Jeffrey F. S. Neumann — Cleveland, Ohio
Started making artwork in 1974. Still making. Still in Cleveland. Collage, assemblage, mixed-media sculpture, painting — a practice built from found materials and fifty years of attention.
BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art. The work moves between abstraction and representation, between recurrent structures and singular invention. Obsessed with surface — with what found material reveals about itself when combined with intention.
Cleveland has always been part of it. The industrial texture, the vernacular that keeps showing up in the work whether invited or not.
Jeffrey F. S. Neumann — Cleveland, Ohio
Studied at the Cleveland Institute of Art with focus on painting, printmaking, and sculpture. Early work with prism paper — holographic, iridescent, surfaces that shift with the light — became an obsession. Rauschenberg on the walls. The permission never left: found material was as valid as paint.
The practice stayed rooted in Cleveland throughout: studio-based, self-directed, showing through independent galleries, street fairs, and the self-built spaces of artists working in the city.
This is a personal record, not a sales history. Fifty years of unbroken making, kept so it isn’t lost — the way five hundred pieces already were.
"Making is attention. You look at a piece of found material long enough, you see what wants to happen. It doesn't matter if it's beautiful or broken. Matter reveals itself if you're patient."
"The best exhibitions were the ones nobody heard about. A corner of a studio. A storefront for three weeks. The ones that didn't need to justify themselves because they weren't trying to sell anything except the work speaking to the person in the room."
"I never waited for a gallery. I kept building my own."