Cuyahoga Arts and Culture Board President Nancy Mendez apologized to artists present at the CAC Board meeting December 13. An apology was the first priority expressed in the 2023 Support for Artists: Community Engagement and Planning report, commissioned by CAC and delivered a week earlier by a contractor on behalf of Assembly for the Arts. CAC director Jill Paulsen said […]
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The arts sector in Cuyahoga County has long sought a way to stabilize the revenue stream for its public support, which since 2006 has been a 30-cent per pack tax on cigarettes. Among many other possibilities discussed by policy makers or suggested (taxing real estate, hotel stays, dine-in restaurant meals, beer and wine, soft drinks) the prospect of a tax […]
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Cuyahoga Arts and Culture’s entire budget for partner organizations making individual artist grants each year–$400,000 –is less than one percent of Deshaun Watson’s annual salary. Indeed, the sum of all grants CAC’s board recently approved for all organizations combined amounts to less than 25 percent of that one football player’s annual salary. This tangential comparison doesn’t just highlight the difference […]
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Cuyahoga Arts and Culture’s Board of Directors meets at 3:30 Wednesday, December 13 in the Louis Stokes Wing of Cleveland Public Library, and if you care about the arts or if you like reality television, you should go. The Board’s public behavior has been an embarrassment to the sector for all of 2023. The good news is that the terms […]
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David Buttram estimates that he went 42 years without having a solo show: between a 1982 exhibition at Karamu House (during which he says he sold every painting) and one in 2022 at Framed Gallery on Waterloo, he appeared regularly and was even sought-after for group shows, but didn’t get the spotlight himself, to present a broad collection of his […]
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Planning for the CAN Journal Archive party has us looking back through the years at art on the cover of every issue of CAN Journal. The cover of any publication is an iconic space, as Shel Silverstein and Dr. Hook noted about Rolling Stone, and all the more so for a quarterly magazine about art. In just under 12 years, […]
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It’s an extremely varied collection of media and message in Barbara Martin’s exhibit, Now and Then, on view August 11 through October 7 at BAYarts. The artist’s highly skilled scratchboard portraits of birds mingle with found object assemblage and 2D collage in a couple of different veins, and one larger installation that makes a category of its own. Taken altogether, […]
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If you are holding CAN Journal in your hands as you read—printed on paper, in the familiar, long-understood format of a magazine—it is entirely possible that you have never looked at its website, blog, weekly e-newsletter on a computer screen. Indeed, the staff and board of directors learned through the strategic planning process that one of the first things readers […]
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To be in The Big Ass Art Show–on view at Lakeland Community College, Valley Art Center, Artists Archives of the Western Reserve, and BAYarts—a piece of art had to measure at least four feet on a side. It’s a simple rule that does a lot of sorting: a lot of artists have simply never made something that large. And for […]
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The dynamic of artists re-energizing neighborhoods only to be displaced by increased rent is so familiar that it needn’t be explored here, beyond pointing out that in Cleveland, Tremont is the go-to case in point. The gentrification dynamic has played out to such a degree in Tremont that there was a time when art scene regulars were mostly writing off […]
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