The events of 2020 have been quite revealing when it comes to matters of race in America. There is a global consciousness of the tensions here, as the world virtually watched life escape Minnesotan George Floyd on May 29th. Corporate responses came moments later. New terms like “anti-racism” accompanied pledges to give greater thought to ways to acknowledge and […]
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If you paid attention to news stories about the protests in response to the murder of George Floyd, you could see politics in the way people describe events. When people took to the streets chanting Black Lives Matter, and the names of Floyd, and Breonna Taylor, and Tamir Rice, and the many others who were killed by police, were those […]
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The Cleveland Museum of Art’s strategic plan Making Art Matter: A Strategic Framework for Our Second Century (2017) distills the myriad elements of a museum experience into three essentials: Art, Place, and Audience. Collectively, the three activate engagement, inspire wonder, and advance the CMA’s mission to “create transformative experiences through art, for the benefit of all the people forever.” What […]
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True to the pledge to be “For the benefit of all the people, forever,” the Cleveland Museum of Art has continued offering aesthetic, educational programming during coronavirus-imposed closure of their brick-and-mortar galleries. About every ten days since March 20, the CMA has posted an episode to its new YouTube series, “Home Is Where The Art Is.” Hosted by a rotating […]
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Elsewhere on the digital pages of CAN, Brittany M. Hudak and Michael Gill have written fine-grained and big-picture analyses of the year in Northeast Ohio art. Hudak remembered the year in a series of particular exhibits; Gill contextualized local developments within larger trends in the artworld. This post, then, is calibrated towards the medium scale—events which made a great immediate […]
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In no particular order, here is a list of my ten favorite exhibitions, artists, performances, etc. in the North East Ohio arts scene during 2019. 1. CHARLES BURCHFIELD AT THE CMA: THE OHIO LANDSCAPES Early last year at the Cleveland Museum of Art in the Focus Gallery, Charles Burchfield: The Ohio Landscapes, 1915–1920 was a truly magnificent glimpse into the formative […]
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The Trump EPA’s rollback of Obama-era rules protecting US waterways should have a special resonance in Cleveland, including in the art world here. Having just celebrated the 50th anniversary of the big fire on the Cuyahoga—an event which helped to inspire creation of the EPA—we know that humans and their industry can do profound damage to our waterways, and that […]
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Last year in his New Jersey studio, Cai Guo-Qiang ignited the gunpowder for his work Cuyahoga River Lightning: Drawing for the Cleveland Museum of Art. Stretching nearly forty feet long, the artist traced the familiar curving path of Cleveland’s famous river—from the site of the historic fire in the summer of 1969 to the mouth at Lake Erie—using explosions. The […]
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ARTISTS: Douglas Paige | Cleveland Lukas Kronawitter | Germany ORGANIZATION: Cleveland Institute of Art The Cleveland Foundation’s Creative Fusion’s projects in 2019 dare to confront Northeast Ohioans with one of the most embarrassing episodes in our region’s history, in the hope that we heed its warnings for our own era. June 22 marks the half-centennial anniversary of the 1969 […]
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“In the early days we were surprised and delighted with a photograph…but we soon wanted something more. Because the photograph told us everything about the facts of nature and left out the mystery. Now, however hard-headed a man may be, he cannot stand too many facts; it is easy to get a surfeit of realities, and he wants a little […]
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