Jeffrey
F. S. Neumann

Started making work in 1974. Still making. Still Cleveland. Collage, assemblage, mixed-media sculpture, photography — a practice built from found material and fifty years of attention.

At the Cleveland Institute of Art, prism paper — holographic, iridescent, surface that shifts with the light — became an early obsession, alongside vacuum-formed plastic, old fluorescent and CFL tubes, sheets of glass. Rauschenberg was on the walls: combines built from anything, the idea that found material was as valid as paint. That permission never left.

Cleveland has always been part of it. The industrial texture, the particular Midwestern light, a vernacular that keeps showing up in the work whether invited or not.

An estimated 500–1,000 early pieces are gone — lost to water damage in storage, undocumented, unrecoverable. This archive exists because of that. 1,084 works documented from 1974 to now.

The practice spans collage, assemblage, mixed-media sculpture, and photography. Recurring motifs — targets, crosses, the Mr. SNOWmann figure, compact discs, warplane silhouettes — appear across the archive as a sustained visual vocabulary built over fifty years. The Guernica series alone runs to 232 works.

BFA in Industrial Design, Cleveland Institute of Art.