Timeline
Home » Timeline
1928
Cleve was born in Staten Island, NY to a family of 7 children. His father was a truck driver, his mother a homemaker, and his parents owned their house.
1928
1945 – 1948
Cleve joined the U.S. Army at age 17 and served in Japan. See his memoir “In the Shadow of the Statue of Liberty.”
1945 – 1948
1948 - Sixties
Cleve married and had 2 daughters, Valarie and Lesley. His brother taught him to weld and that became his occupation and craft. He used the GI Bill to study art in NY schools such as the New School. He was politically active in the Congress of Racial Equality and acted as a potential renter in Staten Island to expose discrimination in the real estate “redline” strategy. He participated in Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington. He managed a laundromat in Staten Island. He and his first wife divorced.
1948 - Sixties
Seventies
Cleve gave pottery classes at his studio, the Potter’s Wheel, then Earthworks. He built kick-wheels for the students, built kilns to fire the pots, dug and blended the clay from S.I,’s clay pits. He was a leader of the “Blacks on Staten Island History Project.” In 1970, he met Jude. He used his welding skills at various job sites in NYC. He was an art professor at Baruch and Staten Island Colleges in NY. He exhibited at Richmondtown Restauration, Staten Island Community College, Karamiekos Gallery and Baruch College Gallery and was a board member of the S.I. Council on the Arts. When fuel prices soared, he designed and welded wood stoves, got them UL-approved and opened a business selling them.
Seventies
Eighties
Cleve and Jude bought land in Pennsylvania and he built a beautiful house on it using recycled building supplies without a blueprint. In 1985, Cleve joined Jude in Zaire where she was Peace Corps Associate Director. He was always photographing; he was even arrested in Zaire for photographing a street sign. He continued creating but also bought many artifacts and masks from itinerant vendors and accumulated a large collection of African art. Back in the U.S., they bought a home in DC in 1989 and Cleve entirely renovated it over the years so that it sold in 2015 for nine times more than it had cost. He exhibited in dozens of solo and group art shows in NY, DC, MD, VA.
Eighties
Nineties
From 1991 – 1994 Cleve and Jude lived in Dakar, Senegal. Lacking art supplies, he used natural materials for collages and began photographing doors (see his book “The Doors of Senegal.”)His collages were exhibited at the IFANNational Museum in Dakar, and his photographs were displayed at the Sorano National Theater of Dakar. He was arrested in the town of Richard Toll,Senegal for photographing a sugar cane field because the police mistook him for an activist. Returning to DC in 1994, Cleve continued to exhibit his work in the U.S.
Nineties
2000’s
The terrorist attack in 2001 provoked many artists to react with their media, including Cleve. His mixed media collage was accepted and featured in several shows in Georgia, Massachusetts, and New York, as well as online shows.
2000’s
2010’s
Cleve collaborated with artist Harriet Lesser to produce a mixed-media show at Parrish Gallery called “Under Surveillance” in 2010. He did an installation on free speech at Artomatic in 2012, and prior to his move to Florida in 2015, he exhibited a mixture of work at Takoma Park, MD. In Florida, 2015 – 2020, Cleve’s last works were collages using the tin he had collected during his 25 years in DC. A few of these colorful and whimsical works were exhibited and sold at the Baobab Gallery in Bradenton.
2010’s