Nick Cave: HEARD•AKRON

When I arrived in Akron last Sunday for the Nick Cave performance titled HEARD•AKRON, the skies were grey and there was a chill in the air. I was honestly freezing as I found my seat on the ice-cold concrete of the Bud and Susie Rogers Garden. And then, as if on cue, as hundreds of people waited for the show to […]

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Prospect and Retrospect: Rita Montlack at UH

WOKE: RITA MONTACK at University Hospitals’ Trudy Wiesenberger Gallery offers a survey spanning a little more than 10 years of work by a notable Cleveland artist. Ranging from photographs Montlack created soon after she started working in the medium to new directions she is exploring, WOKE presents an overview of the artist’s range of techniques and themes. Reflecting her love […]

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Tombs and Treasures: William Harper at CIA

Initially, William Harper’s new exhibit at the Cleveland Institute of Art’s Reinberger Gallery evokes the inner chambers of a pyramid wherein magnificent treasures languish in wait for their pharaoh and his concubines to arrive in the afterlife. It’s not by accident. “I wanted it to look like a tomb,” Harper says of the exhibit The Beautiful and the Grotesque. To that […]

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Cigarette Tax: A Learnable Moment

Educators talk about “teachable moments”– those times when learning comes easily because something happens that makes information relevant. This is one of those times for people concerned about public funding for the arts in Cuyahoga County. As if to highlight the need to find something other than a cigarette tax to provide such revenue,  a recent State of Ohio budget […]

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Billie Lawless and The Politician: A Toy

  In the twenty-three years since it first appeared, hallucination-like, along Chester Ave., Billy Lawless’ over-sized, playful sculpture “The Politician: A Toy” has become one of Cleveland’s most important pieces of public art. It’s not nearly as sinister as the snaking, twisted steel bar that constitutes Isamu Noguchi’s similarly huge 1976 “Portal”, installed on the sidewalk in front of the […]

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Stepping onto the soap box at Rant Gallery

From 2011 to 2014, the Rotten Meat Gallery hosted one of the most eclectic lineups of artists in Northeast Ohio. From month to month, gallery-goers could see pure abstraction, soul-searching expressionist works, or soulfully goofy pop art. Proprietor Dan Miller only reluctantly closed the gallery. Over the years, Miller has continued painting and sculpting, and explored other ways to make […]

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Papering over everything: The seventh National Juried Exhibition at the Morgan Conservatory

The rules are simple for the Morgan Conservatory’s National Juried Exhibition: Participants can submit any art object so long as 50 percent of it is made with paper. 320 artists from around the country answered the call for entries, submitting 587 projects—a record number in the seven years the Morgan has held juried shows. Ultimately, curators selected works from 54 […]

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