Cuyahoga Arts and Culture Board President Nancy Mendez apologized to artists present at the CAC Board meeting December 13. An apology was the first priority expressed in the 2023 Support for Artists: Community Engagement and Planning report, commissioned by CAC and delivered a week earlier by a contractor on behalf of Assembly for the Arts. CAC director Jill Paulsen said […]
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Presenting two exhibitions on geometric abstraction, the Artists Archives of the Western Reserve draws attention to both the history of and the continued impact that the style has had on our region. While the companion exhibition Tangents (curated by Jenniffer Omaitz) pushes the boundaries of geometric abstractions, A Hard Line takes on a more Formalist approach utilizing works from the […]
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The arts sector in Cuyahoga County has long sought a way to stabilize the revenue stream for its public support, which since 2006 has been a 30-cent per pack tax on cigarettes. Among many other possibilities discussed by policy makers or suggested (taxing real estate, hotel stays, dine-in restaurant meals, beer and wine, soft drinks) the prospect of a tax […]
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Cuyahoga Arts and Culture’s entire budget for partner organizations making individual artist grants each year–$400,000 –is less than one percent of Deshaun Watson’s annual salary. Indeed, the sum of all grants CAC’s board recently approved for all organizations combined amounts to less than 25 percent of that one football player’s annual salary. This tangential comparison doesn’t just highlight the difference […]
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Cuyahoga Arts and Culture’s Board of Directors meets at 3:30 Wednesday, December 13 in the Louis Stokes Wing of Cleveland Public Library, and if you care about the arts or if you like reality television, you should go. The Board’s public behavior has been an embarrassment to the sector for all of 2023. The good news is that the terms […]
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In speaking with any number of local artists both amateur and professional, there is a shared observation that the juried exhibition ecosystem is not serving the artists. For the uninitiated, the juried ecosystem is a ‘pay to play’ exhibition model, wherein the non- refundable entrance fees (usually about $15 a painting) are aggregated to pay for juror(s) services, award money, […]
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Dual exhibitions at the Artists Archives of the Western Reserve explore North East Ohio’s long running interest in geometric abstraction. The first, Tangents, asks the question: “Why is making abstract work still important?” Jenniffer Omaitz’s curatorial debut boasts a serious panel of artists working in abstraction, primarily of the geometric variety, each with unique and individual voices. (A second exhibition, […]
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Three artists extend the landscape to others by freezing a moment: calculated, exuberant, and ineluctable, no matter if that landscape rides a riot of Fauve-inspired color, or stretches the delineation of deep graphite across white paper. This trio—Lawrence Baker, Joseph O’Sickey, and Brinsley Tyrrell—share a connection to Kent State University, and a fascination with the landscape. Baker studied with O’Sickey […]
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Long before the Black Girl Magic movement of recent years, community educator and gender studies scholar bell hooks called for loving blackness as a form of political resistance. In 1992, her now famous collection of essays, Black Looks was published with goal of “transforming our ways of looking and being, and thus creat[ing] the conditions necessary for [Black people] to move […]
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David Lusenhop’s celebrated career as an independent scholar and collector of African American art spans several decades, and includes sales to dozens of American museums, including several transactions–by sale as well as donation–to the Cleveland Museum of Art. He describes himself merely as “a conduit.” But he is so much more. He recently opened Lusenhop Fine Art, a quaint storefront […]
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