FRONT Triennial returns to Oberlin with Installation by Ahmet Öğüt

As Prussian troops prepared to crush the 1849 socialist uprising in Dresden, anarchist thinker Mikhail Bakunin proposed that paintings from the National Museum be placed in front of the barricades, reasoning that Prussian soldiers wouldn’t dare destroy the works to breach their defenses. Inspired by Bakunin’s never-realized proposal, artist Ahmet Öğüt has created site-specific “barricades” featuring works from museum collections […]

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Fresh: 18th Annual Juried Exhibition at Summit ArtSpace

Being a recent transplant from Greater Cleveland to the Akron area, I was unfamiliar with most of the artists in Summit Artspace’s annual FRESH exhibition. Now in its 18th year, the juried show is open only to artists in Summit, Medina, and Portage counties. This year’s iteration presents 31 works selected from a total of 155 entries by Jared Ledesma, […]

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NATIONAL JURIED PHOTOGRAPHY SHOW AT FAVA

  For anyone interested in contemporary fine art photography, it’s well worth a trip to the Firelands Association for the Visual Arts (FAVA) in Oberlin for the biennial juried photo exhibition, selected this year by Barbara Tannenbaum, curator of photography at the Cleveland Museum of Art. On view through October 31, the show brings together works by 30 artists from […]

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Oberlin Exhibitions Explore Legacy of the Slave Trade, Everyday Objects of Asia, and Ukiyo-e Prints

THE REMARKABLE BREADTH of the Allen Memorial Art Museum’s collection shines in three exhibitions that run through late May at Oberlin College. Afterlives of the Black Atlantic presents works from the United States, Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa that explore the complexities of memory, identity, and belonging in the wake of the transatlantic slave trade. The exhibition—commemorating 400 […]

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The Allen Partners with FRONT Triennial in Three Oberlin Venues

The theme of architecture acts as a common thread binding three Oberlin exhibitions presented by the Allen Memorial Art Museum as part of the FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art. The museum’s Ellen Johnson Gallery, designed by Robert Venturi in the 1970s, offered a launching point for New York-based artist Barbara Bloom. Her installation responds to this complex, postmodern […]

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The Allen Celebrates 100 Years of Art for the People

“The cause of art is the cause of the people.” Those words, written by William Morris, are a maxim that the Allen Memorial Art Museum has lived by since opening on the Oberlin College campus in 1917. The letters are chiseled into stone above the front doors of the museum building designed by Cass Gilbert. Like its Cleveland counterpart, the […]

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Alternative Historical Narratives Emerge in Two Exhibitions by Fred Wilson

Artist and MacArthur “genius” grant recipient Fred Wilson has created two exhibitions—one of works that he made or fabricated, and one drawn from the collection of the Allen Memorial Art Museum—that explore themes of race, time, memory, and meaning. Both call on viewers to reconsider the historical narratives typically disseminated by scholars and museums.   Wilson has been making trips […]

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