Stacey Bartels has a vision to run an art gallery after she retires, and she’s got a shot at success much better than most. Her plan got off to a good start Friday night, with the opening of Framed Gallery on Waterloo. The most obviously distinctive thing about her plan is that Framed will deal exclusively in art by African […]
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This upcoming Sunday, Shari Wilkins and Laura Ruth Bidwell will discuss their ongoing exhibit at the Massillon Museum, Art as Journal. The show encompasses two series of images depicting locales significant to the photographers. For Promised Land, Wilkins took miniature Polaroid-style snaps of her father’s Illinois hometown, Cairo (pronounced “Kay-row,” unlike the Egyptian capital). Bidwell’s The Great Tangles presents scenes […]
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Lack of Articulation: Ryan Flowers Ryan Flowers developed a personal relationship with plastic soldiers at a very young age. At Christmas, he would use the boxes of his new toys to make hideouts and forts for them, to the chagrin of his parents. Flowers felt these little guys got a bad rap, by which they gained his favor. They always fell […]
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Despite using very different materials and techniques, artists Jenniffer Omaitz and Arabella Proffer augment the impact of one another’s work in their current two person show, where they reorganize, reinvent, or sabotage the stability of organic and domestic structures. Titled Illustrious Decay, the exhibit of paintings and sculptures will be on view through October at CWAL Gallery. Prior to 2010 […]
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Ingenuity, born as Cleveland’s Festival of Art and Technology, has certainly been through some bleak times. There were years at the Port Authority during which it lacked the energy to fill the cavernous spaces. There was a year at Voinovich Park, which included among its few exhibitors vendors of windows and other home improvement products, and which–with a low level […]
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Once books were simply vehicles, carrying the information they contained. For centuries, they were the most efficient way to traffic in words and pictures. In these digital days they still do that, but they have other functions, too: They are monuments to those ideas, celebrations, commemorations, and elaborations on them. They are a way not just to pass words and […]
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The FRONT Triennial may be drawing to a close, but you still have two weekends to see some of the exhibits you might have missed. One of the best installations “off the beaten track” is Sculpture Bases, by Cleveland artist Lauren Yeager. Yeager was one of the six local artists chosen by FRONT to create a commissioned work for the […]
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Where does a piece of art end, and the rest of the world begin? Such odd, philosophical questions are posed by Dawoud Bey’s Night Coming Tenderly, Black, one of the exhibits comprising the first FRONT International Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art. For the artworks in this installation gain meaning not only from what they depict, but from the venue in […]
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The Cleveland Arts Prize has announced the winners of its 2018 awards. The 58th annual prizes recognize artists working in fields as diverse as architecture, literature, painting, and comics. A Lifetime Achievement Award was given to Rita Dove, a playwright, author, poet and lyricist based out of Akron. In 1993, Dove became the first Black Poet Laureate of the United […]
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Near infinite repetitions of rock-chipping and reed-plaiting, balancing and propping, burning and marking continue to inflect our “modern” lives: people know instinctively what to do with sticks and stones (apart from hitting one another on the head). Every human child puttering around a campsite piles up a wall, or draws with a burnt stick. One of the most powerful things […]
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