Is there a crisis in art writing? Does the American Midwest need more art writing? More art criticism? And if so, why? For whom? And what roles do different types of art writing play? Curator and art historian Indra Lācis, PhD, has observed that urgency around the subject seems to come up every ten years or so. The rhythm may […]
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Rita Montlack and Meryl Engler both work in print media, and the artists are presented as such at HEDGE Gallery, but they could hardly be more different. Montlack’s work is digital, while Engler’s is 100 percent analog; Montlack’s photo-based works are fully chromatic; Engler’s relief prints sometimes use just one color, and even the multi-color prints have a palate limited […]
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At press time, it’s come to this: under a new White House administration, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has revised the guidelines for its primary grant program to say funding preference will be given to patriotic art, in the form of projects that “celebrate the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity by honoring” its 250th birthday, in 2026. […]
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Buffalo artist Gary Wolfe met Cleveland artist John Sargent in 2012, when Sargent briefly lived in the Queen City. Both were involved with the Buffalo Society of Artists—an organization founded in 1891 to help advance the cause of artists in that part of the world. They got to know each other over the space of about six months, and kept […]
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The excellent title of Harminder Judge’s exhibition, The Bootstrap Paradox (on view January 24 – June 1 at moCa Cleveland) might seem at this point in history to be an economic reference to the elusive American Dream. In this country we have the illusion that poor people can “lift themselves up by their bootstraps” and start companies, work hard, and […]
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The Cleveland Institute of Art’s Love Is Resistance, which opened on Valentine’s Day at Transformer Station, is in a multitude of ways The Kind Of Show We Need Right Now. After a year with no visual art programming at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s West side exhibit space, after decades during which Cleveland artists have pined for any measure of […]
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Donald Trump’s executive order terminating “diversity, equity, and inclusion discrimination in the federal workforce, and in federal contracting and spending” will have broad impact on the arts and culture. That begins with the National Endowment for the Arts’ recent announcement that, abiding the White House order, the Challenge America Grants program had been cancelled, and its funds re-allocated to support […]
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“It’s kind of like I’m a human seismograph, and I capture the instantaneous spirit of the motion,” artist Robert Wright said, responding to a question about how different types of dance affect his work. But even if it is inspired by dance, and represent its movements, and is actually inseparable from it, what the painter does is not dance notation. […]
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If art is a way of understanding the world, or about revealing the world anew, then it has to be about crossing lines, adventuring into the unknown. That means reaching across cultures, and it’s never been more important than now. The exhibit Womanism–works of Nana Kwesi Agyare-Ansah, on view at East Avenue Gallery in Akron—is like that. Nana is grom […]
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It was perhaps an hour after leaving George Kocar: A Retrospective, on view at Artists Archives of the Western Reserve, that I saw one of the artist’s best-known works silk screened on a T-shirt, worn by someone who didn’t know Kocar’s name. The art was the old Cleveland: You Gotta Be Tough graphic, featuring Cleveland’s skyline in the year of […]
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