Checking in on Julian Stanzcak's "Carter Manor" in Cleveland

We stopped in downtown Cleveland on our way back from western NY a few weeks back to look at Julian Stanczak’s wonderful 12 story mural Carter Manor, which was painted in 1973 and restored, after a long period of deterioration, in 2018. I’ve been meaning to check it out since I first read about the restoration back in 2020.

Stanczak (1928-2017) was a Polish-American artist and central figure in the Op art movement, which emphasized optical effects in 2D visual art. The term “Op art” was, in fact, coined in the 1960s in reference to his work.

Stanczak had an extraordinary life story. As a young person at the beginning of World War II, he spent two years in a Siberian Gulag, where he lost the use of his dominant (right) hand. After the war, he and his family traveled as refugees to the Middle East, Uganda, and England. In the mid ‘50s, he attended art school at Yale, where he studied under modernist master Josef Albers. From 1957 until the end of his life, he lived in Ohio, where he taught in Cincinnati and Cleveland. You can see a bunch of his paintings on his website; they are so beautiful.

Environmental by Julian Stanczak, 1987, 50x44"

Carter Manor was originally painted in 1973 on a historic 1916 hotel of the same name. It was one of the “City Canvases”—an ambitious civic initiative that resulted in 12 large-scale wall paintings intended to help uplift downtown Cleveland’s struggling urban core.

City Canvases closely followed or paralleled similar efforts elsewhere in the US that introduced large-scale murals into distressed urban environments, including in New York, Baltimore, and Detroit, as acts of community care.

After decades of wear, Carter Manor was reborn thanks to FRONT International, an arts organization that produced free art festivals in Cleveland in 2018 and 2022. FRONT commissioned a handful of new murals for the 2018 festival, recreating Carter Manor at the same time as a nod to the those ‘70s-era energies and a tribute to one of Cleveland’s most illustrious artists.