Recently the internationally acclaimed master of Op Art, Julian Stanczak, who has lived and worked for the last forty years in Cleveland, was nominated for an honorary doctoral degree from Case Western Reserve University. We can’t  think of a painter who has ever received this award. The man responsible for this initiative is Richard Hanson,  istinguished Professor of Biochemistry at Case Western Reserve University, and the world’s […]

The black-and-white landscape photographs in Welcome to Hard Times—the opening exhibit of the Cleveland Print  Room—are a boisterous amalgam of primitive and high tech. The enlargements  are digital. But photographer Vaughn  Wascovich captured them on a DIY pinhole camera made of wood, and processed the images by hand, spraying,  splattering and brushing chemicals on the paper like a jazz man improvising in collaboration with the […]

How many serious commercial art galleries are there, here in northern Ohio? Venues that aren’t museums or college  campuses, but where people actually make a living by selling art? Places an exhibiting artist, or an aspiring collector, or  any informed visitor might find to be professionally impressive? Maybe 50, 100? Probably less.     Of course the nation’s heartland isn’t its artistic epicenter, not by the […]

Ruin porn–that much-maligned meme for artistic depictions of abandoned buildings–suffers from one intractable problem. Most of those who decry its gratuitous revelry in the abandonment of our cities also participate in it. James  Griffioen coined the term to deride those who fly into Detroit with expensive cameras to take photos they then sell for  thousands of dollars to non-Detroiters, exploiting the city for its horribly beauty […]

In art and in life, Frank Green made it his mission to push boundaries and make people uncomfortable. In the early nineties he butted heads with Thomas Mulready, director of the Cleveland Performance Art Festival, over the length of his performances. Frank wasn’t interested in editing his work to fit anyone’s schedule. While this made for a tense  relationship between two doyennes of the city’s performance […]