The Way of the Artist

There’s a common theme among the following alumni. Sure, they’re all artists, some using paint and canvas, some the written word, some timeless artifacts, some the stage.

But many arrived there after upheaval, doubts and setbacks. They have traversed winding roads on the way, and it made them all the better for it. More grounded in their expression. More confident in their craft. 

The Tough Act to Follow

After nearly four decades at Playhouse Square — a visionary and unparalleled leader — Gina Vernaci (MS ’03) is set to retire in February 2023, but the impact of her work on Northeast Ohio and its performing arts community will be felt for decades to come. 

To say she traveled far from where she started in life profoundly understates the scope of Vernaci’s success. She grew up poor in St. Louis, completed an undergraduate art degree against the odds and arrived at Playhouse Square in 1984, starting out so low on the organizational ladder that her feet hadn’t quite left the ground. Her first position had no title and no apparent future. It was a time of great uncertainty in Cleveland’s theater world. Performance spaces had gone dark, and Playhouse Square was running deep in the red. 

Still, Vernaci committed to the organization, and that commitment paid off handsomely. As Playhouse Square built itself up from a struggling organization with a couple of theaters to a cultural powerhouse with 11 performing arts spaces, Vernaci rose through the ranks to become executive producer in 2014. Among other things (such as managing educational programming and outreach), she was responsible for overseeing programming for all Playhouse Square’s performance spaces, annually bringing to the stage 1000 shows that grossed nearly $50 million per year. 

Interviewed by The Plain Dealer as she moved into that role eight years ago, Vernaci said she intended “to keep Playhouse Square alive and well.” Instead, she sent the organization into the stratosphere. Under her leadership, the organization’s KeyBank Broadway Series, which she launched, grew from eight to 24 performances per engagement, and the number of season ticket holders skyrocketed to 40,000, giving Cleveland the largest base of touring Broadway subscriptions in the country.  

Vernaci rose still further at Playhouse Square, named the organization’s president and COO in 2018 and its first female CEO in 2019. Then, 2020 arrived, and with it perhaps the greatest challenge a CEO could face — steering her organization through the nightmare of COVID-19. When theaters shuttered, the losses were staggering. Yet under Vernaci’s leadership, all planned live performances went virtual and educational programming flourished, serving over 95,000 students, an unprecedented number. 

Last summer, as Playhouse Square played host to the first post-shutdown touring production in the U.S. with a run of the musical “The Choir of Man,” Vernaci was interviewed for WKYC-TV’s “Boss Ladies of CLE” series. Asked what it was like to be putting live productions back on the stage, she spoke of the emotional impact it has on people when they can once again experience live performance together — how natural and at the same time profound the experience is — clearly still personally and deeply moved by the power of theater even after all these years. 

The Raconteur

Scott Raab (BA ’83) is nothing if not irreverent, and he makes no apologies. 

His unabashed style has led to a prolific career. 

He’s scored a who’s who of celebrity interviews: Tupac Shakur, Taylor Swift, Phil Spector, Paul Giamatti, Dennis Rodman, Sarah Silverman, Phillip Seymour Hoffman and many more — a “Rolodex” of contemporary celebrity by any measure. 

He’s written columns and essays for dozens of publications, including The New York Times, GQ and Esquire. 

He’s published four books —“Real Hollywood Stories,” “The Whore of Akron: One Man’s Search for the Soul of LeBron James,” “You’re Welcome, Cleveland” and most recently, “Once More to the Sky: The Rebuilding of the World Trade Center.” 

And he was a co-producer of the ESPN film documentary “Believeland,” a film helmed by another Clevelander, director/filmmaker Andy Billman.  

Raab starred in the sports doc — famously recut to feature the Cleveland Cavaliers’ 2016 NBA Championship — with his son, “A dream come true,” Raab said. 

His history with CSU is a complicated one, where he claims he “stumbled to a BA in English, on and off, and I never once thought to take a journalism course. So, of course, this was the one of the trajectories my career headed in.” 

Now four books into a career, Raab has careened across the pop culture landscape and is still never at a loss for words —though he does wax poetic about being “semi-retired, with some occasional screeds, bleats and plenty of cuss words!”  

Raab was “mad about Bukowski, Kafka and Blake” during his CSU days and believes in the late Charlie “Bird” Parker’s dictum: “If you don’t live it, it won’t come out your horn.” To that end, when he had a shot to “partake” with the likes of Rolling Stones’ guitarist Keith Richards, he didn’t blink.  

