Last year, Mary Urbas left her longtime post as Director of the gallery at Lakeland Community College after the administration cut her position and closed the gallery amid deep budget cuts and financial woes. During her tenure as director, she curated long-running themed exhibitions, including the annual the Skull and Skeleton Show, and, in honor of Women’s History Month, the […]
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The excellent title of Harminder Judge’s exhibition, The Bootstrap Paradox (on view January 24 – June 1 at moCa Cleveland) might seem at this point in history to be an economic reference to the elusive American Dream. In this country we have the illusion that poor people can “lift themselves up by their bootstraps” and start companies, work hard, and […]
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The Cleveland Institute of Art’s Love Is Resistance, which opened on Valentine’s Day at Transformer Station, is in a multitude of ways The Kind Of Show We Need Right Now. After a year with no visual art programming at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s West side exhibit space, after decades during which Cleveland artists have pined for any measure of […]
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Sculpture has a unique narrative power. The physicality of an object in three-dimensions taking up space and demanding gravity pay attention to it can help create an impact on the viewer that is more rare and even guttural than the most vivid graphic image. Pathways and Passages by Earl O. James on view at Akron Soul Train through February 15th […]
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Donald Trump’s executive order terminating “diversity, equity, and inclusion discrimination in the federal workforce, and in federal contracting and spending” will have broad impact on the arts and culture. That begins with the National Endowment for the Arts’ recent announcement that, abiding the White House order, the Challenge America Grants program had been cancelled, and its funds re-allocated to support […]
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“It’s kind of like I’m a human seismograph, and I capture the instantaneous spirit of the motion,” artist Robert Wright said, responding to a question about how different types of dance affect his work. But even if it is inspired by dance, and represent its movements, and is actually inseparable from it, what the painter does is not dance notation. […]
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If art is a way of understanding the world, or about revealing the world anew, then it has to be about crossing lines, adventuring into the unknown. That means reaching across cultures, and it’s never been more important than now. The exhibit Womanism–works of Nana Kwesi Agyare-Ansah, on view at East Avenue Gallery in Akron—is like that. Nana is grom […]
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Opening on Friday, January 24 are three exhibitions: Gala Porras-Kim: A Hand in Nature; Birthing Beautiful Communities: Dear; and (curated by MOCA’s recent hire, Curator and Deputy Director, DJ Hellerman) Harminder Judge: Bootstrap Paradox. This is the first U.S. exhibition by British artist Harminder, whose vibrant plaster-and-pigment pieces merge painting and sculpture, embedding paint in form, making fields of sinuous […]
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Art and art making has the power to transform how we interact with the world. It can shed new light on sociopolitical issues. It can help to create better ways to understand biological and physical sciences, and art can even sometimes help to make better sense of math. So, it should be no surprise that an artist would use their […]
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It was perhaps an hour after leaving George Kocar: A Retrospective, on view at Artists Archives of the Western Reserve, that I saw one of the artist’s best-known works silk screened on a T-shirt, worn by someone who didn’t know Kocar’s name. The art was the old Cleveland: You Gotta Be Tough graphic, featuring Cleveland’s skyline in the year of […]
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