The 75th annual CIA Student Independent Exhibition is of unusual interest, not just for all the perennial art and education reasons, but also as creative testimony to the deep impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on students and on artists generally. Organized by a student committee, the works on view were selected by a group of artist/educator jurors recruited from around […]
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Near the shore of an ocean—or along Lake Erie where the fiber artist Rebecca Cross lives during much of the year—the world is mainly water, topped with sky. Storm or calm above is reflected in the tone and motion of the waves, and the line between water and sky, the distinction, is often broken, though the long curve of difference […]
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Paintings can foreshorten and remake experience, transcribing in a directly sensual, primal tongue. This ambitious undertaking is often bitter and disappointing — but pocked with thrilling episodes. It’s a search for the kind of truth that immediacy conveys, a body-to-body, first person narrative approach to communication. Either there’s no room for error, or (more likely) the error is all the […]
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Artists are also educators, one way or another, whether as a day job or in the sense that they communicate through their art. They have an important role in the great human project of personal growth as they search out the hidden shape of the spirit. In a statement introducing Underestimated, her current solo show (on view through Friday […]
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The yellowhammer is a bird a little bigger than a robin, protected (like many other song birds) by international treaty as it migrates down the Atlantic coast. When printmaker and photographer Michael Loderstedt was growing up in North Carolina, on the southernmost dot in the string of barrier islands known as the Outer Banks, yellowhammers were a familiar sight. In […]
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Patricia Zinsmeister Parker has been an exhibiting artist for a long time, long enough to impact the arts in Ohio and beyond in many ways, but also long enough for general awareness of the importance of her paintings to go in and out of focus. She is also a significant arts educator, who received her advanced and terminal degrees […]
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The months pass and the memes metastasize as the COVID crisis wears on; we become less familiar to one another and less sure of ourselves. The fact that most of us wear masks in public, now, is especially confusing, obscuring emotional cues and familiar expressions. It’s as if much of the nuance of the social world was blanked out like the pages […]
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Cleveland’s newest gallery, Abattoir, is named for the meat-industry term, meaning “slaughterhouse,” in honor of the original function of the Hildebrandt sausage-producing complex where the space is located. Making its debut in 2020, a punishing year of pandemic and social upheaval, the name and the place might seem disturbingly appropriate. The gallerist-proprietors, Lisa Kurzner and Rose Burlingham, are curators with […]
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The painter Amy Casey lives in a smallish house that might be found (and often is) somewhere in one of her paintings. Like its resident, the house minds its own business on the sidelines, aware of, but mostly uninvolved in, the surrounding bustle of its quasi-gentrified Cleveland neighborhood. Over a period of years her activities have spread through the clapboard […]
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The digital exhibit Self Portraits: Artists Respond to COVID-19 is the result of an open call by Anna Arnold. As the director of the Florence O’Donnell Wasmer Gallery at Ursuline College, Arnold invited any visual artist to submit an image of themselves reflecting their response to the coronavirus pandemic. About 100 works were selected for display from 72 submitting artists. […]
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