Sometimes the news is not all dust and rainbows. FRONT Triennial’s announcement earlier this week was pretty straightforward: Co-chief-curator Prem Krishnamurthy opened the proceedings by leading the crowd in relaxation exercises during which most of the 148 people closed their eyes, put their arms above their heads, and counted to sixty. Then, in a presentation with slides, he introduced […]
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This is not about that old song by the Bellamy Brothers. The Morgan Conservatory scored in a big way last year by landing a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and if you’ve been around the papermaking studio the last few months you’ve probably seen some of the result. Claudio Orso-Giacone, one of the artists supported there […]
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The arrival of the Academy Graphic Communication’s 52 Weeks + Works calendar has become an annual moment in the region’s art scene. The 2020 calendar reached mailboxes in the first days of the New Year. It’s a week-by-week planner for the year, with each week accompanied by a full page image by an artist of Northeast Ohio. So it annually […]
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Nina Freedlander Gibans’ book, Celebrating the Soul of Cleveland (ATBOSH Media Ltd, 2018), serves up a smorgasbord of sagacious insights and observations about a place the author has called home for nearly ten decades. In fact, Gibans employs this book to reveal a keen sense of place about her beloved hometown. She shared most of that life with her husband and soul […]
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Elsewhere on the digital pages of CAN, Brittany M. Hudak and Michael Gill have written fine-grained and big-picture analyses of the year in Northeast Ohio art. Hudak remembered the year in a series of particular exhibits; Gill contextualized local developments within larger trends in the artworld. This post, then, is calibrated towards the medium scale—events which made a great immediate […]
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The holiday break in the art schedule gives us a minute to reflect on what’s been going on for the last year. While I would never sum up 2019 by saying it was the year of this or that, many of the year’s most significant exhibits and events in Cleveland point to big picture evolution in the art world. […]
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In no particular order, here is a list of my ten favorite exhibitions, artists, performances, etc. in the North East Ohio arts scene during 2019. 1. CHARLES BURCHFIELD AT THE CMA: THE OHIO LANDSCAPES Early last year at the Cleveland Museum of Art in the Focus Gallery, Charles Burchfield: The Ohio Landscapes, 1915–1920 was a truly magnificent glimpse into the formative […]
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It’s rare these days for Cleveland galleries to publish catalogs with their exhibits. And while catalogs are very much not the point of art exhibits, they are excellent documents: they capture slices of history, collections of work and their relationships to the times. What happened on Waterloo in North Collinwood Friday, December 6, 2019, was one of those times. A […]
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“Identity” is taking an increasingly central stage in U.S. political discourse. The “intersectional” paradigm lets us speak of the diversity within demographics which had previously been treated as homogenous. Progressives and conservatives alike are more likely to acknowledge that right-wing contrasts between “coastal elites” and “real Americans” amount to valorization of white Christian identity. “Nationalists” of lesser and greater degrees […]
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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 […]
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