Saucy camels, side-eyed snakes, and indignant cats are frozen in a blur of graphite and watercolor in A Sweet and Sour Journey with Elmer W. Brown and Langston Hughes, on exhibit at ARTneo now through July 24, 2023. Brown and Hughes, friends from their time together at Cleveland’s Karamu House in the 1930s, collaborated on “The Sweet and Sour Animal […]
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Over the past two years, Katie Butler has become synonymous with her depictions of fish as a mechanism to draw political anxieties into the domestic sphere. Her latest exhibition, State of the State, at Abattoir Gallery, is a gutsy step in a different direction. She employs her tongue-in-cheek commentary through new forms and confronts the issues she cares about directly. […]
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Praxis Fiber Workshop hosted the inaugural ‘Praxis and Practice’ Fiber Arts Conference from June 23 to June 25, bringing together a diverse community of fiber artists and designers. At the heart of the conference was the celebrated TC2 loom, a remarkable Digital Jacquard machine crafted by Digital Weaving Norway. This computer-controlled and manually-operated loom has revolutionized the creative process for […]
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Back in February CAN Blog reported on the disappearance of Loren Naji’s public art installation, “They Have Landed,” an eight-foot orb constructed primarily of plywood. “For more than 10 years, Loren Naji’s iconic sculpture ‘They Have Landed’ sat politely on a slip of greenspace in front of the West 25th RTA station, but now it’s gone,” noted our previous coverage. The removal was […]
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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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Now on view at the Gallery at Lakeland Community College, we find portraits without manners, staring back at you; an exuberant post-modern sculpture looking like an escapee from the 1980s; and an extraordinary number of works made of mixed media—all part of the 80 pieces of work in this year’s May Show, on through July 14. Joy abounds, with restraint. […]
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Collective Arts Network is thrilled to have won recognition in the Press Club of Cleveland’s state-wide, peer-reviewed All Ohio Excellence in Journalism Awards, held Friday, June 2 at the House of Blues. According to the Press Club’s rules, “Judging will be based on significance, clarity, writing, enterprise, effectiveness, originality and other criteria deemed appropriate by the judges. Judging will be […]
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Collective Arts Network is a mission-driven non-profit organization providing a collective voice for–and accessible, high-quality reporting and commentary on–the visual arts in Northeast Ohio. Since CAN’s first organizational meetings in 2011, CAN Journal and the website CANjournal.org have become critical pieces of Northeast Ohio arts infrastructure. We work for the success of the entire visual art sector in Northeast Ohio. […]
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My grandmother used to say: you can laugh or cry, but you must choose. She passed when she was 101 years young, at home in her own bed, sound of mind, body, and spirit. Despite that life offers inconveniences, perhaps daily, and sometimes, mind-bending tragedy, her strategy of pursuing joy throughout her life appeared to work. Brooklyn-based artist Judy Giera […]
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Velocity stands still in the portraits and interiors by Justin Brennan in his solo show, Wide-Eyed, on view at HEDGE Gallery until June 30, 2023. There’s flurry all awry here, in the unfinished movement of living. Portraits of the famous and not-famous gaze right back atcha, gallery-goer, triumphant in their purples and teals and blues and peaches. These armatures of […]
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