Since the start of his career in the 1990s, the work of Dexter Davis has been expressive of the emotional and magical core of our humanity. Mostly, his work as been a dissective portraiture, reaching into the complex variability of how we face the world. He constructs, tears apart, rearranges, patches together, shreds and assembles. Much as all of us […]
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There are a few things I miss about living in Cleveland, proximity to my son Noah being #1, but if you pressed me about naming a specific public space I’ve pined for most since departing for Knoxville last year it would have to be the Cleveland Museum of Art. I took serious advantage of its availability through the 15 years […]
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At its current point on the gentrification/revitalization arc, Hingetown might seem an unlikely place to find a new commercial art gallery, and even more so one selling works by an artist who has never before had a proper show. That’s the situation at Sixty Bowls Gallery, though, where you can find Roger von Golling’s first ever exhibition, The Appearance of […]
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Aching traceries of grasses arch and sway across colossal canvases as part of Sam Falls’ exhibit, We Are Dust and Shadow, at moCa Cleveland now until June 11, 2023. Bits of the forest have disappeared and leave only white silhouettes behind, maybe answering the question, “What void does the natural world leave when it goes away?” Falls’ work is at […]
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What makes an event worthy of documentary film? Of course the answer can be the story-telling as much as the subject, and the substance as much as the newsworthy moment. Where We Overlap: The Motion Picture is a documentary by Cleveland-based director Wayne Smith III, which appeared on the Local Heroes shorts program at the Cleveland International Film Festival. It’s […]
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There are webs that hold history captive, connecting events to one another other and to us. Bruno Casiano’s Pieces of Me, on view until April 9th in the Residency Gallery of moCa Cleveland, spins such webs out of vibrant colors and a riot of textures. (But don’t touch those paintings, no matter how much you want to.) What stories are […]
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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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