The months pass and the memes metastasize as the COVID crisis wears on; we become less familiar to one another and less sure of ourselves. The fact that most of us wear masks in public, now, is especially confusing, obscuring emotional cues and familiar expressions. It’s as if much of the nuance of the social world was blanked out like the pages […]
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Cleveland-based artist Ron Shelton puts the worldwide plastic problem front and center in both his own art-making and his practice as a curator / convener. His current exhibit, HAF Connects, is on view now through September 18 at RampArts Gallery, in the 78th Street Studios complex in Cleveland. It’s an exhibit that weaves together multiple threads of ongoing interest […]
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When I heard that Rebekah Wilhelm was pairing up with John Saile for a show ostensibly about “color” at 818 Studios, I will admit, I was surprised. Wilhelm is an artist whose career I have followed for years, and whose work I very much admire (and own), but color is not a quality I associate with her practice. Her […]
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Many abstract paintings do not suggest movement. Or if they do, they not create the suggestion of movement of elements within the canvas, but bring viewers to mind of the act of painting. A Helen Frankenthaler painting might prompt us to imagine the artist pouring paint; a Jackson Pollock recalls Hans Namuth’s photos of the artist dripping paint onto canvas […]
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You can’t win if you don’t play. That’s the kind of flippant, easy thing people say about the lottery. But it is an important message in the midst of the greatest challenge we face in the US, which is to deal with our history of racism. We can’t deal with it if we don’t try. You are not making progress […]
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The likeness of “whiteness” has always filled our world. It is the ideal of beauty that most people strive to become. As children, we spent the entire day watching television, looking at magazines and school books void of “diversity.” Thank you, 1976 “Charlie’s Angels,” for making girls want hair that would blow in the wind. What began as a need to […]
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The CAN Journal’s cover for its summer issue, The Art of Surviving Pandemic, was created to show unity in the face of adversity. Unfortunately, what it did was emphasize the existence of institutional racism in our twenty-first century art world. Of the forty some artists featured on the cover, only one was a person of color. Is the staff of […]
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Amanda D. King, artist, activist, and a recent recipient of a SPACES Urgent Art Fund award, took the time to speak to CAN about her life, art, and commitment to the advancement of Black leadership in the art world and the fight against anti-Black racism within arts and culture. King studied art history at Bryn Mawr and graduated from CWRU […]
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Whenever I was with Stephen Bivens, I always found myself doing most of the talking. Invariably, I would rewind conversations with him in my mind shortly after we spoke, and think to myself, “Wow, I sure do talk a lot.” And while it may be true that I enjoy talking, I found that there were many others who felt the […]
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Kasumi has said she doesn’t know what her brain knows, suggesting a mysterious and limitless ore to mine. Her willingness to plunder that mine—her curiosity and fearlessness—inform her art, whether cinema, installation, or app. While Kasumi productions are abstract and demanding no matter how kinetic, they are based on her feelings, her deep connections. Even as her multimedia, high-tech work […]
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