CAN Wins, at Press Club of Cleveland All-Ohio Excellence in Journalism Awards

Collective Arts Network is thrilled to have won recognition in the Press Club of Cleveland’s state-wide, peer-reviewed All Ohio Excellence in Journalism Awards, held Friday, June 2 at the House of Blues. According to the Press Club’s rules, “Judging will be based on significance, clarity, writing, enterprise, effectiveness, originality and other criteria deemed appropriate by the judges. Judging will be […]

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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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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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WALK THE STREETS OF CLEVELAND WITH CHANNING AND BURK

**Note: This show has been extended until Saturday, January 21.** A rainy winter day seemed perfect for stopping in to Bonfoey Gallery to see work by Laurence Channing.  These moody, hyperrealistic, mostly black and white drawings of Cleveland’s urban landscape present city streets, structures, and bridges as tranquil environments devoid of people or traffic.  Channing’s choice medium is charcoal and […]

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MAKERS: Cannaday Chapman, Illustrator

  I asked Cannaday Chapman if he thought of himself as an “Illustrator” or an “Artist”, and without skipping a beat he said: “Illustrator”. I nodded quizzically as I looked over all of the hand-drawn and hand-painted scraps of paper around the room.  While Chapman does indeed “illustrate” many things – in particular articles for magazines, newspapers, greeting cards, etc. […]

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MAKERS: Jake Kelly

Once you are familiar with Jake Kelly’s work you start spotting it everywhere. He is the virtuoso responsible for the giant murals in Melt Restaurants – or maybe you’ve seen his fliers advertising upcoming shows at the Grog Shop, or perhaps you’ve seen his amazing mural inside the Grog Shop, or his serial comic masterpiece the “Lake Erie Monster” made with long-time […]

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Fred Wilson Unearths Hidden Truths at the Allen Memorial Art Museum with “Wildfire Test Pit”

test pit – a small preliminary excavation made to gain an idea of the contents of an archaeological site. Much like an archaeologist, New York artist Fred Wilson has made a career digging to uncover long lost or hidden treasures.[1]  Wilson burrows into the conventional Western history of art, mines academic and historical writing, and in many cases, he physically […]

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MAKERS: ADRIENNE SLANE, COLLAGE ARTIST

Adrienne Slane’s studio in Geauga County is perfectly situated in a copse of tall trees, surrounded by marshes and shadowy forests.  It’s the kind of fairy tale location entirely appropriate for the creation of her enchanting cut-paper collages. Clearly a collector at heart, every available surface in Slane’s studio is covered with her coveted items – seashells, postage stamps, buttons, scissors, […]

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SHINE ON: In a new photo book, Charles Mintz documents Lustron Homes and the people who live in them

If you are not old enough to remember when pop culture visions of the future looked something like a Jetsons cartoon, you probably don’t know the meaning of the phrase “Lustron Home.” Lustron was a Columbus, Ohio-based company founded by Carl Strandlund which–between 1948 and its bankrupty in 1950–manufactured 2498 homes whose most distinguishing characteristic was the construction of their […]

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MAKERS: Steven Mastroianni, Photographer

When I asked Cleveland photographer Steven Mastroianni why he still makes photographs the traditional way, his answer was all about silver.  For Mastroianni, it’s that moment when the image miraculously appears on the paper that counts. Alone in his darkroom, under the amber glow of the safelight, light causes a chemical reaction on the paper that produces a thin layer of silver – seemingly […]

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