Recently on CAN Blog
The printed CAN Journal—CAN’s most visible and best-known outlet—typically doesn’t publish exhibit reviews. That’s because we want them to be timely, and our quarterly schedule often means exhibitions would be closed by the time a review could appear in print. Because the state of arts journalism is a current discussion in the region (including the essay in this issue by Indra Lācis, PhD, and also an online panel with CAN editor Michael Gill and other arts journalists from around the state at noon June 6), we want to call your attention to the steady stream of reviews you can find on CAN Blog. New reviews and breaking news reports appear there just about every week. Just go to CANjournal.org, and click it on the menu bar. The following are excerpts from selected reviews published on the blog in the last six months.
Davon Brantley: Chapter 2: Midsommar in Granada Gardens
February 26–April 5, 2025
Akron Soul Train
Anyone who has gone through the loss of a loved one will tell you that grief doesn’t come to you in expected or predictable ways. Rather, it hits you at unexpected and/or inopportune times. It also will rear its head one, two, or even twenty years after you’ve lost that special person. It is like a living breathing thing that you must come to know and even cherish to understand. Davon Brantley’s Chapter 2: Midsommar in Granada Gardens, a collection of paintings in conversation with purgatory and grief, is an expression of the artist grappling with the loss of his grandmother. [ … ] It’s always exciting to see good art. So much out there just doesn’t reach a level of skill and expression that is consistent and professional. Davon Brantley’s work is well painted, compelling, and demands that we pay attention to it.
Reviewed by Anderson Turner
Nevertheless, She Created: Encore
March 13–April 26, 2025
Bonfoey Gallery
The precipice of spring in Northeastern Ohio can be gray and dismal. The clouds, the lake, the asphalt all conspire to monochrome for days that turn to weeks and resolve into months. Into this wash of wipeout inertia blasts a burst of color in Nevertheless, She Created: Encore, on view at the Bonfoey Gallery. This exhibition celebrates Women’s History Month, observed in March, by featuring over 30 artists working in a variety of media—painting, sculpture, photography, printmaking, multimedia—that reach from the 1930s to today. Several works by notable artists from the Cleveland School are featured here. The saturated colors of Clara Dieke’s cubist-inspired E341 Still Life from 1953 still resonate magnificently, and two aquatints on copper produced in 1936 by Elsa Vick Shaw and Dorothy Rutka Porter are quiet still life pieces that entangle the viewer with deceptively simple lines describing strawberries and coxcomb flowers. Ruth Diem Wood’s 1951 painting, Orchids in Moonlight, offers a strikingly lit branch and yellow orchids glowing against darkness, an intriguing commentary next to its gallery neighbor, Fraternity by Dana Oldfather, whose 2024 painting picks up the yellow of its neighbor and runs full tilt into a tree portrait rendered in warm, rich tones set against cool grey-blues. And then there are the blues: such a wealth and range of tone and depth, both upstairs and down. Amber Kempthorn’s birdsong images float against delicious blue skies that open the exhibit, while Helen Lewis’ Back Home Again is a layered wash of blues on blues on blues; downstairs, Linda Mayer’s Seaward freezes a luminous moment of water and light with encaustic, oils, and metal leaf, and in Susan Danko’s Of Water, the uncertainty of sky, water, and reflection assemble and disassemble. Blues even appear in the more monochromatic part of the show, as Judy Barie’s Blue Mist speaks with the same tones of Therese Cook’s We Can All Leave A Legacy.
Reviewed by Jo Steigerwald
February 28–April 26, 2025
The Sculpture Center
The post-industrial landscape of Cleveland is by now a familiar visual and conceptual trope in the city’s contemporary art scene. [ . . .] In her exhibition Aggregate, Hannah Bates approaches this history with a sensitivity to how these landscapes are still alive—still changing. Her work casts light on the unnoticed moments where the industrial and organic meet, overlap, and regenerate. The exhibition unfolds as a meditation on Cleveland’s post-industrial landscape—one shaped as much by rust and ruin as it is by resilience. Working with materials gathered from across Northeast Ohio, Bates assembles a world where nature and industry blur. The result is a tactile, intimate exhibition that doesn’t just describe the region’s ecology, but actually feels like it. As visitors move through the space, there’s a sensation of wandering through a landscape at once familiar and uncanny, as if stumbling upon the remains of a place half-remembered, half-reimagined.
Reviewed by Madalyn Fox
Rita Montlack: Artificial Insanity
Meryl Engler: the Urge to Walk All Night
March 19–April 26, 2025
HEDGE Gallery
Rita Montlack and Meryl Engler both work in print media, and the artists are presented as such at HEDGE Gallery, but they could hardly be more different. [ . . . ] What makes them work together is the contrast, and the fact that each is strong and can stand on its own. [ . . . ] The most striking effect of installation is Montlack’s Patterns of Behavior, a series of 42 numbered prints arrayed in a tight matrix of seven rows and six columns. The patterns of behavior are all embodied in adjectives—Petty, Brainy, Sneaky, Thrifty, Feisty, Flashy, Stormy, and 36 others. [ … ] Individually, each has its personality, and could be read as a description of an individual. In that way they are witty, perhaps sweet and affectionate. Grouped together, though, they become darker—a larger commentary on the way humans assess and categorize each other. These are definitely stronger together. Engler’s reduction print Warm Light shows a man at the perimeter of a bonfire, in a clearing surrounded by mature trees. Engler captures the life of the fire in lines and nuances of the flames, and in the tumult of sparks rising skyward. It’s beautiful carving, but the brilliance of this one is in the inking that makes the glow of the fire. Engler created a fade of the transparent orange and yellow, inking by hand and moving the brayer side to side so that the color is more dense and intense closer to the heart of the flame, and gradually fades as it falls outside those bounds. The glow has no hard edge, and that’s just cool.
