Erika Cleveland - Washington, D.C. 

http://www.transformativehealingdolls.com
https://www.facebook.com/Transformativehealingdolls

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Artist, writer and healer, Erika Cleveland was trained as an art therapist at NYU. After working clinically for many years with children and adults, in settings such as International Center for the Disabled in NYC and Boston Children’s Hospital, she studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Her current focus is on the ways in which changes, big and small, cataclysmic and celebratory, force us to grow and reinvent ourselves. In addition to offering healing doll workshops, she makes commissioned healing dolls. Most recently she was juried into the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria, VA where she makes and shows her dolls. She has a studio at the Jackson Art Center in DC now, studio 15A. She is an Associate artist at the Torpedo Factory, in studio 311, the TAG gallery. The TAG (Associates) gallery has a website now .

Erika has completed Barb Kobe's Medicine Doll online class and has taken several classes from Pamela Hastings.

Erika featured artist on the Torpedo Factory blog Read here

In the Washington Post, Washington, D.C.  Museums Review
In the galleries: Erika Cleveland’s ‘Healing
​Dolls’ are playful in their duality

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HANDOUT IMAGE: Erika Cleveland. "Black Lives Matter flip doll." Media: Soft sculptural and mixed media; Size: 31 x 9 x 2 1⁄2 inches; Year: 2017. (Erika Cleveland/WAS Gallery)
By Mark Jenkins
February 15, 2019There’s as much grim fairy tale as sunny new-age whimsy stitched into Erika Cleveland’s fabric figurines. Some of the most memorable creations in the D.C. artist’s “There, There: Healing Dolls as Solace in an Off Kilter World” are “flip dolls,” whose identities depend on which end is up. Hanging like trapeze performers at WAS Gallery, the funky mixed-media beings can twirl from joy to loss, sun to moon or literature to pop culture.
Trained as an art therapist, Cleveland is drawn to fables of duality and rebirth. Her subjects include a selkie, the half-seal half-woman of Scottish lore, and a woman emerging from a dragon. The face of Baba Yaga, the mythic Slavic forest spirit, peers from inside a bear’s head, and on her dress is attached a tree on which new human souls are germinating. (The souls, which appear in other pieces, as well, look less like fruit than newly hatched yellow chicks.) With an eye to current events, a “Black Lives Matter” doll is part policeman, part potential target.
Many of the artist’s needle-felted creatures are kid-friendly, if not exactly cuddly; her “Woodland Spirits” suggest the influence of Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are” illustrations. But the selection also includes “The Experience of Pleasure,” a vulva-like blossom whose folds are defined by lines of beads. Cleveland’s embodiments of fertility and transformation can be as earthy as they are fanciful.
So, too, are the soft sculptures and small paintings of Lindsay Hall’s “Luscious and Pluscious.” Brightly colored and often sparkly, Hall’s stuffed fabric objects initially appear more suited for a pre-K classroom than do Cleveland’s playfully grotesque dolls. A closer look at the IA&A at Hillyer show, however, reveals its sensuality.
Admittedly, much of the craving seems to involve sugary treats. The paintings are executed in candy and cupcake hues, and their titles invoke sherbet, doughnuts and marshmallows. But some of the fabric pieces feature interlacing forms that resemble plush versions of yoni and lingam, the sacred Hindu embodiment of female and male.
The Las Vegas-based artist is compelled by “pleasure, desire and intimacy,” according to a gallery note. When Hall titled one painting “Jelly Jelly Jelly Roll,” she surely was aware of the phrase’s history as a jazz and rhythm-and-blues double entendre.

Check out Erika's video about her latest work HERE