Owning the history of the burning river | The first twelve fires on the Cuyahoga River didn’t get much attention or do much to change the way our industries or governments viewed one of Cleveland’s defining features. But the thirteenth fire, which took place in 1969 and was reported in Time magazine, captured the attention of the nation. Not only […]
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It was late October, 2018 that Cuyahoga Arts and Culture hosted meetings with arts and cultural leaders to get input on a job description, to learn from constituents what leadership qualities are desirable in the organization’s next executive director. It’s a big job at a challenging time. Gary Hanson, a member of the CAC board who is working with the […]
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We’ve said since the beginning that CAN Journal is a mirror of the art scene here. The truth of that, however, depends on who happens to be standing in front of it. For the last two years, Cleveland artists have been talking about racial inequity in our art scene—a conversation pushed along by Cuyahoga Arts and Culture’s efforts to […]
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Douglas Max Utter’s house on the hillside above Euclid Avenue in East Cleveland is filled with his steady output of painting and ideas. In room after room, the walls are hung with his own work. “I’ve made it a kind of museum of myself,” he says, in a way that is perhaps slightly bemused, but also frankly true. There […]
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The Spring 2019 issue of CAN, forthcoming March 1, includes an essay by gallerist and regional art historian William Busta, surveying artists’ treatment of the Cuyahoga River as a subject through the centuries. When we went looking for examples to illustrate the essay, we struck it rich with the Print Club of Cleveland. Coincidentally, there’s an exhibit of Print Club […]
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Some exhibits beg the visitor to simply bathe in their glory, at least as a starting point, but also as an ongoing experience. They inspire a physical reaction of awe: you just want to stand in their presence and gaze, and take it in like the sun. The Cleveland Museum of Art and the Toledo Museum of Art each have […]
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Cleveland is a city buoyed and inspired by a workforce of artists We have always contended that art is a part of public discourse, and not just the writing and conversation about art, but the art itself. It’s not merely decorative, though it can be. It is not merely promotional, though it can do that, too. Rather, by presenting the […]
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Commissioned in bulk, murals have recently proliferated around Cleveland At least one thing is happening very fast at City Hall: October 19, Mayor Frank Jackson’s office announced an extraordinary opportunity for a Cleveland artist—to help celebrate the tenth anniversary of our sister city relationship with Rouen, France, by traveling there to paint a large mural, eighty feet long by […]
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Each issue of CAN looks ahead to a new season, but this time we’ve got to take a minute to look back on what just happened in Northeast Ohio. The FRONT International Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art is winding down. The inaugural CAN Triennial is behind us. Did Cleveland make you proud? In our view, the most important thing about […]
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Before the internet spread aerosol-painted, hip-hop style across the world, the word “graffiti” did not instantly conjure the wildly colorful, mural-sized graphics that all but define the term these days. Graffiti is as old as walls, of course, and its history is woven with diverse threads and intentions. A deeply informed exhibit at the Massillon Museum of Art explores one […]
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