To be loving we willingly hear each other’s truth and, most important, we affirm the value of truth telling. Lies may make people feel better, but they do not help them to know love.” ― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions. Ada Pinkston’s Searching for Mother Tongues, on view at SPACES through October 30, is a multi-media installation in […]
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In 1982 no one I knew could stop listening to Prince’s iconic record celebrating the apocalypse, 1999. The record’s title song reminded us in robotic-alien voice that no harm would come, “Don’t-worry-I-won’t-hurt-you-I-only-want-you-to-have-some-fun.” This sense of dancing on the grave of white patriarchal capitalism is at the heart of Vivica Satterwhite’s installation in Toby’s Vault at SPACES (on view through October […]
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Douglas Max Utter’s second major solo exhibition at HEDGE Gallery (Family Life & Other Fancies, on view July 19 – September 1, 2023), reflected the glow of a fire just put to bed, after many long conversations. This sense of yearning—for childhood innocence and later, life unchained—governs an abundance of the artist’s pictures. In Doug’s work, it seems difficult to […]
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It’s an extremely varied collection of media and message in Barbara Martin’s exhibit, Now and Then, on view August 11 through October 7 at BAYarts. The artist’s highly skilled scratchboard portraits of birds mingle with found object assemblage and 2D collage in a couple of different veins, and one larger installation that makes a category of its own. Taken altogether, […]
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Krista Tomorowitz and Timothy Callaghan are artists and residents of Collinwood, living in the geographically unique, culturally diverse community along the Lake Erie shore, which includes the Euclid Beach Mobile Home Park. The mobile home park is unusual in that it offers affordable lakefront living to people in mobile homes. In June, the owner of the mobile home park (Western […]
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How do you capture the wind left by a monumental figure racing against time and hate? With an Olympic oak, flames frozen like leaves in mid-quake, and echoes of the dreams and fears of our community. Angelica Pozo’s recent installation honoring Jesse Owens–located in the Jesse Owens Olympic Oak Plaza, near the intersection of Martin Luther King Boulevard and East […]
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At the center of the latest exhibition at Kaiser Gallery in Tremont is longing for a more fun, lighter, more innocent time, in this era of “post” COVID economic uncertainty and continued assaults on the bodies and rights people of color, females, and queers–particularly transgender citizens. Gallerist Tanya Kaiser writes in her curatorial statement: “[Nowstalgia] is everything and anything—combining retro-indulgent […]
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The request landed back in February. “Hi Erin,” wrote Tim Herron, cofounder of the Pretentious Cleveland Portrait Artists (PCPA), “I am always on the lookout for interesting models.” He added the sketch group was scheduling pretty far out, into August. I blinked at the screen for a minute or two amid a vague feeling of disbelief. Me? Sit for a […]
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Today’s highly choreographed, plastic, bifurcated world (and all the concerns keeping us up at night) grants renewed meaning to the phrase, open road. It’s there we find freedom and a sense of escape, but also greater connection, and the inclination to understand identity—one’s own and that of others. A selection of Julie Langsam’s Landscape Interventions: 500+ Drawings, on view at […]
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To be in The Big Ass Art Show–on view at Lakeland Community College, Valley Art Center, Artists Archives of the Western Reserve, and BAYarts—a piece of art had to measure at least four feet on a side. It’s a simple rule that does a lot of sorting: a lot of artists have simply never made something that large. And for […]
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