Mark and Anne Spurgeon embrace their familial bond with ‘Blood Harmonies’

When Anne Spurgeon was in high school, she accompanied her older brother, Mark Spurgeon, on a formative spring break trip to New York. While in the city, the two caught a Fishbone concert at the Cotton Club and visited a handful of galleries, including the Guggenheim Museum. In reflecting on the trip, Mark now says it was his sister’s lifelong pull toward art that gave shape to much of that week’s itinerary.

“Anne was always the artist in the family, although everyone in the family is creative, for sure,” said Mark, who joined Anne for an early June interview at Blockfort, where the siblings’ new duo exhibition, “Blood Harmonies,” will kick off with an opening reception on Friday, June 5. “And so, it’s interesting to think about that trip now, because I think for me it was more about music and being there [in the city], but I know I was thinking about you wanting to see and visit these cultural institutions.”

Anne was more recently able to return the favor when a few years back she began inviting Mark to join her on occasional road trips to museums in Cleveland, Toledo, and Mansfield – brief excursions on which the two would absorb the displayed work and then talk and compare notes.

For Mark, these treks had a similarly transformative impact as that early NYC trip had on Anne, leading him to reengage with his surroundings in a way he hadn’t since Covid hit. “And when Covid happened, I got to be a homebody, and I got used to looking at things online, I guess. And I forgot about the experience of seeing things in person,” he said. “And the scale of these larger works, or the detail of the smaller works, the presence they have in person makes it a totally different experience.”

The brother and sister have always had a shared interest in art that they traced back to the childhood lessons each took with a neighbor, Mr. Saling, an Ohio State University engineering professor who taught art to kids on the side. “And Mark would come home with this stuff, and I was like, ‘That’s what I want to do. I want to do what Mark is doing,’” Anne said, and laughed.

In the years that followed, two continued along similar paths. Both received life-changing high school art instruction from a progressive nun who would wear dashikis rather than a habit, and who would close the door to her office at the end of the day so she could smoke and listen to comedy records by the likes of Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby, and George Carlin. And both later studied art in undergrad at Ohio State, taking classes with a number of the same professors, though years apart.

And yet, despite a lifetime of shadowing one another in these creative pursuits, Anne and Mark had never before exhibited together, their work having only shared a space on one previous occasion, at the Matter News silent art auction at Streetlight Guild a couple of years back. 

Stepping inside of Blockfort, however, the connection between the two became immediately apparent, each artist routinely incorporating geometric shapes into their individual canvases, which are also painted in similarly vivid color palettes. In addition to these solo paintings and a series of circular sculptures by Anne, “Blood Harmonies” also features five collaborative works that the siblings completed over the last year by passing the canvases back and forth – a process that over time drew out different dimensions in each. 

“With my own work, I’m always willing to destroy something to get it back to a place where I’m happy and excited and it feels fresh. … There’s a boldness, or a willingness to trash a piece in the pursuit of something better,” said Mark, who compared his approach to a gorilla armed with a marker who makes wild, gesticular marks to see what sticks. “And Anne, in my assessment, proceeds a little more cautiously, where she’s looking at nuanced things. … And one of the biggest learning things for me was figuring how to let go of that, and to step back and begin to propose smaller things, like giving a gorilla a smaller crayon.”

Anne, in turn, said she gradually found herself mirroring Mark’s bolder strokes, adding expressive streaks of pink in one painting that trace an arc alongside his turquoise markings. “And I started almost shadowing him in places,” she said. “And even some of the drips. I think you started letting [the paint] drip in places, and then I homed in on that at some point and started using it. And it was interesting, some of that visual language you were laying down, I started speaking myself.”

Though Mark and Anne remained in touch throughout adulthood, the relationship naturally deepened after Anne moved back to Ohio in early 2019 after nearly two decades spent living in NYC. And while the two said they’ve always gotten along, both allowed that the bond has grown stronger owing to some combination of maturity, the selflessness that comes with parenthood, and the reality that siblings have a tendency to pull closer in the wake of a parent dying, which the Spurgeons experienced in 2018. 

“I definitely think about the surviving parent more, and think more about the immediate family,” Mark said. “But I also think the time apart allowed me to see [Anne] fully realized, especially the fact [she] had picked up and moved to New York and were then working at a couple major cultural institutions, teaching and leading in these advancement and learning departments at MoMA and the Noguchi Museum. … When you’re close to somebody for a long time, it’s hard to see the changes. But once you see them from farther away, those are easier to see. … Maybe I saw you as my little sister, but after you moved away, I finally saw you as a peer.”