“I decided to become the person I needed when I was a kid.”
ANTWOINE WASHINGTON
As a kid growing up in the ‘90s, Antwoine Washington fell in love with drawing replicates of characters he watched during the Saturday morning cartoon lineup, including Tiny Toons, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Animaniacs. This childhood fixation flourished into a larger desire to learn and perfect his craft, leading him to matriculate at Southern University and A&M College in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where he later received his B.A. in Studio Art.
While at Southern, Antwoine deepened his understanding of the relationship between black history and art in America, inspiring him to further the legacy of Harlem Renaissance artists like Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett, and Jacob Lawrence. There, he decided that he too would use narrative art to capture the history and stories of the black experience in America.
After college, he moved to Cleveland, Ohio and began working for the U.S. Postal Service as a mail carrier, but the burning desire to make art resurfaced soon after. His dream was to create full-time, so he left his job at the post office to pursue a career in art. While taking this leap of faith, however, in November 2018, Antwoine suffered a stroke. During his recovery, he used his art to help get through panic attacks and the numbness he was experiencing on the right side of his body.
Since the stroke, he continues to seek out opportunities to show his work. His art has been displayed at the Cleveland Print Room, Worthington Yards, Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, Rooms to Let in Cleveland’s Slavic Village, and Artist Archives of the Western Reserve, (MoCHA) Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, and SPACES online exhibition. He also was commissioned to do a mural in Cleveland Public Square by Land Studios.
Antwoine co-founded a non-profit organization called the Museum of Creative Human Art (MOCHA), where he teaches graphic design courses. Antwoine also is a recipient of the Cleveland Arts Prize Verge Fellowship Award of 2019. He currently works and lives in Cleveland with his wife Carlise and they have two children, Grayson and Luca.
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