Owning the history of the burning river | The first twelve fires on the Cuyahoga River didn’t get much attention or do much to change the way our industries or governments viewed one of Cleveland’s defining features. But the thirteenth fire, which took place in 1969 and was reported in Time magazine, captured the attention of the nation. Not only […]
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The AfriCOBRA co-founder, Cleveland resident, and CAN Triennial exhibition prize winner is busy with exhibits and speaking engagements in New York, Los Angeles, Venice, and Central Ohio. Wadsworth Jarrell is on the move. At 89 years old, Jarrell has an exhibiting schedule any artist could envy. In 2019 alone, his work has been featured at New York’s Skoto Gallery […]
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For more than three decades Matt Dibble, one of northern Ohio’s strongest painting talents, divided his time between a thriving roofing business and a necessarily discontinuous studio practice. Summers were for roofing; winters were for painting. Not that the interruptions slowed him down very much. Visitors to his Superior Avenue workspace in downtown Cleveland knew they would need to tread […]
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Kristina Paabus, winner of the CAN Journal Prize at the 2018 CAN Triennial, is influenced by the systems and strategies of perception we use to contain and negotiate our surroundings. Working within the polarities of myths and truths, Paabus pays special attention to aspects of our information-drenched society that are often taken for granted or overlooked. Involved with ideas that […]
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Painter Mark Howard’s public art work is ubiquitous—from trash cans downtown and in the Heights to the walls at Hopkins Airport and beyond. Once a regular presence in the art scene, he’s been low-key in recent years. We caught up with him to talk about what makes the right gallery, what public art owes to the public and big-time foot […]
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Last year in his New Jersey studio, Cai Guo-Qiang ignited the gunpowder for his work Cuyahoga River Lightning: Drawing for the Cleveland Museum of Art. Stretching nearly forty feet long, the artist traced the familiar curving path of Cleveland’s famous river—from the site of the historic fire in the summer of 1969 to the mouth at Lake Erie—using explosions. The […]
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RIAN INTERVIEWS EVA RIAN BROWN-ORSO: I love your sculpture because it gives me this visceral reaction. The Immortal Peaches are luscious creatures, candy-like…they’re like poisonous mushrooms or frogs. You want to touch them and put them in your mouth, but you know they’re dangerous. EVA KWONG: The fact that you want to touch it is what drew me to working […]
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In collaboration with professor Damaris Punales Alpizar, we gave Spanish language students from Case Western Reserve University a task: Go out there to the real world; put the language skills acquired in the classroom to work; connect with Hispanic artists in Cleveland; talk to them; learn from them. The results are below: students sharing what they found in common with […]
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Sequoia Bostick, co-founder of the all-ages comic book anthology, VAGABOND COMICS, talks storytelling and the creation of new worlds. Sequoia Bostick quietly eats a lunch of Mediterranean food at Maelstrom Collaborative Arts where she works as a creative producer. She is relaxed here and it’s easy to see why: though she describes herself as primarily an illustrator, this space bears […]
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I recently attended the opening for a group show that had an entry category for disabled artists. I was asked dozens of times which work on the “disabled” display was mine. The confusion was understandable: My wheelchair was parked near it to avoid blocking foot traffic, and I was one of few visibly disabled artists present. Redirecting each querier to […]
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