Death cracks open and the flowers come out in Katy Richard’s Pocket Full of Posies, now at HEDGE Gallery until May 5, 2023. Here are rooms where skeletons ache behind strips of floral wallpaper, bodies shimmer underneath a heavy mask of stylized blooms twisting on vines, and the underside of a pink petal shifts to show skin. O, do these […]
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Language rills like the always-moving water that flows through “ᏓᏗᏬᏂᏏ (We Will Speak),” a documentary film about the work of Cherokee activists, artists, and educators fighting to save the Cherokee language. “ᏓᏗᏬᏂᏏ (We Will Speak)” premiers at the Cleveland International Film Festival with one live screening only, on Thursday, March 23, 2023 at 7:30 pm at the Allen Theater (Q&A […]
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Magic Mountains, Magic Cities by Tia-Simone Gardner is on view through April 28th at SPACES. The body of work came from conversations that Gardner had with her mother about Fairfield, Alabama, where they both grew up. Fairfield is located at the Western border of Birmingham and was an experiment in spatial-racial-class separation and segregation. According to Gardner’s artist statement, “these […]
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Kristen Cliffel’s delightfully textured ceramics are familiar around northeast Ohio in group shows, galleries, and museums. At William Busta Projects, Cliffel’s solo exhibition, Working from Home, occupies two rooms and is poignant in all the right ways Cliffel’s work is an exploration of what she calls “domestic mythologies.” According to her website, “our culture surrounds us with pervasive archetypal myths […]
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I’ve wanted to see artistic commentary on Amazon’s pervasiveness for a long time. I’m certain that nearly everyone reading this has made a purchase from Amazon at some point in their lifetime (myself included). As I write this article, I’ve already looked out the window and watched the Amazon truck pass by my apartment building. Whether you’re an enthusiastic Prime […]
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To be polite and understated, Cuyahoga Arts and Culture has a lot going on right now. The organization that administers public funding for the arts is facing criticism from artists over the way it has handled individual artist grants in recent years, and a discrepancy between amounts budgeted for individual artist grants and the amounts actually spent. In discussion of […]
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The nonprofit advocacy organization Assembly for the Arts rolls out a new grant program for individual Cuyahoga County artists this week, supported by Cuyahoga Arts and Culture. Assembly for the Arts Executive Director Jeremy Johnson and Chief Community Officer Deidre McPherson spoke about the program via Zoom. Assembly joins Julia de Burgos Cultural Arts Center, Karamu House, and SPACES Gallery […]
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“I was born and raised in Cleveland but I became a man in Atlanta,” says Kevin Harp, the artist known as Mr. Soul. He graduated from John Marshall High School on Cleveland’s West Side in 1992, enrolled at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, and soon after graduation moved to Atlanta to create graphics for the music industry. He got involved […]
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In 2011, Fred and Laura Ruth Bidwell and the Cleveland Museum of Art announced a unique partnership that allowed the art-collecting Bidwells to launch exhibitions featuring their extensive holdings for six months each year, and allowed the museum to create a permanent presence for contemporary art on the Near West Side—an area long known as Ohio City, recently branded by […]
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On a Tuesday evening in March 1964, two New York police detectives stormed into the New Bowery Theater in the city’s Lower East Side and seized a number of items, including reels of an avant-garde film, Flaming Creatures. Produced the previous year by experimental film pioneer Jack Smith, the forty-minute effort included nudity, transsexuality, and sexual situations. Just two months […]
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