When CAN launched as a quarterly, we were stricken with the glow of potential. This column began: There’s a moment, sure as flipping a light switch, when you realize something is possible. The visual art scene in Cleveland is at that moment. Five years later, that potential has grown in every way, and another moment has arrived. In the summer 2018, […]
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Lauren Yeager’s studio on the fourth floor of a near-east-side warehouse is filled with the dry humor of accumulated cast-off products, mostly made of plastic. You wouldn’t call any of it beautiful, at least not to look at, not in any conventional sense. There are five-gallon paint buckets brimming with drips and smears, mostly white and neutral. There are balls […]
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The night white nationalists marched with tiki torches, shouting racist slogans in Charlottesville, Virginia Johnny Coleman was capturing a different atmosphere, after midnight in a plantation cemetery about 100 miles south, near the Dismal swamp. Driven to fill in the details of a story his grandmother told, Coleman had been searching geneological records and county land records dating to the […]
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A college’s alumni art exhibit—not that of an art school, but of a liberal arts college, with a football team and a whole variety of degrees—might seem to be an insular affair, of interest primarily to that college community. And on the front of thematic cohesion, this kind of show faces an uphill battle: if alumni are the focus, then […]
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Art is always about a relationship with the world. Sometimes that means trying to explain it, or re-interpret it, or document it, or comment on it, but sometimes it is simply a way of understanding how the world works. In Memory External—works of Matthew Gallagher and Mike Lombardy, on view now at Waterloo Arts—the key to understanding the works is […]
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The Dead Boys were probably never your thing. That–based on Billboard charts–is a statistical fact, even in Cleveland, and more specifically even in Lakewood, their home town. Most people certainly knew the band’s name and rowdy fame more than their music. Even “Sonic Reducer,” covered by Guns N Roses and Pearl Jam, and now on occasion by twelve year-olds–their one […]
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If you look at MOCA’s Constant as the Sun as a way to see what is going on in the region’s art world, you would see a sampling of wildly disparate practices. From straightforward documentation to generative exercises in community engagement, to quirky metaphor, the 10 individuals/collectives are all over the map in their motivations, their media, and their concepts. […]
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There’s a magical-realist novella by the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, in which one of the characters creates dolls in the image of all the members of their family, and moves the dolls through the days of their lives. Keith Mayerson’s My American Dream, on view now at MOCA, along with the regional exhibit Constant as the Sun, is a little […]
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How do you choose the exhibits you go see? Last night I went to 3204 Studios only compelled by the whimsical name of the show there: Some Nice People Made Some Nice Things. That sounded . . . you know . . . nice. The nice people were Grace Frank, Erin Guido and John Paul Costello. If you are familiar […]
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The empty suit on the floor, topped by the orange head of Donald Trump vomiting his mushroom cloud of braggadocio and absurdity is just one of the installations you will remember if you got to Rooms To Let the weekend of May 20 & 21. This was in the Hosmer House, curated by Dana Depew. Artist David King was responsible […]
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