Are video games art? Back in 2012, The Museum of Modern Art in New York purchased 14 video games for their permanent collection, and several museums have shown video games on their walls, including a major exhibition earlier this year at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and last year at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Video games are […]
Read more
On this, a day of giving thanks, I am thankful for Samaria Rice. Thrust into the spotlight five years ago when her son Tamir was gunned down by the Cleveland police, Ms. Rice has turned this tragedy into action – and a week ago on the occasion of memorializing this horrible date, she presented the plans for a Afrocentric Cultural […]
Read more
It’s true with voices in a duet, with food on a plate, and certainly in a two-person exhibit: When two things are presented together, the way they relate (or don’t) is a make-or-break factor. Cleveland Print Room makes good on this front with Rebekah Ann Wilhelm and Steven Mastroianni’s exhibit, Lines and Shadows, on view November 8 – 30. The […]
Read more
Walking in to the Transformer Station’s current exhibition, Surface Tension, you will quickly notice that all of Tabitha Soren’s photographs appear hazy and out of focus. Upon closer inspection, you might notice that all-too-familiar pattern of smudge marks and fingerprints, a texture that is now a recognizable aspect of modern technological life, as our fingers swipe the various screens of […]
Read more
With the weather changing here in North East Ohio, may I suggest a trip to Massillon Museum’s Studio M to look at the mood-altering drawings of Sandra Benny? The gallery is an explosion of color like a tropical botanical garden. The drawings fill the room with marriages between feathers and flowers. It is the first time that I noticed […]
Read more
Last weekend at the Cleveland Cinematheque the makers of The Foreigner’s Home, a documentary about acclaimed writer and Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, presented the film for the first time since Morrison’s death last summer. This somber fact made the film all the more powerful, as much of it features Morrison speaking directly to the camera, her words potent, compelling, urgent, and prescient. […]
Read more
Pakistani-American artist Anila Quayyum Agha won both the popular and juried vote at ArtPrize (an international art competition that takes place every other fall in Grand Rapids, Michigan) in 2014 for her work Intersections, a feat that no artist had previously achieved. This double-win put Agha “on the map” so to speak, and since, her highly-immersive installations have garnered not only […]
Read more
Emma Anderson’s paintings liberate through claustrophobia. Her panels are full of faces. Those faces exist between caricature and carnage. They wear the bulbous eyes and flapping lips of Muppets, or the fangs and searing eyes of monsters. Their colors are as vivid as poison dart frogs. They bunch together, crowding out negative space, pressing themselves towards the viewer. They are […]
Read more
“My images are my proof that I exist in a world without accurate depictions….I am tired of people from outside of Black environments communicating our stories. Their perceptions are off. This is why my work is so important.” — Donald Black Jr., photographer, whose work is including in seenUNseen SeenUNseen is a large survey of work by African American artists […]
Read more
A couple of shows recently opened at Negative Space, both reminding us (in case anyone ever forgot) that the river of creative production is endless, and constantly renewing itself. Negative Space director Gadi Zamir has run the Annex Gallery for several years as a zero-commission space for artists to present shows. The space he is calling Sideburner Gallery, however, is a […]
Read more