Kinheart Studio welcoming place for artists in Cedar Rapids

CEDAR RAPIDS — At age 3, Deb Crerie picked up an orange crayon and knew she would be an artist the rest of her life. At age 71, she’s still learning, teaching and sharing art at her Kinheart Studio in the historic Cherry Building, an anchor for the NewBo District.

Kinheart also is an anchor for emerging and professional artists, open to all ages.

“This welcoming and collaborative space is for everybody’s comfort and catharsis,” Crerie told The Gazette. “It’s really, really important to create an invitation — that you have an invitation to come and show your work here, to be an artist here, and to claim yourself as an artist.”

That means everybody.

On her website, kinheart.art, Crerie (pronounced KRE-ree) explains that Kinheart (KIN-hart) is “named for the common bonds we all share (LGBTQA+ Family) (Hearts) (Art). Made by people who have not always felt welcome as artists and collaborators. This studio is about who gets to occupy space and whose comfort and catharsis are attended to. In the art world, Kinheart’s efforts are to create an invitation to join in and in doing so, create a safer, more buoying place.”

Crerie, of Marion, financed the studio with a portion of her teacher’s pension, and the point of this endeavor is to make art, not money.

She’s mounted about 10 shows so far. Kinheart is a non-commission-charging gallery, so when the artists’ pieces sell, Crerie doesn’t take a cut. Every dollar goes to the artists.

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Current exhibition

Right now, her work is a grind — in the best way. Until May 3, her studio/gallery is splashed with color from the “Grinding Skate Deck Show.” In skateboarding, to “grind” is to scrape the metal bars between the wheels along an object or obstacle, like a bench or railing

“It’s a metaphor also — just grinding during life and achieving something out of nothing. It’s kind of like when you start with a blank canvas, you create something out of nothing,” said Thomas Clark, 42, of Cedar Rapids, a mural artist known as O!nk. He helped facilitate and curate the show. Among his own colorful murals is “We Are CR,” a black and white hand forming a heart, visible along Third Street SE.

While grinding is a common skateboarding trick, the exhibition is anything but common.

More than 500 people lined up on opening night March 16 to see 45 hand-painted and crafted skateboard decks — the wooden surface without wheels — grouped horizontally or vertically on the walls in the gallery and studio spaces. Eleven of the decks are not for sale, but the others range from about $40 to $1,200, and on opening night, visitors claimed 17 of the pieces.

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Viewers would never guess the youngest artists are 12 to 15 years old. Their sophisticated pieces fit right alongside works by established pros like Mary Zeran of Cedar Rapids, who posted on Facebook that “making a skate deck has been on my list for years.” Adding that she’s happy with the way her piece turned out, it reflects her bright abstract collage style, with a vertical blue stripe woven over and under swirling colors.

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Other artists painted bright cartoons, anime or abstract designs. Some are groovy, with ’60s mod patterns. But a few works barely look like a skateboard. One is covered with bark, another has been carved along the painted lines. In another, “deconstructed” skateboard elements hang on a grid.

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Collaborations

Networking has been integral personally and professionally since Crerie and her wife, Kay Rzasa, spent about 15 years traveling from their home on the East Coast to Cedar Rapids to visit their son. About two-and-a-half years ago, they moved to Cedar Rapids, and Crerie opened her studio.

“This is a really nice place,” Crerie said. “The people are wonderful. They’re smart. There’s culture, there’s art, there’s a lot of colleges, there’s a lot going on, and we thought we could possibly live here.”

So they bought a condo in Marion but had to wait through the pandemic to move. Then during a holiday market, Rzasa discovered the Cherry Building and told Crerie she had to see it, saying, “It's 100 years old. It’s so cool.”

They walked around the building, and an available spot about halfway back on the second floor caught Crerie’s eye. Lijun Chadima, the building’s co-owner, just happened to be right behind her and asked if she’d like to see the space.

“She opened the door for me and I got under that wooden ceiling and thought, ‘OK.’ I’ve had (a studio) for 35 years in Arlington, Va. It’s the largest artists’ cooperative, probably in the country,” with 25 studios. “This (Cherry Building space) is twice the amount of space, and I was able to afford it and get it repainted.”

The studio’s 650 square feet is a visually welcoming space, too, in the former 1919 dairy equipment manufacturing building.

“It’s not huge,” she said, “but it’s got a really wonderful vibe.”

That vibe extends outside the building, and into the Newbo District’s maker spaces, festivals and small businesses. Networking is how the “Grinder” show came about.

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Clark and Crerie met early on and did a Juneteenth art show together, and Clark knew Nate Sherwood, owner of Eduskate Board Shop at 208 12th St. SE, who was plugged into the local skateboarding scene.

Clark and Sherwood were familiar with other skate deck shows, and mentioned that possibility to Crerie. She liked the idea, so Clark put out feelers on Facebook, “and the rest is history,” he said.

Having teens’ artwork in the current show warms Crerie’s heart. She studied art in Washington, D.C., and Fairfax, Va., earning a BFA in painting, and MFAs in printmaking, and teaching, and spent her career as a teacher and working artist.

Now finding the intersection between photography and digital programming, she creates large-scale pieces, and her “Ecotone” is on view in the “Land/Scape” exhibit at the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art.

When she looks at the skate decks painted by the teens, she sees “tremendous promise.”

“There's just so much potential, and there's just so much more that can be happening. And we're hoping that we're encouraging young artists to do another one.

“I’m working with Thomas on a catalog so that these art decks that go into someone else’s collection, we’ll be able to give at least a paper catalog or an e-published catalog to the artists. So when they say, ‘Oh, yeah, I had this skate deck show,’ they’ll have something to show for it.”

Clark likes seeing the “youthful rawness about their work.”

“There’s a lot of release I see in their work, and there’s a lot of anime hints in there,” he said. “But it’s just true and really real, and I really appreciate it.”

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Art as cleansing

Art is cleansing for the soul at any age, and that’s a quality Crerie strives to foster in her own work and through her gallery.

“You have to have self-esteem to make art,” she said, “and you have to kind of hold yourself and tell yourself that you’re an artist. It becomes difficult when you run into problems or you get to the dark night of the soul place of creation.

“But my art is not any better than anybody else’s. I don’t hold myself above or beyond anybody else’s capability and expression. And I think that's what this gallery for me is about — the way that I don’t want to make barriers for people to be able to make their art and show their art.”

She knows how it feels to be a woman passed over for next steps in a university setting.

“And then I found a way to get other steps and to continue to make my art. It wasn’t stopping me, but it certainly was a blip along the way,” she said. “I think I would have scanned groceries or painted houses to be able to make my art. But I was lucky enough to find a job, where I’m teaching art and learning and teaching and making, all together. That was a good fortune,” she said.

“But I think women are limited. People of color are limited. People of different gender expression are limited. People of a younger age are limited. The art world has been very hierarchical, and that hierarchy is starting to break down. We're starting to talk about it a lot more and how to kind of pull it apart.

“And so in order to open up this art world, I feel like we’re kind of cracking open a new media for Cedar Rapids because this is not the first skate deck show in the world — there have been others, but not in this city. And then we had a new audience. When all of those people showed up at the opening, it blew my mind.”

Comments: (319) 368-8508; diana.nollen@thegazette.com