It was less than 24 hours before opening night, and no one planned to get much sleep. The floors, painted black days before, were still sticky with newness. The walls laid freshly white, waiting for art to be hung. “Do you want a single shadow to fall beneath the objects?” asked Bill Jordan, one of the two owners of River House Arts in Perrysburg. Adam Sanzenbacher, one of the following night’s presenting artists, stroked his goatee while visualizing light arrangements, and then went to grab one of his pieces of blown glass from the other room.
River House Arts will celebrate its fifth anniversary this year at 115 Front Street in Perrysburg, along the Maumee River. During the past half-decade, River House has presented works by over 100 artists, many of them from Northwest Ohio. For each exhibit—a new show is presented nearly every month—Jordan and his wife, Paula Baldoni, alter their space to artists’ specifications. They rearrange and sand and saw and paint. For their very first show, they stapled steel chains to the ceiling and hung unframed paintings between suspended sheets of clear glass. River House is always morphing, always new.
Opening night
On Wednesday at 9pm, the walls of River House were bare. When I returned the next evening at 7pm, the house was filled with art and well-dressed spectators. It was the premier of an exhibit by two young glass artists, Sanzenbacher and Kristine Rumman. “[River House] caters directly to the artist,” said Sanzenbacher. “They just want their artists to be successful.”
Each piece of art was displayed differently. Hand-held-sized structures that looked like brilliantly layered mountains from Jupiter sat starkly atop white pedestals in a window-walled room looking out into the street. A large installation of opaque white glass that looked like modulated prosthetic hips stood mounted along a back wall, like an archaeologist’s reconstruction of a recently extinct geriatric dinosaur.
Sometimes presentations bleed into the art itself. A wooden plank the size of an ironing board stood with three glass horses nestled atop beds of wood shavings. The horses all appeared to be dying or in distress. The piece, entitled “Marmalade, Buttercup & Candyboy,” was named after the first three horses reported to have died from ingesting black walnut, which is poisonous to horses. Sanzenbacher explained the concept to Jordan, who then carved the plank and shavings to Sanzenbacher’s specifications. The wood and glass—arranged just the night before—now seemed indivisible.
A long partnership
Jordan and Baldoni’s first collaborative project happened while they were students at Ohio University. They were both political activists, and organized a festival to protest apartheid in South Africa. They soon put on their first art show together, strung together in a house of college students. They’ve now been married 28 years. “Neither of us could do this without the other,” said Baldoni.
Baldoni is petite, with closely cropped black hair and an aesthetic burst of silver jutting outward from her front bangs. She worked in non-profit management for decades, in Boston and Ann Arbor, before opening River House. “I’m glad we’re here,” said Baldoni. “I wanted to help build a community I want to live in . . . with people who think differently.”
Bill Jordan is a professional photographer. He has photographed every president from Ford to the most recent Bush. He leaves Toledo on assignment for a month each year, photographing the war-beaten Middle East or land mine-struck parts of Africa. River House was originally his own studio before it began displaying work by other artists. “I like to show the work in a way that the viewer can immediately, instantly identify,” said Jordan. Jordan and Baldoni believe that an honest presentation often requires a lot of work. With each exhibit, River House re-adjusts with a new purpose, like a photo lens, forever trying to bring art into clearer focus.
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Dorian Slaybod is 28, a local attorney
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and happily living in Toledo.
