Jan Ridgeway joked that her daughter calls her a hoarder. It’s easy to see why. Walk into one of her storage areas and you encounter tens of thousands of pieces, paintings covering walls and stacked in corners, original event posters, vintage Black magazines in full runs, china from countries across the world, paper dolls, baseball cards, trading cards, candlesticks, quilts and picture frames. Nearly 2,000 vinyl records. A sewing machine her mother bought in 1949, Ridgeway’s birth year, that still works. Artifacts that resist any single category.
But spend time with Ridgeway, ask her about anything she owns, and the hoarder theory collapses. She knows exactly what she has. Where it came from. What it means. And oftentimes she’s surprised at what it turns out to be worth. She said she isn’t accumulating. She’s archiving. And now she has her first public exhibit titled HERstory, HISstory, OURstory: The Journey.
About 70 pieces from her personal collection are on view at the Wade Park Community Engagement Center in the Glenville neighborhood, connected to Case Western Reserve University. The exhibit runs through October. The center, 11310 Wade Park Ave., is open from noon to 2 p.m. on Tuesdays and 4 to 7 p.m. on Thursdays.
At the opening in May, in front of about 50 people, Ridgeway moved through the space for close to an hour. At 77, she was electric — talking, pausing, her energy shifting between delight and the particular weight that she calls “goosebumps” that certain objects carry.
Growing up in Georgia
Most Clevelanders know her name from somewhere else entirely. For years she ran the Garden Valley Neighborhood House — the food pantry, library and training center that held a community together in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. Later, she was a member of the Cleveland Community Police Commission. She’s retired now, but she still shows up in the Kinsman neighborhood working with seniors, retirement or not.
Ridgeway grew up in a small rural community outside Albany, Georgia, in the 1950s. Her parents were educators, her mother a schoolteacher and musician, her father a principal. Education wasn’t something that needed to be discussed in their house. It was simply what you did.
The public library was another matter. One afternoon, Jan and her siblings walked over after school. The police brought them back in a squad car. Her mother’s response was neither a scene nor a collapse. It was quiet and precise: You have a better collection here at home than that library does. She was right. The family kept first editions, encyclopedias, Paul Laurence Dunbar volumes. Children from the neighborhood came to their house to do homework because there was nowhere else to go.
Becoming a librarian
What her mother couldn’t have anticipated was that the library her daughter wasn’t permitted to enter would become the engine of her life’s work. Ridgeway earned a library science degree, became a supervisor at the Anchorage Public Library in Alaska, and served as project manager on a $43 million library construction project. Back in Cleveland, she helped develop the Cleveland Public Library’s Garden Valley branch and spent a decade managing the Cuyahoga County Public Library’s Beachwood branch.
In a packed room at her exhibit opening, while Ridgeway spoke about her Georgia childhood, the farm, the sharecropping, someone in the room called out that they remembered their own family members doing the same thing. That’s when another attendee said what the room was probably already feeling: “This is the story she should tell. I’ve known Jan a long time. But I didn’t know this.”
That trajectory matters for understanding what the collection is. Ridgeway did not develop her eye through galleries or auction houses. She developed it the way a librarian and researcher does — by learning how to find things, trace them, place them inside a larger story. “I just see something,” she said, “and then I’m researching it.”
Love Cleveland? So do we! Explore more things to do in Cleveland.
Beginning to collect
It began with a doll. When Ridgeway was working at the Anchorage Public Library in the 1970s, a white coworker approached her with a Black ragdoll she’d had since childhood. She thought Jan might appreciate it. Ridgeway took it. Later she started visiting antique dealers around Anchorage. Then estate sales. She wasn’t working from a plan or a vision of what the collection would become. “I just loved the stuff,” she said. That was it, at first, a feeling of recognition, an instinct about what deserved to be kept. She didn’t yet know she was building anything.
Over years, the collection grew, and something else grew alongside it: the sense that what she was holding might amount to more than a personal accumulation. She began to think about a museum. A place where the work could live publicly, where people could come and understand what these objects held. Whether that museum comes to exist or not, the thought of it changed how she collected, with more intention, more documentation, more understanding of what she was preserving and why.
The exhibit at Wade Park is something she didn’t plan for either. But she’ll tell you that the timing feels right. The history she’s been holding for 50 years feels, in this moment, urgent.
Curating the exhibit
Janice Eatmon-Williams, director of school- and community-based outreach programs at CWRU, has partnered with Ridgeway in community work for decades. She put it plainly: “I literally took stuff off her wall. I have no shame.” It was Williams who kept coming back for items to display at the center, first for Black History Month, then Women’s History Month, then National Poetry Month, until the ask became simple: Just bring the whole collection.
