Timothy Callaghan makes art of the places that he sees in the ordinariness of his life. It is in some ways a contrary to the frequent practice of artists to travel to generate new ideas, looking for the unfamiliar, the dramatic, the exotic. (Admittedly there is benefit to this, as travel is one of the ways that we can see […]
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Winner of the 2025 Cleveland Arts Prize for Lifetime Achievement is painter and sculptor Mark Howard. Howard’s work is held in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art, and is visible in public art around the city. He has exhibited internationally and was included in the Biennale Internazionale dell’ Arte Contemporanea, Florence, Italy, 2001. He’s currently represented by HEDGE […]
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How do we know the world? How do we know how we belong? There are histories that are written and sometimes we tell ourselves that is all there is to know, provided, of course, that the history satisfies. If it is close but doesn’t quite satisfy, we fuss with it. This is a type of game—writing and rewriting history to […]
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Framed works of art can be imagined as windows. In art history and criticism, that’s a time-worn perception. Marcel Duchamp turned the idea inside out in his epic Étant donnés, a work of art that presents as a door with peepholes. Looking through the peepholes, the viewer experiences an illuminating, erotic world. Then you wonder what is being illuminated—the tableau […]
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Since the start of his career in the 1990s, the work of Dexter Davis has been expressive of the emotional and magical core of our humanity. Mostly, his work as been a dissective portraiture, reaching into the complex variability of how we face the world. He constructs, tears apart, rearranges, patches together, shreds and assembles. Much as all of us […]
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What could be more obvious or more pleasing than paintings of your hometown? Maybe with a comforting recognition of local landmarks? Maybe enhanced with a new flourish? This was the appeal of the Cleveland Calendars published in the 1980s and 1990s by International Printing Company, who commissioned a different artist each year. These annual commissions included Mary Lou Ferbert, Moses […]
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Laurence Channing had his first one-person show in 1991 at the William Busta Gallery on Murray Hill Road, Cleveland. His charcoal drawings, at once romantic and elegant and disquieting, found an audience in exhibitions that followed in 1992, 1994, and 1995. In 1997 he also presented prints—three drypoints and a lithograph. In the next few years he created five additional […]
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There is something about how we remember things, and then there is something about how we wish to remember things, and then there is something about how we wish things that we remember were different. These are some of the lenses of history. Mary Jo Bole draws upon her experiences, wide-ranging around Cleveland since childhood, while just a little drunk […]
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The arts, which have long promoted authenticity and social engagement, have spent the past year bravely extolling their accomplishments in transitioning from direct experience to virtual experience. It is understandable—everyone placed their best foot forward, working with what was possible. Still, as brave as everyone was, it was still life fallen apart. It has been a zombie life—not the […]
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We huddle around our electronic hearths, looking at each other through the flames, with an ache to touch. When we rise, we look around at walls that enclose, finding safety in contemplative ways, uneasily worshipping these melancholy days. There is an important question that the William Busta Gallery and its projects have asked over and over and over: As artists […]
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