“Housewife,” “neurosurgery professor,” “art teacher,” “vagabond”: these are the self-proclaimed professions included on the biographical questionnaires of artists who exhibited in the Cleveland Museum of Art’s May Show. From 1919 to 1993, this juried exhibition featured the work of Northeast Ohio artists and craftspeople. Beginning in 1924, the May Show office solicited biographies from participating artists. Many also included resumes, head shots, and personal memorabilia. The varied artistic media and levels of experience of the exhibitors is highlighted in these records. Altogether, the biographies illustrate the opportunities that the May Show provided hundreds of Ohio artists of diverse backgrounds. For many artists they are the only recorded information about their life and work. May Show biography files were digitized in 2019 as part of a larger project to digitize all records of the exhibition and are now available on the Internet Archive at https://archive.org/details/may-show-bio-files . The collection provides an exciting opportunity for artists, researchers, art collectors, and others to learn more about Northeast Ohio artists of the past century.
