The request landed back in February. “Hi Erin,” wrote Tim Herron, cofounder of the Pretentious Cleveland Portrait Artists (PCPA), “I am always on the lookout for interesting models.” He added the sketch group was scheduling pretty far out, into August. I blinked at the screen for a minute or two amid a vague feeling of disbelief. Me? Sit for a […]
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Today’s highly choreographed, plastic, bifurcated world (and all the concerns keeping us up at night) grants renewed meaning to the phrase, open road. It’s there we find freedom and a sense of escape, but also greater connection, and the inclination to understand identity—one’s own and that of others. A selection of Julie Langsam’s Landscape Interventions: 500+ Drawings, on view at […]
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To be in The Big Ass Art Show–on view at Lakeland Community College, Valley Art Center, Artists Archives of the Western Reserve, and BAYarts—a piece of art had to measure at least four feet on a side. It’s a simple rule that does a lot of sorting: a lot of artists have simply never made something that large. And for […]
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Synesthesia happens when a person experiences one sense through another: hearing Bach, you see rectangles. Or the word “table” brings purple to mind. Its Greek roots mean “senses coming together,” according to Dr. Veronica Goss at Boston University. Closer to home, artist Renee Fisher and gourmet chocolatier Ines Rehner have created a synesthesthetic experience in their collection of hand-painted chocolates […]
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To a younger viewer, the work of Keith Haring might read more like Instagram than Street Art. Trendy current commercial success stories like Timothy Goodman and Mr. Doodle proudly carry on the tradition of laundering the vernacular of graffiti and reselling it back to the masses as a slice of an Experience. Haring’s aesthetic is really popular again: his figures […]
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Saucy camels, side-eyed snakes, and indignant cats are frozen in a blur of graphite and watercolor in A Sweet and Sour Journey with Elmer W. Brown and Langston Hughes, on exhibit at ARTneo now through July 24, 2023. Brown and Hughes, friends from their time together at Cleveland’s Karamu House in the 1930s, collaborated on “The Sweet and Sour Animal […]
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Over the past two years, Katie Butler has become synonymous with her depictions of fish as a mechanism to draw political anxieties into the domestic sphere. Her latest exhibition, State of the State, at Abattoir Gallery, is a gutsy step in a different direction. She employs her tongue-in-cheek commentary through new forms and confronts the issues she cares about directly. […]
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Praxis Fiber Workshop hosted the inaugural ‘Praxis and Practice’ Fiber Arts Conference from June 23 to June 25, bringing together a diverse community of fiber artists and designers. At the heart of the conference was the celebrated TC2 loom, a remarkable Digital Jacquard machine crafted by Digital Weaving Norway. This computer-controlled and manually-operated loom has revolutionized the creative process for […]
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Back in February CAN Blog reported on the disappearance of Loren Naji’s public art installation, “They Have Landed,” an eight-foot orb constructed primarily of plywood. “For more than 10 years, Loren Naji’s iconic sculpture ‘They Have Landed’ sat politely on a slip of greenspace in front of the West 25th RTA station, but now it’s gone,” noted our previous coverage. The removal was […]
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The dynamic of artists re-energizing neighborhoods only to be displaced by increased rent is so familiar that it needn’t be explored here, beyond pointing out that in Cleveland, Tremont is the go-to case in point. The gentrification dynamic has played out to such a degree in Tremont that there was a time when art scene regulars were mostly writing off […]
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