2019: A forward-looking retrospective

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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One Critic Takes a Look at the Year’s Best

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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Photocentric: Hopeful

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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We are because they were: “Getting to Know You” at CIA’s Reinberger Gallery

“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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Open World at Akron Art Museum: Video Games as Art

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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Tabitha Soren Shows Us the Dirty Side of Our Devices at Transformer Station

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 […]

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