Reviewed by Michael Gill
Understory Gallery
February 19–March 25, 2025
Understory’s iteration of From Woman 18 is a beautifully and thoughtfully curated exhibition that stands on its own as a complete project. Organizing three shows across Greater Cleveland is no small feat. [Curator Mary] Urbas’ commitment to women artists is unwavering, and beyond this project, she created a directory of women artists and events for Women’s History Month. However, From Woman 18 at Understory lacks diversity. [M]ost if not all makers are mid to late career, white cisgender women, all trained as skilled craftspeople and/or “fine” artists. Missing are young artists, queer perspectives on “woman” as identity, and critical analyses on the very idea of “woman.” […] To leave these concerns out of From Woman 18 in 2025, as all women are being stripped of rights, lives, and dignity (as second citizens, living under the pussy grabber and in an allegedly “free” nation that dictates our healthcare choices), is a missed opportunity for deeper discourse around it what means to identify as “woman” in this toxic political climate.
Reviewed by Lyz Bly, PhD
Harminder Judge, The Bootstrap Paradox
January 24–June 1, 2025
moCa Cleveland
The excellent title of Harminder Judge’s exhibition, The Bootstrap Paradox, might seem at this point in history to be an economic reference to the elusive American Dream. In this country we have the illusion that poor people can “lift themselves up by their bootstraps” and start companies, work hard, and build wealth. […] The metaphorical bootstraps in this show are not about wealth or the United States, or even capitalism, but instead about universal mysteries of life. The Bootstrap Paradox an elegant way of stating the dynamic inherent in the question, “which came first: the chicken, or the egg?” It is about continuity of life, being a part of something eternal, and about the never-ending pursuit of finding the ultimate source of one thing born of another.
Reviewed by Michael Gill
July 21, 2024–January 5, 2025
Cleveland Museum of Art
In several scenes in the film Como Agua Para Chocolate, the De la Garza sisters cross the border between Mexico and the United States, like those who cross the street: without so much drama or paperwork. They cross for a variety of reasons, [ … ] and the border thus becomes another character, a permeable and permissible space where the forbidden can be reversed, disguised, or deceived. More than three thousand kilometers of border have unified the United States and Mexico since the mid-nineteenth century. Some 8,000,000 people live, sometimes in suspense, on both shores of a division as arbitrary as it is controversial. A dividing line that has changed throughout history, affecting those who have remained on one side or the other. This same space, mythical, liminal, polemic, has become, in the last half-century, above all, one of the most watched and controlled landscapes of the entire planet. It has also become one of the most vulnerable: millions of Mexicans, Central Americans, and many other nationalities have crossed—or tried to cross—the border. [ … ] The photographs present alternative proposals for understanding and reading the border by placing the people who inhabit it in the spotlight, thus challenging fixed and stereotypical conceptions of identity and culture.
En más de una escena de la película Como agua para chocolate, las hermanas De la Garza cruzan, por diferentes motivos, la frontera entre México y los Estados Unidos, como quien cruza la calle: sin tanto drama ni papeleo. [ … ] La frontera se convierte así en un personaje más, en un espacio permeable y permisible donde lo prohibido puede revertirse, disimularse, engañarse. Más de tres mil kilómetros de frontera unen a los Estados Unidos y a México desde mediados del siglo XIX. Unos ocho millones de personas viven, a veces en suspenso, en ambas orillas de una división tan arbitraria como polémica. Una línea divisoria que ha cambiado a través de la historia, afectando a quienes han quedado de uno u otro lado. Ese mismo espacio: mítico, liminal, polémico, se ha convertido en el último medio siglo sobre todo, en uno de los más vigilados y controlados de todo el planeta. También en uno de los más vulnerables: millones de mexicanos, centroamericanos y de otras muchas nacionalidades han cruzado, o lo han intentado, para llegar al norte en busca de una vida mejor que en la de sus países de origen. Pero de todo esto están llenas las noticias que hablan de la frontera. La exhibición presenta propuestas alternativas para entender y leer la frontera poniendo bajo los focos principales a las personas que la habitan, desafiando así concepciones fijas y estereotípicas sobre la identidad y la cultura.
Reviewed in English and Spanish by Damaris Puñales-Alpízar, PhD
Curlee Raven Holton: Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and Spirit
October 4–November 7, 2024
William Busta Projects
On view as part of Curlee Raven Holton’s solo exhibition Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and Spirit at William Busta Projects in Waterloo this fall, the modest size serigraph relief, A Dance of Joy and Pain (2024), summons the unusually spectacular autumn gracing Cleveland this year. Orange-crimson burns like a flame against a shrinking azure expanse, glow emitting a boundless, jubilant, and incredible sensation—precisely such because it shall end all too soon. The leaves will fall and winter, dressed in its bare bones and the lunge of its chilly winds, will arrive momentarily. Yet as the sun goes down, revelers take in the light and life, blissfully ignoring the embrace of darkness that will follow and perhaps also, the darkness within. In such animated, compositionally dense but formally reductive works, Curlee Raven Holton seems to consider our shared human experience or more specifically, the notion that we are essentially ethereal beings living a physical experience. [ … ] Many of Mr. Holton’s works on view at William Busta Projects suggest that old adage, “no way out but through.” Resolve and self-inquisition—an honest appraisal of the self and one’s environment—seem to matter most here. [ … ] Mr. Holton’s work feels deafeningly silent in ways, like answers that bring only more questions, but his pictures are broad, searching ones, images to lean on, and to lean into—ones that grant a great view of all that lies beyond here.
Reviewed by Indra Lācis, PhD
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