Dwight M. Cleveland
Dwight M. Cleveland is a Chicago real estate developer and internationally recognized as a vintage film poster collector. He assembled the largest privately held and fully curated film poster archive, which he sold in 2016.[1]
Education & Career
Cleveland was born in a suburb of New York City in 1959. He spent three years as a commercial real estate broker with Cushman & Wakefield in mid-town Manhattan after graduating from the Brooks School and Columbia University. He established his company, Longstreet Renovation and Development Co., in 1987 after graduating from the University of Chicago Booth School. His company specializes in restoring historic single-family homes on the Near North side of Chicago.[2]
Posters
Cleveland began collecting film posters in 1977. His archive represented 115 years of film history and was comprised of over 45,000 items. There were posters from 58 countries[3] and all 83 "Best Picture Academy Award Winners Oscar Winners, with an average of 22 per winning film.[4] Every item was from a film recognized by some governing body including the American Film Institute, the British Film Institute, Internet Movie Database, Roger Ebert's Top-100 among others and every film genre was covered including silent, Golden Age, Race, western, sports, film noir, Sci-Fi, horror, and James Bond.[5]
Dwight wrote the first article on film posters to appear in a major arts publication, The Antique Trader[6][7], in 1981 while a student at Columbia College. Since then he has self-published books on various categories of his personal collection including 1920's and 1930's lobby cards[8], his best big paper representations from famous titles[9], and as varied as Mexican Golden-Age Diva María Félix.
He has lent images to newspapers, magazines and books over the years including Light + Noir: Exiles and Émigrés in Hollywood, 1933-1950 at the Chicago Holocaust Museum.[10] He has donated significant dedicated genres to institutions around the United States including the Academy Museum in Los Angeles[11], the Library of Congress,[12] and to the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.[13] And among those internationally, the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum at the University of Exeter.[14]
In July 2019, a portion of Dwight's collection was displayed at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida. The exhibit, titled Coming Soon: Film Posters from the Dwight M. Cleveland Collection[15][16], included over 200 rare posters (and 1,250 movie 'Coming Attraction' glass slides[17]) that span across multiple film genres from the early 20th century to the late 1980s. The exhibit ran from July 12 through October 29, 2019.
Dwight's book, CINEMA ON PAPER: the Graphic Genius of Movie Posters[5] was published by Assouline 2019. Ben Mankiewicz, host of Turner Classic Movies and grandson of Herman J. Mankiewicz screenwriter of CITIZEN KANE (1941), wrote the Foreword.
His latest collection is comprised of over 10,000 silent film lobby cards[18] focused on films relating to the careers of over 1,000 women whose careers have heretofore gone unnoticed and unrecognized. This collection was on exhibition under the title Behind the Camera: The Unknown Women of Hollywood at Poster House in New York City from April 7th thru October 9th, 2022.[19]
In March 2024, Cleveland contributed materials to Glamour & Grace: The Anna May Wong Legacy Unveiled, a focused exhibition at the San Diego Chinese Historical Museum highlighting the career and cultural impact of the pioneering actress. The show ran from March 1–10, 2024.[20]
The Anna May Wong portion of his 'Completist' collection is currently part of the exhibition Unmasking Anna May Wong at The Chinese American Museum in Los Angeles which opened May 24, 2024 and has been extended through April 27, 2025.[21]
In 2026, selections from Dwight’s collection of Maria Félix posters were on exhibition at the American University of Paris from March 24 thru April 17. This was the first ever retrospective on the most recognized Spanish speaking star of the Mexican Golden Age who made 47 films in Argentina, Spain, Italy and France.[22]
Public Reception
Cleveland has been the subject of two episodes on NBC'S The Hunt for Amazing Treasure[23][24] with a story on discovering the earliest known Mickey Mouse poster from Barn Dance (1929) and later a large find of U.S. movie window cards used as insulation in a house built during the early 1930s.
He has been interviewed, quoted, had letters to the editor, retrospectives and articles in a broad diversity of news outlets including the Wall Street Journal[25], The New York Times[26], The Hollywood Reporter[27], Classic Images[28], Classic Chicago[29], Movie Collector's World[30], the Chicago Tribune[11], The Sun Times[31], BuzzFeed[32], The London Independent[33], Forbes Magazine[34] and The ROBB Report.[35]
In 2022, Dwight collaborated with Dartmouth College's Media Ecology Project by allowing them to digitize 10,000 silent lobby cards in his collection as part of the Early Cinema Compendium. Dartmouth received a National Endowment for the Humanities Grant to fund the digitization. MEP is a sustainability project that develops literacies of moving image and visual culture history and functions as a collaborative incubator, fostering new research questions and methods. Those range from traditional arts and humanities close-textual analysis to distant reading, which relies on computational methods to help analyze graphics and visual culture components as data. For his contribution of scale to the project, Dwight was named to the newly created post of associate visual cultural curator. [36]
In 2023, Dwight gave a fellowship to Columbia University in honor of Frederica Sagor Maas which supports historical research on women artists from the 20th century silent film industry. The scholarship cultivates and encourages students’ abilities to preserve the work of female filmmakers, making possible the future expansion of archival resources and exhibits.[37]
Additionally, in March of 2019, Dwight was featured in the MeTV Network original show "Collector's Call"[38], an unscripted video series that focuses on notable collectors of pop culture memorabilia.
References
- ↑ Sjostrom, Jan. "Collector behind movie poster show at the Norton Museum has a new book out". Palm Beach Daily News. Retrieved 2021-12-07.
- ↑ "Founder". LongstreetRenovation. Retrieved 2021-12-07.
