CIA’s Sketchbooks on Display at RRPL

CIA sketchbooks - images and ideas on display

A traveling exhibition of Cleveland Institute of Art student sketchbooks will be on display at the Rocky River Public Library from December 16 through January 31.

The CIA Traveling Sketchbook Project started when the college’s incoming freshmen were provided with identical sketchbooks over the summer. The students were instructed to complete them during their first month at college. Library visitors can interact with these 65 graphic memoirs and vicariously experience the life of a student in the first month of art school.

The project was designed to support this year’s summer reading at CIA, in which the entire college community was invited to join the new students in reading "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian", a novel by Sherman Alexie, with illustrations by graphic novelist, Ellen Forney. Just as the semi-autobiographical novel is formatted as an “absolutely true diary”, CIA students were given an opportunity to fill their own “absolutely true diaries” with images and ideas in response to the novel and documenting their first month away from home.

After the exhibition’s run at the Rocky River Public Library, the collection moves to the Fine Arts & Special Collections Department at Cleveland Public Library from February 10 through March 8; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland from March 15 through April 30.

For more information, e-mail sketchbookproject@cia.edu.