Dennis Barrie was director of the Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center when he and the museum became the first in the US to face obscenity charges over the art they exhibited–a retrospective of Robert Mapplethorpe’s provocative photos, titled The Perfect Moment. He went on to serve as executive director of Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, and subsequently […]
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The yellowhammer is a bird a little bigger than a robin, protected (like many other song birds) by international treaty as it migrates down the Atlantic coast. When printmaker and photographer Michael Loderstedt was growing up in North Carolina, on the southernmost dot in the string of barrier islands known as the Outer Banks, yellowhammers were a familiar sight. In […]
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We were not much more than halfway through the year when the horrors of 2020—so extreme, so numerous–became a kind of prompt for generating poetry. Across platforms, people would recite the litany of wildfires and floods, and police violence against People of Color, and one failure after the next to hold police accountable; they’d note the COVID pandemic, and the […]
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Artist Malcolm Brown, who with his wife Ernestine Brown operated Malcolm Brown Gallery in Shaker Heights, passed away October 1 at age 89. Through the gallery, through his teaching at Shaker Heights High School, and in all his relationships, he had a lasting impact. We asked art collectors, dealers, former students, artists, and family members to offer their reflections on […]
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You can’t win if you don’t play. That’s the kind of flippant, easy thing people say about the lottery. But it is an important message in the midst of the greatest challenge we face in the US, which is to deal with our history of racism. We can’t deal with it if we don’t try. You are not making progress […]
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The likeness of “whiteness” has always filled our world. It is the ideal of beauty that most people strive to become. As children, we spent the entire day watching television, looking at magazines and school books void of “diversity.” Thank you, 1976 “Charlie’s Angels,” for making girls want hair that would blow in the wind. What began as a need to […]
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The CAN Journal’s cover for its summer issue, The Art of Surviving Pandemic, was created to show unity in the face of adversity. Unfortunately, what it did was emphasize the existence of institutional racism in our twenty-first century art world. Of the forty some artists featured on the cover, only one was a person of color. Is the staff of […]
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Amanda D. King, artist, activist, and a recent recipient of a SPACES Urgent Art Fund award, took the time to speak to CAN about her life, art, and commitment to the advancement of Black leadership in the art world and the fight against anti-Black racism within arts and culture. King studied art history at Bryn Mawr and graduated from CWRU […]
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Whenever I was with Stephen Bivens, I always found myself doing most of the talking. Invariably, I would rewind conversations with him in my mind shortly after we spoke, and think to myself, “Wow, I sure do talk a lot.” And while it may be true that I enjoy talking, I found that there were many others who felt the […]
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As soon as Governor Mike DeWine issued stay at home orders, we knew the Summer 2020 issue of CAN Journal would be different from any we’ve published before. That’s because previews of exhibits and related events usually fill about half of the pages in this magazine, and inform the rest, as well. As gallery directors and artists shelter in place […]
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