Meet the 2025 Cleveland Arts Prize Winners

For more than six decades, the Cleveland Museum of Art has celebrated the artists who defined Cleveland’s creative community and the next generation who keep it alive and thriving. The next group of Cleveland Art Prize winners will be honored on Oct. 22. These creative minds have shaped Cleveland’s art scene by telling their stories, making the city become one with the art and supporting the next generation of Cleveland artists. 

Ali Black

Emerging Artist Award, Literature

For some, writing comes naturally — so much so that it becomes a part of them. That is the case for Black. “I discovered I was good at writing when I realized I couldn’t be without it,” she says. “To me, my passion and dedication for writing said a lot about my skill set as a writer.” The Clevelander recently released a poetry collection, We Look Better Alive, that dives into very personal and autobiographical poems about her life. Outside of her own writing, she is the co-founder of Balance Point Studios, a nonprofit dedicated to teaching and sharing art, where she teaches classes in her writing progam, “The Most Promising.” 

Jason Vieaux

Mid-Career Artist, Music

Around the age of 5, Vieaux got his first guitar when his mom brought home a classical one. The Buffalo native started to expand his repertoire, leading him to study at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Afterward, he would take master classes in Rochester in front of international artists. “They would all want to talk to my parents and my teacher after I played for them,” Vieaux says. “It was really through the international players that we got this sense that they were telling us that there is a real future there.” That future would lead him to winning a Grammy in 2015 and teaching the next generation at the CIM.

Mark E. Howard

Lifetime Achievement Award, Visual

Almost two years after graduating from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1986, Howard landed his first show at the Avanti Gallery in Little Italy. From there, the sculptor and painter went on to create public art all around Cleveland and Northeast Ohio for a show that will never end, leading to his Lifetime Achievement Award. “(Public art) becomes a part of everyone’s experience, whether or not they realize it,” Howard says on why his favorite art pieces are the ones outside the gallery. His art also consists of infrastructure elements he designed for the Euclid Corridor project, such as trash cans, tree grates and removable curbs.

Jennie Jones

Special Citation from the Board of Trustees

Jones is known for her architectural photography, which has captured major projects such as Tower City, the Cleveland Public Library and Gateway. “I took pictures of all the wonderful architecture around here, and they were just ordinary pictures,” she says. Those ordinary images have appeared in The Plain Dealer, Forbes and other major and local publications. After a five-decade career, she donated 22,000 images and photo materials to the Michael Schwartz Library at Cleveland State University. Before the donation, she had used her photography for educational purposes in teaching art history.

Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation

Barbara S. Robinson Prize for the Advancement of the Arts

If you have been around Cleveland enough, you have probably seen the Mandel Foundation’s name on a plaque somewhere. There’s also a chance you have seen Joseph’s sculptures around the Mandel buildings. Mort had close ties to the Cleveland Museum of Art. Overall, the three brothers cared deeply about the humanities, especially the arts and cultural institutions that have put Cleveland on the map. Those values haven’t been lost. “It’s a mistake if we think the arts are confined to the elites,” says Steve Hoffman, chairman of the Mandel Foundation. “I think the arts have something to speak to everyone.”

Greg Peckham

Robert P. Bergman Prize

As a city planner, Peckham is in the business of combining art with community development and sees it as a way the city “can strengthen communities and neighborhoods across Cleveland.”  But Peckham isn’t the artist; he’s the connector between the artist and the community, serving in roles at LAND Studio and the Cuyahoga Valley Land Conservancy. “Amazing talent can make everyday, ordinary landscapes look different and help people see something that they wouldn’t otherwise see,” Peckham says. With his work at the Cuyahoga Valley Land Conservancy, he is now connecting the city with nature. 

Robin Pease

Martha Joseph Prize for Distinguished Service to the Arts

When Pease was a young girl growing up in New York, she was surrounded by diverse cultures, and many of the people she called “aunt” and “uncle” were not her family. “In sharing their histories and cultures, I felt all of their cultures belonged to me,” Pease says on how her career in culturally diverse storytelling started. Since then, she has shared the stories of the world, reaching thousands of children in Northeast Ohio through Kulture Kids, a nonprofit she founded. Her work has helped foster cultural pride, inclusivity and empathy through music, theater and interactive engagement with the kids.