Despite his success, Raab never strays far from that “earthy,” direct, dyed-in-the-wool Cleveland kid that he still is deep down inside.  

“With the experience of being a Viking, the first story I ever wrote for GQ, 25 years ago, was about [former basketball coach] Kevin Mackey after he left Cleveland State,” said Raab of imbroglio often being at the center of his storytelling. 

“This experience isn’t abstract. It formed me in a lot of ways. And gave me an attitude where you might feel nervous or you might feel intimidated by diving into something [expletive] cringy or uncomfortable, but what difference does that make? You’re still going to show up and do the best you can,” he said.  

“I learned all of that at CSU and I am grateful for all it has given me.”

The Steelworker-Turned-Author

Eliese Goldbach (MFA ’17) could have died as a steelworker. At her orientation, she learned of a slew of ways she could be maimed, crushed, burned, sliced and/or diced. It could have sent the faint of heart for the exit. But that wasn’t who Eliese was. She’d overcome challenges before, and this would be no different. True to form, instead of sinking into the tedium of the work, she found a reason to live and the fuel to fulfill her lifelong dream of authoring a book. 

“Rust: A Memoir of Steel and Grit” is that book, born of her days at the Arcelor-Mittal steel mill on Cleveland’s riverfront, but also of her formative years spent aspiring to the nunnery. It’s born of her sexual assault in college and its aftermath. Of her battle with bipolar disorder. 

“It was like nothing I’d ever seen before, so I started writing about the mill,” she said. 

“Then it seemed natural to put these other stories about myself and my earlier life into that framework.” 

She’d toyed with the idea of a memoir while in graduate school at CSU, but the elements of her story never connected like they should have. It was a puzzle missing key pieces. 

Eliese finished her graduate coursework and thesis in 2012, but a minor error on her graduation form prevented her from officially receiving her degree. For most, it would have been an easy fix, but not for Eliese. 

“The problem seemed like a monumental hurdle as I was struggling with an unshakable bout of depression at the time,” she writes in “Rust”. 

“My life had followed a cascade of unpredictable events, and somewhere along the line I’d lost control.” 

Instead of graduating, she painted houses and lived in a mouse-infested, one-bedroom apartment, barely scraping by. When a friend showed her a paystub from the steel mill, Eliese saw dollar signs and applied. She desperately needed the money. 

“I don’t think I’ll ever have health insurance that was quite that good again,” she laughs. 

Her motivations were clear. She needed to pay her bills. Move into a better apartment. And the steel mill seemed the best option. She expected that, at least financially, her life would turn around. But what she didn’t account for is that she’d end up taking home something far more valuable: a greater sense of self. 

Eliese found a real community among the steel mill’s crew of characters. And there were, indeed, many characters. They prodded, poked and teased her, but they also challenged her and her worldview. On the dusty floors and amid the blazing furnaces, she’d found the missing piece of her story and drafted her entire memoir while she worked there. 

She’s since moved on, first as an adjunct professor and now as a community writing instructor, but even now, she longs for the mill. 

“I enjoyed the people. I enjoyed the environment,” she said  

“It felt like a family down there.”  

The Mount Maker

Dante Rodriguez (BA ‘03) would find it a compliment if you never saw his work. In fact, that’s the way he thinks it’s supposed to be. 

He’s a mount maker at the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA), and it’s likely millions of visitors have paid him the pleasure of ignoring his craftsmanship. 

Dante describes his job as “a metal fabricator but for art”, and it’s an important one. He’s the reason those masterpieces – sculptures, objects and paintings on view remain in place. Upright. Suspended in space, even.  

To him, he’s a facilitator of the art-viewing experience. Just the works themselves deserve to have a spotlight, not the pieces holding them. 

But when he visits other museums, his focus is always on the work of fellow mount makers. He can’t help It, much to the dismay of his friends and family. 

“When you become a museum employee, you become a steward,” he said. 

 “All we do is preserve the work for future generations.”

If he notices something amiss, like an object precariously dangling at risk of potential damage, you can be sure he’ll point it out.

This was not his intended path though. At CSU, he focused on drawing, but his experiences as a student worker in the campus art gallery exposed him to a world beyond the art itself.

Dante started at the CMA in security, but when the museum embarked on its massive expansion nearly two decades ago, his student experience aligned with an opportunity as an art handler.

“And it just rolled into where I am today,” he said.

Word is, he’s at the top of his craft. 

