d like to see in the community. I know what I would have liked to see myself growing up. If I can create those opportunities to see that for someone else, then that’s the benefit. That’s the impact. 

We’ve been operating here for six years. It took us a while to get the space even prepared to invite people in. We are a full time art gallery. Within this space, we work exclusively with Black and brown artists, but the imprint outside the space affords us the ability to work with all cultures and communities. We do art classes for kids out of here, and site visits for classes. We’ve spent time doing community cleanups, helping neighbors and residents. The gallery wasn’t created because we just wanted to, it was created because we saw the need. And because of the need, and the recognition from the rest of the community that the need existed, there was a tremendous amount of buy-in fairly early for us. 

We opened a couple of months before COVID hit. So, we had maybe four shows, and then everything shut down. We were sustained by the community, right? Not just in physical ways, like money donations, but in engagement. We did Christmas bag giveaways, food giveaways, art supply giveaways. These are all things we’ve done out of this space. I know the neighbors, and when the music’s too loud, they’ll walk down and they’ll let us know. The five houses immediately surrounding the gallery are all owned by lifelong residents. They want to see the community in the neighborhood look beautiful. They want to see engagement, they want to see activity. We’re creating a community that has a culture of its own, and the stronger that community and culture is, the deeper the roots. 

We’ll be kicking off art classes starting in the summer. We’re also hiring youth from Youth Opportunities Unlimited to help manage and operate the gallery. Every year in July, we have our “SheArt” exhibition, which has grown. Last year we were able to activate the backyard space and do some live performances, some interviews, and have more of a festival feel. This year, we’ll be kicking down the fence that’s back there, expanding the backyard into that whole back space, to create a bigger imprint for what we’re able to do here. The goal is to continue to grow. We do live performances, outdoor exhibitions, fashion shows. All of those are things that the community knows are happening, and they feel comfortable coming in, to be engaged. One of the best things about the summertime is the kids walk in and come down and say, “What y’all got here this time?” We sit and we’ll talk about what they see and their insight has much more depth than I think we give them credit for, because they see things that I sometimes don’t see in the work. The most important thing is that they see themselves. They see representations of themselves on a large scale, in ways that they’ve never seen before, and that inspires a sense of pride in the place that you live and reside.”