Since his death in 2006, Rev. Albert Wagner’s family has been working to establish a museum to commemorate the self-taught artist and minister. After many years and setbacks, the Wagner Museum of Art has officially been established as a nonprofit. Bonita Wagner Johnson, the reverend’s daughter and driving force behind the museum, said she is also close to regaining […]
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This upcoming Sunday, Shari Wilkins and Laura Ruth Bidwell will discuss their ongoing exhibit at the Massillon Museum, Art as Journal. The show encompasses two series of images depicting locales significant to the photographers. For Promised Land, Wilkins took miniature Polaroid-style snaps of her father’s Illinois hometown, Cairo (pronounced “Kay-row,” unlike the Egyptian capital). Bidwell’s The Great Tangles presents scenes […]
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Where does a piece of art end, and the rest of the world begin? Such odd, philosophical questions are posed by Dawoud Bey’s Night Coming Tenderly, Black, one of the exhibits comprising the first FRONT International Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art. For the artworks in this installation gain meaning not only from what they depict, but from the venue in […]
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“To a large extent, I’m doing this show because no one else is doing it,” says John Morris, speaking about Artbelt: New Art from the Rustbelt, which he curated and organized. The exhibit, now on display at Lakeland Community College, had two primary goals. Firstly, to showcase art made in the postindustrial Midwest while the world’s attention was turned to […]
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The Cleveland Arts Prize has announced the winners of its 2018 awards. The 58th annual prizes recognize artists working in fields as diverse as architecture, literature, painting, and comics. A Lifetime Achievement Award was given to Rita Dove, a playwright, author, poet and lyricist based out of Akron. In 1993, Dove became the first Black Poet Laureate of the United […]
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The Morgan Conservatory’s mission is the preservation and advancement of “the ancient art of papermaking.” That mission is well-served by its exhibition opening this week, Unknown Terrain. Breaking preconceptions about paper in the fine arts, the Morgan’s show hosts more than a half dozen large installation made entirely or primarily out of paper. Paper is most often treated as a […]
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You will not find Lundsville, Pennsylvania on a map. It is the invention of photographer and Cuyahoga Community College instructor Mike Majewski, and the setting of his exhibition at FORUM Artspace. Though Lundsville does not exist, Majewski describes his show as a “documentary” of sorts. Like a social realist painter or author of historic novels, he uses fiction to recombine […]
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An exhibition title like Portals_Thresholds naturally raises the question, “Portals to where?” To give away the game: They take us back to where we are already, but via an unfamiliar route, offering new perspectives. Portals_Thresholds is now on display at the Cleveland Institute of Art’s Reinberger Gallery. It features works by Sara Ludy, Rachel Rossin, Rafaël Rozendaal, and the collaborative […]
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Some 6,000 new volumes are headed to the Cleveland Public Library, but they will not be available for either checkout or reference consultation. Rather, they are elements of one of FRONT International’s public art exercises, The American Library, conceived by Yinka Shonibare, MBE (RA). At this moment in American history, Shonibare’s title is almost a provocation. The spines of The […]
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What powers do words have? In a pair of exhibitions now ongoing at The Sculpture Center, Jonas Sebura and Anthony Warnick conduct two very different investigations of this question. Sebura looks at early efforts to manipulate reality directly through ritual and speech in the form of spells, incantations, curses, and prayers. Warnick uses the insights of philosophy of language to […]
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