Since the start of his career in the 1990s, the work of Dexter Davis has been expressive of the emotional and magical core of our humanity. Mostly, his work as been a dissective portraiture, reaching into the complex variability of how we face the world. He constructs, tears apart, rearranges, patches together, shreds and assembles. Much as all of us […]
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Dexter Davis is something of a legend. The African American artist was born half a century ago and raised on the wrong side of rust-belt red-lining, right in the middle of Cleveland’s soon to be notorious Hough neighborhood. One of the youngest of eight siblings, Davis showed unusual artistic ability when he was still a child. Such talents aren’t […]
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These are empty hours, like times when you lay in bed, awake, uncertain of sleep. Usually the arts celebrate direct engagement, experience that is intellectual and emotional and physical all at once. In our current art life, mostly online, there are always things that are lost in translation, in the generations of reproduction. Simply put, standing in front of a […]
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The number of artists who applied to the curated CAN Triennial exhibition was enormous, and the range of their experience and accomplishment, the diversity of their techniques and perspectives all were inspiring. We should not be surprised: this is emblematic of the energy and intensity visible every week in the Cleveland art scene. In all, curators William Busta, Angelica Pozo, […]
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In the months just after I started work at the Cleveland Museum, I struck up a friendship with one of the guards who was always impeccably well-groomed and well-dressed and always had something interesting to say. He seemed both gentle and genteel—someone with whom one might comfortably have a drink at a neighborhood coffee house. Only later did I discover […]
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Dexter Davis was two years old when the riots broke out in Hough, which was his neighborhood. He has lived in Cleveland his entire life, except for some time in France back in 1987. He earned his BFA at CIA, and has worked as a security guard at the Cleveland Museum of Art for more than 20 years, all the […]
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