The exhibit is organized into distinct spaces. You enter through an Africa room. A drum from Africa anchors the space. Masks that Ridgeway collected during her years in Alaska, pieces of a culture she was drawn to long before she fully understood why, line the walls. At the center sits a cotton wreath she made herself.
Next the Jim Crow room stops people. Advertisements, ephemera – like postcards, receipts – artifacts from the era of American apartheid. To stand in that room inside a Black woman’s collection is to understand that she didn’t look away from that history. She looked directly at it and decided it needed to be kept.
Then comes the partnership room, which tells a different kind of story, one of community and creative relationships. Original artwork and signed posters from artists Ridgeway worked alongside over decades to create cultural programming. The pieces came out of real collaborations, including a six-month partnership with the Detroit Arts League called “Rock My Soul” that later became the model for a presentation at the Super Bowl. The pieces in this room don’t feel like acquisitions. They’re physical representations of relationships.
Preserving community memories
Back at the exhibit opening, she asked, “How many remember Malcolm Brown Gallery?” and hands went up. She talked about Sankofa and people called out. The Black Cultural International Parade — people remembered it. The African American Family Picnic. The Second Line. Places and events and institutions that existed and then didn’t, and she has the flyer, she has the postcard, she has the record to remember them by.
The main gallery holds a broader mix, paintings, prints, historical objects. And on one wall, six generations of family photographs on her mother’s side and six on her father’s, each in an antique frame she selected herself. The frames are part of the archive too. A family’s depth made visible, held in objects that are themselves a form of collecting.
Fighting for value
Ridgeway will say it plainly: “Things carry their own history and their own stories,” she said. “And sometimes you have to fight for that.” Her collection is full of evidence for what happens when the collector fights for an object’s value.
The quilt is the clearest example. Ridgeway acquired it decades ago, probably in the 1980s, and believed from the beginning it dated to around the mid 1800s and had belonged to an enslaved person. The evidence was in the materials — a specific dye particular to that period, a binding not of thread but of rope consistent with the time. She brought it to a professional for assessment and was told it was not what she thought. Not from slavery.
Then a well-known Black quilting association that carries the tradition of knowledge examined the quilt. They confirmed what Ridgeway had known all along.
The pattern holds across the collection. Ridgeway once bought a landscape painting at an estate sale not for the image but for the frame. When she went to remove the picture and keep the frame, she found three original lithographs folded inside as packing material — from the Georgia Minstrels, not the white performers in blackface the word usually conjures but from a rare all-Black minstrel troupe that had claimed the form to generate their own income. Original lithographs from a group like that are extraordinarily rare. Ridgeway returned to the seller, explained what she had found, and walked away with the frame, her money back, and one of the lithographs.
She has learned, over time, to look something up and find it worth far more than she paid because her understanding of value was ahead of the market to begin with.
Tracking history
And then there are the letters. Tattered, yellowed correspondence tracking her grandparents’ payments on their Georgia land from Pittsburgh during the Depression — receipts sent back to prove the money arrived, the paper record of a family holding onto what was theirs against considerable effort to take it away. In one of those letters, a detail so casual it almost passes by: her mother picking pecans alongside a young Ray Charles, two people working the same Georgia farm fields. This is exactly how history survives — in what people wrote to each other, in what someone had the foresight to keep, in what a daughter thought was worth carrying across decades and thousands of miles.
Her most sobering piece may be a set of slave restraints, a head piece and wrist chains, actual artifacts, that came to her through a picker when a small museum was closing. She didn’t have the $1,500 to pay for them so she made a payment plan. At the opening at Wade Park, when she brought them out, the room went quiet.
Looking forward
Ridgeway didn’t set out to build an archive. She set out to keep things she loved. The archive is what that love became over 50 years of looking, researching, acquiring and holding onto objects that no institution was rushing to preserve.
A museum is still her goal. A friend called out from the audience at Wade Park that she needed to sit down and write about the collection. Ridgeway laughed because she knows the work is unfinished. Community leader, musician and gallery owner Vince Robinson, who was among those at the opening, agreed; a collection like this deserves a museum. And as Cleveland continues developing its lakefront, Robinson suggested that conversation is worth having.
What is on view at Wade Park through October — 70 pieces, a fraction of what she holds — is a rare chance to encounter a private archive in public.
When asked how it feels to have her collection outside of storage, Ridgeway smiled and said, “It’s kinda amazing that this is here right now. When I started I didn’t think this would be the result. Some people would say I’m a little bit obsessive and a little bit intense when it comes to the African-American experience. But to know what I have been doing is to know who I am.”
HERstory, HISstory, OURstory: The Journey exhibit: The exhibit runs through October at the Wade Park Community Engagement Center, 11310 Wade Park Ave. Public viewing times are from noon to 2 p.m. on Tuesdays and 4 to 7 p.m. on Thursdays. Send an email to arrange other viewing times.
