Epics of the everyday: Pamela Dodds at Suite 215

A contemporary filmmaker has about 30 images per second with which to tell her story. A painter has only what she can fit into the canvas. Therefore, most paintings are not narratives per se. Even when mythological, historic, or pop cultural figures are recognizable in painting, the meaning of the painting is more than just the story of the depicted […]

Read more

Time Travel: In a new exhibition at BAYarts, David King continues a series exploring a box of family photos

Now that he’s retired, David King has time to get to work. For three decades, King taught art in Chagrin Falls schools. He is proud of his students. “They make me look good,” he says of them. And he puts his money where his mouth is: Throughout his Cleveland Heights home, he’s hung works by Chagrin Falls graduates who’ve gone […]

Read more

The bow: Tregoning & Company preserved, made art history

Tregoning & Company was born in 1982, over lunch. Having cut his teeth at American University and Washington, D.C.-area museums, Tregoning had come to work for a prominent Cleveland framing and appraisal company. However, he quickly found himself in philosophical clashes with the owners. The firm only hung a few paintings on the walls at a time. To Tregoning, this […]

Read more

2019: A forward-looking retrospective

Elsewhere on the digital pages of CAN, Brittany M. Hudak and Michael Gill have written fine-grained and big-picture analyses of the year in Northeast Ohio art. Hudak remembered the year in a series of particular exhibits; Gill contextualized local developments within larger trends in the artworld. This post, then, is calibrated towards the medium scale—events which made a great immediate […]

Read more

We are because they were: “Getting to Know You” at CIA’s Reinberger Gallery

“Identity” is taking an increasingly central stage in U.S. political discourse. The “intersectional” paradigm lets us speak of the diversity within demographics which had previously been treated as homogenous. Progressives and conservatives alike are more likely to acknowledge that right-wing contrasts between “coastal elites” and “real Americans” amount to valorization of white Christian identity. “Nationalists” of lesser and greater degrees […]

Read more

Treasured Volumes

Just in time for the holidays, we bring you an overview this year’s exhibition catalogs and other books on Cleveland Art. RESTROOMS OF CLEVELAND Arabella Proffer’s The Restrooms of Cleveland started as an Instagram joke, but she took it seriously when several people asked her to make it into a book.  The result is a 9″ X 6″ volume documenting […]

Read more

Expressionism in purple and pink: “I/You/She” at The BOX Gallery

Emma Anderson’s paintings liberate through claustrophobia. Her panels are full of faces. Those faces exist between caricature and carnage. They wear the bulbous eyes and flapping lips of Muppets, or the fangs and searing eyes of monsters. Their colors are as vivid as poison dart frogs. They bunch together, crowding out negative space, pressing themselves towards the viewer. They are […]

Read more

20 years in the making: Art House at Studio 215 Gallery

For its 20th anniversary, Art House is visiting 78th Street’s Studio 215 Gallery to celebrate the artist-educators who have helped its students thrive. “Several passionate artists and neighbors, understanding the positive impact art could have on peoples’ lives, realized that there was a fundamental need for greater access to rich art experiences,” reads an Art House mission statement hung alongside […]

Read more

Finding the trees in the forest: Eileen Dorsey at the Cleveland Botanical Garden

Two paintings in Eileen Dorsey’s Cleveland Botanical Garden exhibition Wooded Perspectives share the title “Breakthrough.” On one level, the word names the literal contents of those images—the spot where a hiker in thick forests suddenly steps into an open field, “breaking through” the claustrophobia of thick trees. But “breakthrough” also encapsulates an apt response to Wooded Perspectives itself. Here, Dorsey […]

Read more

Watercolors in the garden: Forever Spring at Bonfoey Gallery

The exhibition Forever Spring by Gary Bukovnik coincides with the release of a luscious book of the same name. Both the show and book celebrate Bukovnik’s watercolor images of floral arrangements. Born and raised in Northeast Ohio, Bukovnik is currently based out of San Francisco. For more than three decades, he has painted posters for that city’s symphony. However, he […]

Read more
1 2 3 4 6