Artists are most celebrated for their big shows at major institutions. Nonetheless, measured in terms of impact on the world, commercial artists and teachers give big names a run for the money. Commercial artists are the image makers who define the look of the world—from the way people are remembered in portraits to the way landscapes are perceived, to how […]
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“Two elder bohemians” is how Stephen Calhoun described himself and John Saile while introducing their exhibit, Luxuries of Being, which opened at Doubting Thomas Gallery June 14 and closes June 29. It’s a quickie, and the middle weekend of the short run was closed in response to Northeast Ohio’s sweltering heat, but you’ve got one weekend left to see their […]
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Arabella and I shared a studio in the Screw Factory for almost eight years. We met in 2004 at Capsule, a futuristic Lakewood bar with glossy white walls where her husband Ben DJ’d and she bartended. Their record label Elephant Stone had signed a band from Cleveland, so they decided to see what the north coast had to offer, moving […]
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A simple, well-told story is worth its weight in gold in this era of overwrought content creation. I’m sure there were prehistoric humans who wished the raconteur du jour would just get to the point already in his insufferably self-aggrandizing and lengthy tale about the big Sabertooth tiger he took down. As a writer I can fall into excess description […]
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After posing questions that the arts sector has faced for years, Cuyahoga County Council unanimously moved Tuesday night (June 4) to put before voters the option to replace the current cigarette tax for the arts. The third reading by County Council makes it official: the opportunity to approve or deny an increase from 1.5 cents to 3.5 cents per cigarette […]
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A group of artists and administrators stepped up to the microphone at Cleveland Heights City Council Monday night to plead the case for the Coventry PEACE Campus, a community hub in danger of closing because of a change in lease terms. Three members of the board of Cleveland Heights-University Heights Libraries also spoke. CPC and Heights Libraries, its landlord, have […]
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Through the years, this quarterly column traces a narrative of Cleveland art. It strings together major events like the COVID-19 pandemic and local galleries’ responses to the Black Lives Matter movement, Cleveland’s art triennials, art sector news and exhibits, all highlighted in our current stories. The arc of Cleveland’s art history is especially prominent as we approach Summer 2024, and […]
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Put something on repeat and loop it, and it takes on a shape of its own, becoming another entire entity in and of itself. It’s pattern’s older, louder cousin: one who also may travel under the name Persistence of Vision—the title of Kasumi’s first retrospective on view at Summit Artspace, July 12 through September 14. “Life is born of random […]
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Imagine a turbine always in motion; it spins quietly and eternally in the background, barely humming, gathering energy and transforming it into something else. It’s a sort of mechanical alchemy: a cool, perpetual transmogrifier that harnesses power from one source and outputs something completely different. Welcome to Allison Bogard Hall’s creative process. For the past eighteen months, Hall has immersed […]
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The last thing artist, activist, and creative director Antwoine Washington expected at the end of the fall semester of Pressing Matters—an afterschool art program at Zygote Press—was to give financial management advice to a group of eager teenagers. And yet, it is precisely this sort of real-life problem-solving that is at the core of this unusual youth program. Pressing Matters […]
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