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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Kristen Cliffel’s delightfully textured ceramics are familiar around northeast Ohio in group shows, galleries, and museums. At William Busta Projects, Cliffel’s solo exhibition, Working from Home, occupies two rooms and is poignant in all the right ways Cliffel’s work is an exploration of what she calls “domestic mythologies.” According to her website, “our culture surrounds us with pervasive archetypal myths […]
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What could be more obvious or more pleasing than paintings of your hometown? Maybe with a comforting recognition of local landmarks? Maybe enhanced with a new flourish? This was the appeal of the Cleveland Calendars published in the 1980s and 1990s by International Printing Company, who commissioned a different artist each year. These annual commissions included Mary Lou Ferbert, Moses […]
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Laurence Channing had his first one-person show in 1991 at the William Busta Gallery on Murray Hill Road, Cleveland. His charcoal drawings, at once romantic and elegant and disquieting, found an audience in exhibitions that followed in 1992, 1994, and 1995. In 1997 he also presented prints—three drypoints and a lithograph. In the next few years he created five additional […]
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There is something about how we remember things, and then there is something about how we wish to remember things, and then there is something about how we wish things that we remember were different. These are some of the lenses of history. Mary Jo Bole draws upon her experiences, wide-ranging around Cleveland since childhood, while just a little drunk […]
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Exploring lives and culture through the landscape has long been a subject for Jacob Koestler, particularly through the evidence of human impact and passing time. That manner of storytelling is at the heart of his and collaborator Michael McDermit’s new book Strange Devotion, which debuted in an exhibit at William Busta Projects on Waterloo in September. Its stories unfold in […]
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The arts, which have long promoted authenticity and social engagement, have spent the past year bravely extolling their accomplishments in transitioning from direct experience to virtual experience. It is understandable—everyone placed their best foot forward, working with what was possible. Still, as brave as everyone was, it was still life fallen apart. It has been a zombie life—not the […]
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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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