Liz Maugans, known over the past twenty five years as a power-house of inspiration and sustained effort behind the developing Cleveland arts scene, is also one of the region’s most admired visual artists. Her prints, collages, and drawings document her commitment to personal freedom and the complex emotional and cognitive problems of life in our times – as a […]
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For more than three decades Matt Dibble, one of northern Ohio’s strongest painting talents, divided his time between a thriving roofing business and a necessarily discontinuous studio practice. Summers were for roofing; winters were for painting. Not that the interruptions slowed him down very much. Visitors to his Superior Avenue workspace in downtown Cleveland knew they would need to tread […]
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Unlike most people, I first knew of Douglas Max Utter as a writer. Flipping through the pages of Angle Magazine and the storied Free Times (both now sadly defunct), I became a Doug Utter “The Writer” fan girl. As an aspiring art writer myself, I didn’t know that this kind of writing was allowed – I loved it so much […]
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In the twenty-three years since it first appeared, hallucination-like, along Chester Ave., Billy Lawless’ over-sized, playful sculpture “The Politician: A Toy” has become one of Cleveland’s most important pieces of public art. It’s not nearly as sinister as the snaking, twisted steel bar that constitutes Isamu Noguchi’s similarly huge 1976 “Portal”, installed on the sidewalk in front of the […]
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Douglas Max Utter’s house on the hillside above Euclid Avenue in East Cleveland is filled with his steady output of painting and ideas. In room after room, the walls are hung with his own work. “I’ve made it a kind of museum of myself,” he says, in a way that is perhaps slightly bemused, but also frankly true. There […]
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The subtle patterns and collage-like layers of Petra Soesemann’s textile-based works are like core samples, skimmed or extracted from a not-quite-physical dimension found near the frontiers of memory and human understanding. At the same time, they read as desirable, touchable, and the tension between these qualities lends them a lapidary oscillation – like precious stones seen in a shallow lake. […]
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Whether or not many people, local or otherwise, actually saw any of the works and projects completed by its 111 artists, or visited some (or even none) of its 26 sites in Cleveland, Akron, and Oberlin, FRONT Triennial was a big deal. It succeeded in putting our region decisively on any map of international twenty-first century art events. Ambitious planners […]
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Visions and Revisions Azziz Muhammad is a visual artist and community activist who grew up in East Cleveland. Comfortably seated in a window at the main branch of the East Cleveland Public Library, he spoke with CAN about his work as a part of the Cleveland Foundation’s Creative Fusion Data Cohort. The view along streets near the library is mainly […]
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Despite using very different materials and techniques, artists Jenniffer Omaitz and Arabella Proffer augment the impact of one another’s work in their current two person show, where they reorganize, reinvent, or sabotage the stability of organic and domestic structures. Titled Illustrious Decay, the exhibit of paintings and sculptures will be on view through October at CWAL Gallery. Prior to 2010 […]
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Before the SUV ruled America’s highways, before Uber and Lyft threatened the primacy of the family car, there was the Road Trip. Not that anyone called it that back when the Joad clan were fleeing the Dust Bowl. But from The Grapes of Wrath all the way through Jack Kerouac’s adventures, up to the sad moment when Chevy Chase and […]
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