Narrative Power: Earl O. James at Akron Soul Train

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 […]

Read more

White House Trickle-Down in the Arts?

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 […]

Read more

Dance Seismography: Robert Wright’s Over, Under, Sideways, Down at Summit Artspace

“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. […]

Read more

When Expectant Mothers Have a Village: Birthing Beautiful Communities’ Dear, at moCa

I recently went to moCa Cleveland for the opening of an exhibit of photos provided by Birthing Beautiful Communities: Dear. Dear is a tribute to the strength, resilience, and beauty of Black motherhood and the community that supports it. Birthing Beautiful Communities is an organization in Northeast Ohio that holistically supports pregnant women from the time they find out they […]

Read more

Womanism: Nana Kwesi Agyare-Ansah at East Avenue Gallery

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 […]

Read more

Winter/Spring at moCa: a Look Ahead

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 […]

Read more

El Albañil: J. Leigh Garcia at Canton Museum of Art

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 […]

Read more

Life, Death, Politics and Boobies: George Kocar and Friends, at AAWR

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 […]

Read more

I’m with the BAND: FriendsWithYou at Cleveland Public Library

The eternal now glides through an enormous marble box wearing those sherbert pastels last seen in a 1970s Florida hotel. There’s a murmur of inscrutable—yet comforting—language of chimes and tones and whirrs. Lean into this otherworldly chatter and move among entities who move among you; dance without noticing and create the next movement, the next verse, that is inherent in […]

Read more

Attempt to Imagine: Possibility for Repair, at CIA

Possibility For Repair, on view at the Reinberger Gallery through February 9, opened just three days after the November 5 election. The show is an attempt to imagine reparations for the systemic elite white supremacy and unchecked, hegemonic European-Christian values that buttresses our collective American histories. Artists Lyndon Barrois, Jr., Mark Thomas Gibson, Sarah Kabot, M. Carmen Lane, and Jessica […]

Read more
1 2 3 58