- ↑ Whitfield, Kay. "Dwight Cleveland: The Hunt | Classic Chicago Magazine". www.classicchicagomagazine.com. Retrieved 2021-12-07.
- ↑ "Cinema On Paper: The Graphic Genius of Movie Posters". Cinema on Paper. Retrieved 2021-12-15.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 Cleveland, Dwight M. (2019). Cinema On Paper. Assouline. ISBN 9781614288756. Search this book on
- ↑ https://www.antiquetrader.com/
- ↑ Cleveland, Dwight (Nov 25, 1981). "Old Movie Posters: Collecting and Dealing". The Antique Trader Weekly. 25 (47): 84.
- ↑ Cleveland, Dwight M. (2014). Lobby Card Highlights from the Dwight Cleveland Poster Collection. Chicago: Self. Search this book on
- ↑ Cleveland, Dwight M. (2014). Big Picture Highlights from the Dwight Cleveland Poster Collection. Chicago: Self. Search this book on
- ↑ Whitfield, Kay. "Dwight Cleveland: The Hunt | Classic Chicago Magazine". www.classicchicagomagazine.com. Retrieved 2021-12-07.
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 "Chicago collector donates movie posters to Academy". Chicago Tribune. Retrieved 2021-12-15.
- ↑ Allen, Erin (2012-03-06). "Lobbying for the Silver Screen | Library of Congress Blog". blogs.loc.gov. Retrieved 2021-12-17.
- ↑ “Into the Archives: Silent Western Film Lobby Cards.” National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, 8 Nov. 2022, https://nationalcowboymuseum.org/blog/into-the-archives-silent-western-film-lobby-cards/.
- ↑ Rare British Posters Donated to the Museum from the USA . 23 Oct. 2020, https://www.bdcmuseum.org.uk/news/rare-british-posters-donated-to-the-museum-from-the-usa/.
- ↑ https://www.norton.org/exhibitions/coming-soon-film-posters-from-the-dwight-m-cleveland-collection
- ↑ "Coming Soon: Film Posters from the Dwight M. Cleveland Collection". Norton.org. Retrieved 7 April 2021. Unknown parameter
|url-status=ignored (help) - ↑ "Travel Back In Time To Hollywood's Golden Era Through Movie Posters At The Norton". WLRN. Retrieved 2021-12-17.
- ↑ Cleveland, Dwight M. (December 17, 2021). "RWBTC Press Release". (PDF). Unknown parameter
|url-status=ignored (help) - ↑ "Behind The Camera: The Unknown Women of Hollywood". Poster House. 2021-02-05. Retrieved 2021-12-07.
- ↑ https://sdchm.org/past-exhibitions
- ↑ Strebin, Dan. "Anna May Wong: A Pioneer in Cinema History". Classic Chicago Magazine. Retrieved 2025-02-10.
- ↑ https://www.aup.edu/news-events/event/2026-03-25/vernissage-film-screening-enamorada
- ↑ "Hunt For Amazing Treasures - first aired on NBC in 1994". YouTube. Unknown parameter
|url-status=ignored (help) - ↑ "Hunt For Amazing Treasures - first aired on NBC in 1996". YouTube. Unknown parameter
|url-status=ignored (help) - ↑ Cleveland, Dwight M. (May 2, 2012). "Movie Posters a Great American Art Form". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved December 17, 2021.
- ↑ Sandomir, Richard (2019-10-11). "Philip Gips, Creator of Celebrated Film Posters, Dies at 88". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2021-12-14.
- ↑ Lewis, Andy (31 January 2013). "FIlm Academy Scores Significant B-Movie Poster Gift". The Hollywood Reporter. Unknown parameter
|url-status=ignored (help) - ↑ "Cinema on Paper: First Ever Publication Focused on the Dwight M. Cleveland Collection". Classic Images. January 2020. pp. 26–27.
- ↑ "Dwight Cleveland's Realm | Classic Chicago Magazine". Classic Chicago Magazine. Retrieved 2021-12-15.
- ↑ Cleveland, Dwight. "Beyond the Films Themselves Hollywood is Not Just Fancy Dresses and Gossip: Vermeer Rarity Exists in the Artwork" (PDF). dwightclevelandposterarchive. Retrieved 26 March 2019. Unknown parameter
|url-status=ignored (help) - ↑ Sun-Times, Selena Fragassi-For the (2019-11-12). "Chicagoan's movie poster collection a snapshot of American pop culture, is featured in new book". Chicago Sun-Times. Retrieved 2021-12-15.
- ↑ Epstein, Leonora. "10 Cool And Rare Vintage Movie Posters To Gawk At". BuzzFeed. Retrieved 2021-12-15.
- ↑ "Blockbusters of cinema's arthouse". The Independent. 2011-06-05. Retrieved 2021-12-15.
- ↑ Jones, Finn-Olaf (Dec 2007). "Collecting" (PDF). dwightclevelandposterarchive. Unknown parameter
|url-status=ignored (help) - ↑ Tolson, Shaun (Feb 2012). "Cinematic Endeavors". Collectoin: Published by Robb Report. XI, No 1: 74–86.
- ↑ Dartmouth to Digitize Rare “Lobby Card” Collection | Dartmouth. 29 Aug. 2022, https://home.dartmouth.edu/news/2022/08/dartmouth-digitize-rare-lobby-card-collection.
- ↑ Out of the Archive, Into the Spotlight: MoMA, Columbia University Silent Film Showcase Honors Women Artists | School of the Arts. https://arts.columbia.edu/news/out-archive-spotlight-moma-columbia-university-silent-film-showcase-honors-women-artists. Accessed 4 Jan. 2024.
- ↑ "Collector's Call". Facebook. 28 February 2019. Unknown parameter
|url-status=ignored (help)
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