Cleveland: Marking Time and Making a Sustainable Mark

Cleveland’s Big Triennial Era reaches the finale of its long denouement in Fall 2025. After announcements early last year that neither the FRONT nor the CAN triennials would proceed for a third iteration, both had unfinished business. CAN Triennial Exhibition Prize shows, for example, continued to roll out, one season following another, with solo exhibitions by selected artists at the Butler Institute of American Art, Akron Art Museum, Erie (Pennsylvania) Art Museum, and elsewhere.

FRONT Triennial’s final commitment—an exhibition by the FRONT Futures Fellows Antwoine Washington, Charmaine Spencer, Amanda D. King, and Erykah Townsend—opens at Transformer Station September 12. The Futures Fellowship was a major commitment by FRONT to selected BIPOC artists, including significant financial support, travel, and initially participation in the next iteration of the triennial. Director Fred Bidwell committed to make good on all that, even if the triennial itself would not happen. The result—the Futures Fellows’ own exhibition at Transformer Station—will show how those artists’ work has evolved in recent years. Read about it, with insights from the artists and writer Nate Paige in this issue of CAN Journal.

The final CAN Triennial Exhibition Prize show also opens this fall. The Canton Museum of Art selected Augusto Bordelois for that prize. As curator Christy Davis told us while announcing the prize in 2022, “we were immediately drawn to Augusto Bordelois. [. . .] His powerful artist statement of portraying ‘the promise of the American Dream, the discrepancy between the wealthy and those less fortunate, but also how we all have our own entitlements’ confirmed our selection. [. . .] His use of animals as stand-ins for humans focuses on issues of class and immigration across America with a painting style that reflects his Cuban heritage and training.” And so we look forward, three years later, to seeing this show when it opens August 26. Read more from Jo Steigerwald, who interviewed the artist for our cover story.

A third major international score for Cleveland and the Midwest also comes full circle this fall, when Everlasting Plastics—the exhibit then-SPACES director Tizziana Baldenebro curated with Lauren Leving for the US Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Biennale—is reinstalled here. Midwest-based artists Xavi L. Aguirre, Simon Anton, Ang Li, Norman Teague, and Cleveland-based Lauren Yeager all reused plastic in different ways to highlight our “fraught but enmeshed kinship” with the ubiquitous material. SPACES opens the new installation of Everlasting Plastics September 26.

Where do these conclusions leave Northeast Ohio artists and patrons in their quest to connect to the world at large? Those three shows will certainly leave them talking about craft vs. concept in art, about the continuing need to support BIPOC artists, about plastic, and of course about Cleveland’s place as an art center.

But the interest in knowing what’s going on elsewhere in contemporary art, and being a part of it will never end, and we’re happy to see artists and organizations continue working at that. CAN reported in the Spring on Common Currents—an exhibition of artists from both Northeast Ohio and Western New York, created by Artists Archives of the Western Reserve and the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, with curators representing each region. That show opened in the Spring in Cleveland and traveled to Buffalo in July, where it continues on view through November 2. Meanwhile, moCa Cleveland collaborated with the Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati on Ohio Now: The State of Nature, featuring artists from Cleveland, Cincinnati, and around the state. It’s on view in Cincinnati through September 7, and opens at moCa Cleveland January 30, 2026. These are shows any Clevelander who cares about contemporary art should see.

Will that idea of regional collaboration gain traction and continue? Or will a new vision of broader connection take hold? We’re sure the wrap-up of Cleveland’s triennial era isn’t an end to anything. In fact, we expect greater and perhaps more sustainable things to come along the shores of the Great Lakes.

We look forward to seeing you.

Michael Gill

Editor / Publisher