Kathy Curnow, an associate professor in CSU’s art department, noted that friends of hers at the Smithsonian said he’s one of the best in the country. 

The Free Spirit

Karly West (BA ’05) left CSU with a degree in Spanish and had no intention of using it. 

She’d thought that the major would have combined three of her top interests in humanities, art, and education. But nearing graduation, she met the sobering reality that it wasn’t her path. 

In fact, she didn’t know what was. 

“I was kind of left with: ‘I don’t know what to do,” she said. 

By chance, she landed at a bakery, decorating cakes. She had a natural propensity for anything artistic. Back when she was a kid, her idol was Jim Henson. And though she lacked any experience, she took to her work at the bakery quickly.

Molding the fondant sparked her interest in sculpture, which led her to launch the Republic of Cute, where she created and sold quirky wedding cake toppers and figurines. 

But Karly knew she was more than a sculptor. The Republic of Cute had amassed a loyal following, even garnering attention from American Greetings. But she knew she was a designer, too. Surely, someone would hire her as a graphic designer. She just had one problem: no portfolio. 

To create one, Karly pulled from another of her interests — folklore. She loved analyzing stories like Little Red Riding Hood and would devour weighty tomes dedicated to the study of folktales. But she knew others weren’t likely to share that interest and the only other option to learn the stories were in children’s books. There had to be a way fill that hole. 

Her pet project would be to repackage popular folk tales in a book for the crowd who didn’t geek out at the exploration of the witch’s motivations in Hansel and Gretel. It would also be the proof to would-be employers that she had the requisite design chops. 

“In doing all of those drafts, I just got more and more into it, and it became clear to me: I really want this book to exist.” 

And in the absence of securing full time graphic design work, Karly focused almost exclusively on creating this new take on folklore. She calls it “The Scholarly Banana,” because — well — bananas are cute. And the glasses give him the air of an academician. 

“I try to identify the stories that I think are the zaniest, most bonkers, just crazy stories,” she said. 

Add to that some of the scholarly research, her knack for sculpting wacky figures and her design skills, and the finished product is a something you’ve never seen. 

“This is the ultimate of everything I love, that is so integral to who I am,” she said. 

It also lifted her out of the doldrums. Up until she decided to create “The Scholarly Banana”, Karly had experienced a steady stream of rejection. But finally, she found her fit. Now, she’s produced three books in the series: “Little Red Riding Hood,” “The Juniper Tree” and “Fitcher’s Bird.” 

“The best therapy you can have is to find something you really love,” she said. 

“And spend as much time as you possibly can interacting with that thing you love.” 

The Keeper of Rock History

One day Joe Wickens (MA ’14) handles a dress Whitney Houston wore on the award circuit. On another, it’s David Gilmour’s black Stratocaster, one of the most iconic guitars in rock history. 

“If you hear [Pink Floyd’s] ‘Money’ on the radio, that’s the guitar you’re listening to,” he said. 

“That’s one of those guitars that was heavier than it physically was. You could feel a certain weight and you can feel a certain aura coming off it for sure.” 

As the collections and exhibits manager at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he’s the keeper of rock history. Nearly every artifact that arrives at the museum passes through his white-gloved hands. 

It’s hallowed ground and a role that was a long time coming. 

One of his favorite exhibits 

When Cleveland hosted the NFL Draft, the Rock Hall created an exhibit highlighting the past 55 years of Super Bowl halftime shows. 

“I couldn’t have been more proud of the team to come together and make that happen under a very tight deadline.”

Joe, who specialized in museum studies in CSU’s graduate history program, began his career at the Rock Hall in security. At the time, it was the only job he felt qualified to pursue. And even though it wasn’t his ideal position, he was in the type of space that he’d fallen in love with as a child. Plus, he was certain a door would open somewhere down the line. 

So, he learned everything he could. The grounds. How curators used the galleries. The names of the accountants.

“A museum is more than just the curators and the people that are on the team to create the exhibits,” he said.

After three years, and two promotions in the security department, he became a curatorial coordinator. A little over a year ago, he was promoted to his current role.

Now, his work involves the painstaking process of ensuring the museum’s over 40,000 music artifacts are catalogued and preserved properly. He’s also a part of the team that mounts the exhibits. And then, there’s being a tour guide, one of his favorite parts of the job.

“Probably the most satisfaction is from delivering those tours and getting to engage with people directly and give them that insight into the show that the casual visitor walking through might miss,” he said.

“[It’s] getting to highlight those things that really draw out the story that the curators are trying to tell.”