The months pass and the memes metastasize as the COVID crisis wears on; we become less familiar to one another and less sure of ourselves. The fact that most of us wear masks in public, now, is especially confusing, obscuring emotional cues and familiar expressions. It’s as if much of the nuance of the social world was blanked out like the pages […]
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Cleveland’s newest gallery, Abattoir, is named for the meat-industry term, meaning “slaughterhouse,” in honor of the original function of the Hildebrandt sausage-producing complex where the space is located. Making its debut in 2020, a punishing year of pandemic and social upheaval, the name and the place might seem disturbingly appropriate. The gallerist-proprietors, Lisa Kurzner and Rose Burlingham, are curators with […]
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The painter Amy Casey lives in a smallish house that might be found (and often is) somewhere in one of her paintings. Like its resident, the house minds its own business on the sidelines, aware of, but mostly uninvolved in, the surrounding bustle of its quasi-gentrified Cleveland neighborhood. Over a period of years her activities have spread through the clapboard […]
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The eight artists at the exhibit Timeless Vision: Earth, Sea and Sky are modern proponents of an American tradition, responding to the natural world — to the night, to the sky, to the eternities found at Earth’s wild margins — with subtle, contemporary spirituality. Much of the work at Timeless Vision: Earth, Sea, and Sky at CSU reads (at least at first) […]
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I was surprised by Louis B. Burroughs’ works on canvas, after seeing photographs of a few of them in catalogs and on the painter’s website. I knew they were big, but it’s hard to imagine the impact of a large painting in real space. Several mural-like compositions, each ten and twelve feet long, were displayed down one side of the […]
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A sculptor works not only to shape a chunk of stone, but also to soften the terrible hardness of the world, downshifting the deeps of time and space toward human understanding. Chappelle Letman Jr., an African American artist born in Brooklyn, New York, who became totally blind when he was 41 years old, went on in the remaining three decades […]
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“hush” is a tender syllable, beginning as an exhalation and ending with an onomatopoeic sound, like lips closing for a kiss. Yet like so many sentimental things, the word can also cast a somber shadow, hinting that all breathing will finally stop. When ceramicist Kimberly Chapman uses it as the title of her current show at the McDonough Museum in […]
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The core of Stranger Beings is a mind-bending selection of dozens of eccentric works gleaned, in sober fact, from the widely known collection of the Richard and Alita Rogers Family Foundation. Known also as the Hieronymus collection (so-called after Hieronymus Bosch, Renaissance master of the grotesque), the eclectic mix of art objects has been an ongoing labor of love for […]
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“Bodies have their own light which they consume to live; they burn, they are not lit from outside.” Egon Schiele “The Get Up #2”, a recent painting on Yupo paper by Cleveland-based artist Darius Steward, shows a young boy dressed in T shirt and jeans as he rises from the floor, propped on hands and one knee. The image […]
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In a lush series of paintings depicting larger than life-size nude figures, Lauren McKenzie Noel explores the sensuous boundaries and psychological range of self portraiture. Nothing says “modern” with quite the same conviction as the self portrait, which in the centuries of Western art since Rembrandt has repositioned the human face and body in respect to history. In a self […]
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