Bio

Biography

Patsy Coffey Kline is a Cleveland-based artist known for her multimedia, live, interactive art installations held in odd places. She is best know for her Gallery Ü ARTcade Project, Gallery Ü Haul and ReThinkPink. She was born in Kentucky in 1960, raised in Lake County, and graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1990 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Graphic Design. She studied modern philosophy, marketing and business at Cleveland State University, where she has been employed for ten years as a graphic designer. She graduated in the top ten percent of her class at CIA and received a Bronze Addy in 2009 from the American Advertising Federation for her CSU design work. In Kline’s multimedia work, she uses sewing, lighting, videos, Super-8 films, photographs, watercolors, tires, found objects, junk car nuts and bolts, doll parts – basically anything she can find because she hates to see things go to waste. Kline is also a compulsive storyteller and writer who has always been addicted to questioning the rules. Her art is highly emotional, for she makes her life known as well as her beliefs and her feelings. Kline’s life and art are inextricably entwined. Her work is a controlled exhibition of the self: often tragic, sometimes funny. She creates installations where we openly question authority, shake our complacency, and are more aware, connected to and appreciative of ourselves and our surroundings. Kline is always seeking ways to share these ideas in a meaningful exchange. She is constantly crafting environments where the audience’s active participation becomes a necessary piece of the whole. It is the emotional response that makes each piece complete. Kline holds a brazen, audacious, fearlessly optimistic belief that art can change the way people look at themselves, others, and ultimately the world. She wants to make art that is relevant to everyone, while awakening their curiosity and desire to question. Kline believes that if you tell someone they will forget; show them and they will remember. But if you involve them, they will understand. Kline’s main goal is in creating opportunities to experience art!

Liz Bly of the former Free Times called Gallery Ü Haul an ideal example of the DIY spirit that pervades Cleveland’s art scene. Since 2002, Kline has slowly been turning her two-family home in Tremont into a studio where she holds art MIX events. Kline created art MIX (ers) with the intent to foster the development of new works across the disciplines of theater, dance, music, visual art, and creative writing and to encourage interdisciplinary collaborations between artists, students, and guests. The main focus is to experience the creative process via live art and audience participation. “I started holding MIX events in the early 90’s as a way to energize audiences during gallery openings and nonprofit fund-raising benefits. MIX venues eventually grew into bringing attention to otherwise unnoticed or abundant urban wastelands throughout greater Cleveland, Ohio,” states Kline. Each MIX event is site-specific and since 2006, the installation environments have been in and around a rented U-haul truck. Sites range from traditional gallery settings, empty buildings, vacant lots, street corners, bridges, alley ways and roof tops. They are random in nature and are mostly artist-run-and-funded events. Gallery Ü Haul’s mission is to be a fun and accessible opportunity to experience and discuss the importance of the arts in our everyday lives. The hope is to energize viewers by powerfully evoking questions regarding the importance of art and individual identity. And to also act as a social sculpture that encourages the need for change.

Kline’s other work includes: ReThinkPink/breast cancer awareness; Garage Door Gallery/artist garage turned gallery; CLÜMAP/sight and sound map of Cleveland; The Bed Project/ artist bed; The Bridge Project/audiovisual soundscapes; Train of Thought/story of Train Ave.; Lucky Penny; Forgotten Block and Plant an Artist/answers to foreclosure and general vacancies; PAIR/international artist exchange; TAC/Temporary Art Centers; FÖD/simple gardening and cooking; STÖR/a barter-swap-free shop; and Terry’s Tire Swings/random tire swings made from tires collected along Train Ave.; Habitat for Artists/using the vacant lots and houses on my block




My Story
I was born in 1960 — a girl who likes to draw and dance – an observer of Appalachian origin — an Urban Appalachian. I place the welfare of my family and neighbors above my own advancement; I believe we move up pretty much together or not at all. My father is a carpenter, my mother a homemaker. I was born in Kentucky and raised in northeast Ohio. When I wasn’t in school I was discovering life on my grandparents 100-acre tobacco farm in Kentucky. When I was a baby my parents moved north to Cincinnati during The Great Migration, then further north in search of employment. But I never lost my acute understanding of poverty, ruggedness, self-sufficiency, isolation, and how to reclaim abundant natural resources.

Religion has long been one of the most powerful forces in Appalachia. My father’s family followed the Holiness movement who sought to promote a Christianity that was personal, practical, life changing, and thoroughly revivalistic. Whereas my mother’s family followed the Southern Baptist Convention who are evangelical in doctrine and practice specific beliefs based on biblical interpretation. These influences have given me a sense of independence and a distrust of hierarchies.

I have a strong sense of education, literature, music and the arts. I love Folklore and story telling — ghost stories are my favorite. My family has always followed the Biblical tradition of planting by “the signs,” such as the phases of the moon, or when certain weather conditions occur. I love a little home-distilled alcohol once and a while and mountain music unaffected by modern music is the only real music. I am attracted to ballads, the fiddle and banjo, African-American blues, and Bluegrass Gospel songs. Shhh, I can hear my grandma singing “I'll Fly Away” while doing her daily chores. Her quilts still warm my bed and I would give anything to have her fried chicken, chickens I would chase given the chance, or help my grandfather feed the livestock. I loved feeding the pigs the best. I grew up on what my family created with their bare hands. I find it sad that there are those who don’t know how to build a house or plant a garden, or worse, don’t even care.

Since I was a kid I have wanted to meet whoever it was that made up all the rules we blindly followed. They have been very hard to find.

I am interested in the way that people blindly conform to society and commonly accept an attitude of complacency when they shouldn’t. People simply do not question the world around them the way they should, or the way children often do, or in the way of one who has seen beauty and horror. Does a group always have to follow rules of behavior? Otherwise will there always be chaos and dysfunction? I am addicted to questioning rules. I always have been. I know first hand how what you see isn’t what you get.

These qualities have prepared me for a life as an artist.

For me art connects the common and uncommon, the idealistic and the rational. I find myself constantly crafting various environments where I can discuss these ideas. I am always searching to have a mutually meaningful exchange. Often this means working collaboratively with other artists and an audience by bringing them into the process of a project. It is true that if you tell someone they will forget . . . show them and they will remember . . . but if you involve them they will understand.

I want my art to be relevant to everyone — I want to reach people in ways that are fun and engaging. I intend what I do to be witty, but at the core of each piece I want there to be a solemn critique of what rules us. It’s important to be able to laugh while actively questioning the various power structures that rule our daily lives. Therefore, I tend to use familiar but odd objects in my art to get it noticed yet keep it approachable. Hopefully making way for people to open up to opening their minds.

I have the brazen, audacious, cocky, fearless and optimistic belief that art changes the way people look at themselves and others, therefore the world. That belief rules my hardheaded approach to bringing about those changes.