The holiday break in the art schedule gives us a minute to reflect on what’s been going on for the last year. While I would never sum up 2019 by saying it was the year of this or that, many of the year’s most significant exhibits and events in Cleveland point to big picture evolution in the art world. […]
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In no particular order, here is a list of my ten favorite exhibitions, artists, performances, etc. in the North East Ohio arts scene during 2019. 1. CHARLES BURCHFIELD AT THE CMA: THE OHIO LANDSCAPES Early last year at the Cleveland Museum of Art in the Focus Gallery, Charles Burchfield: The Ohio Landscapes, 1915–1920 was a truly magnificent glimpse into the formative […]
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It’s rare these days for Cleveland galleries to publish catalogs with their exhibits. And while catalogs are very much not the point of art exhibits, they are excellent documents: they capture slices of history, collections of work and their relationships to the times. What happened on Waterloo in North Collinwood Friday, December 6, 2019, was one of those times. A […]
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“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 […]
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Are video games art? Back in 2012, The Museum of Modern Art in New York purchased 14 video games for their permanent collection, and several museums have shown video games on their walls, including a major exhibition earlier this year at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and last year at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Video games are […]
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On this, a day of giving thanks, I am thankful for Samaria Rice. Thrust into the spotlight five years ago when her son Tamir was gunned down by the Cleveland police, Ms. Rice has turned this tragedy into action – and a week ago on the occasion of memorializing this horrible date, she presented the plans for a Afrocentric Cultural […]
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Democratizing, inclusive, acknowledging and addressing conflicts Readers may or may not have known about an organization called the International Conference of Museums, but there is in fact such a thing, and it is based in Paris, and it does have 40,000 members, representing 20,000 museums around the world. In Ohio, they include the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Cincinnati Art […]
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The core of Stranger Beings is a mind-bending selection of dozens of eccentric works gleaned, in sober fact, from the widely known collection of the Richard and Alita Rogers Family Foundation. Known also as the Hieronymus collection (so-called after Hieronymus Bosch, Renaissance master of the grotesque), the eclectic mix of art objects has been an ongoing labor of love for […]
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The year 2019 marks a harrowing anniversary: roughly 400 years ago, Jamestown colonists bought a group of enslaved Africans from English pirates. The twenty to thirty men and women that walked ashore in Virginia in 1619 became the first of 380,000 Africans forcibly taken from their homes and dragged in chains across the Atlantic to North America. From the very […]
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Amber Ford is a 2016 graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Art by way of Brush High School, where she first began to investigate photography. Ford explores painting, printmaking and video, but is mostly known for her portraiture. She’s been shown many times, but will be part of the (DIS)MANTLE exhibit at Kent State University that opens November 7. We talked […]
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