On this, a day of giving thanks, I am thankful for Samaria Rice. Thrust into the spotlight five years ago when her son Tamir was gunned down by the Cleveland police, Ms. Rice has turned this tragedy into action – and a week ago on the occasion of memorializing this horrible date, she presented the plans for a Afrocentric Cultural […]
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It’s true with voices in a duet, with food on a plate, and certainly in a two-person exhibit: When two things are presented together, the way they relate (or don’t) is a make-or-break factor. Cleveland Print Room makes good on this front with Rebekah Ann Wilhelm and Steven Mastroianni’s exhibit, Lines and Shadows, on view November 8 – 30. The […]
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Walking in to the Transformer Station’s current exhibition, Surface Tension, you will quickly notice that all of Tabitha Soren’s photographs appear hazy and out of focus. Upon closer inspection, you might notice that all-too-familiar pattern of smudge marks and fingerprints, a texture that is now a recognizable aspect of modern technological life, as our fingers swipe the various screens of […]
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With the weather changing here in North East Ohio, may I suggest a trip to Massillon Museum’s Studio M to look at the mood-altering drawings of Sandra Benny? The gallery is an explosion of color like a tropical botanical garden. The drawings fill the room with marriages between feathers and flowers. It is the first time that I noticed […]
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Last weekend at the Cleveland Cinematheque the makers of The Foreigner’s Home, a documentary about acclaimed writer and Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, presented the film for the first time since Morrison’s death last summer. This somber fact made the film all the more powerful, as much of it features Morrison speaking directly to the camera, her words potent, compelling, urgent, and prescient. […]
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Pakistani-American artist Anila Quayyum Agha won both the popular and juried vote at ArtPrize (an international art competition that takes place every other fall in Grand Rapids, Michigan) in 2014 for her work Intersections, a feat that no artist had previously achieved. This double-win put Agha “on the map” so to speak, and since, her highly-immersive installations have garnered not only […]
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Emma Anderson’s paintings liberate through claustrophobia. Her panels are full of faces. Those faces exist between caricature and carnage. They wear the bulbous eyes and flapping lips of Muppets, or the fangs and searing eyes of monsters. Their colors are as vivid as poison dart frogs. They bunch together, crowding out negative space, pressing themselves towards the viewer. They are […]
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“My images are my proof that I exist in a world without accurate depictions….I am tired of people from outside of Black environments communicating our stories. Their perceptions are off. This is why my work is so important.” — Donald Black Jr., photographer, whose work is including in seenUNseen SeenUNseen is a large survey of work by African American artists […]
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A couple of shows recently opened at Negative Space, both reminding us (in case anyone ever forgot) that the river of creative production is endless, and constantly renewing itself. Negative Space director Gadi Zamir has run the Annex Gallery for several years as a zero-commission space for artists to present shows. The space he is calling Sideburner Gallery, however, is a […]
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The earliest exhibitions of digital art took place in Stuttgart, Germany and New York City back in the first half of 1965, yet today’s debates over how (or if) “digital” and “art” ought to mix too often lack maturity to match their advancing age. In the ‘60s the New York Times feared that “almost any kind of painting can […]
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