Degas at CMA: Elevating the Laundress

Laundry. Whether the word evokes dazzling white sheets billowing along a clothesline or a basket brimming with unmentionables, the uniquely human task is as universal as it is mundane. However it’s perceived, the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) is elevating the humble work of washing and ironing with Degas and the Laundress: Women, Work, and Impressionism. “The exhibition looks at […]

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New Model Old School: I sat for the Pretentious Cleveland Portrait Artists, and lived to tell about it.

The request landed back in February. “Hi Erin,” wrote Tim Herron, cofounder of the Pretentious Cleveland Portrait Artists (PCPA), “I am always on the lookout for interesting models.” He added the sketch group was scheduling pretty far out, into August. I blinked at the screen for a minute or two amid a vague feeling of disbelief. Me? Sit for a […]

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Finding Warhol: Resurrecting a Lost Film

On a Tuesday evening in March 1964, two New York police detectives stormed into the New Bowery Theater in the city’s Lower East Side and seized a number of items, including reels of an avant-garde film, Flaming Creatures. Produced the previous year by experimental film pioneer Jack Smith, the forty-minute effort included nudity, transsexuality, and sexual situations. Just two months […]

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The Resurrection of Reverend Albert Wagner

With the pledge of a remarkable gift, the long-awanted, much-anticipated Reverend Albert Wagner Museum is set to become reality in September, 2023. At age fifty in the mid-1970s, the Reverend Albert Wagner experienced an epiphany during which an old board splattered with house paint spoke to him and delivered what would become his lifelong mantra: “God is going to plant […]

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Kimberly Chapman: Where Tragedy and Elegance Converge

Your head tilts with curiosity when you first gaze at the strange porcelain objects. At once familiar and foreign, they evoke a set of legs, or perhaps a swaddled infant. Damaged and deformed, their vulnerability is undeniable. Then the name, Pearly Whites, gives it away. These are teeth—sort of. Clearly modeled from human teeth, but at least fifty times as […]

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A SCOUTING ADVENTURE WITH NORMAN ROCKWELL, IN THE MAHONING VALLEY

  Five and a half miles due east from downtown Warren, Ohio, in the heart of Howland Township, sits the Medici Museum, which is completely singular on account of its current exhibition and how it got there. Norman Rockwell: American Scouting Collection includes no less than 65 original Rockwell oil paintings that the revered American artist and illustrator created for […]

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A Temporary Burst of Joy

Last March, the Museum of Contemporary Art (moCa) Cleveland announced its OPEN HOUSE initiatives, including the big news you’ve probably heard by now—free admission. But other components of the program launched behind the scenes, such as the creation of the Gund Curatorial Fellow. Enter La Tanya Autry, whose work in the Museums Are Not Neutral campaign that she co-founded in […]

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AN ARMFUL OF FLOWERS

In overwhelming numbers, organizations that make up the region’s art scene are led by women. When you draw back the camera and pan Northeast Ohio’s nonprofit arts community, one thing comes into sharp focus. An overwhelming number of these organizations are staffed and helmed by women, from Amy Callahan at Waterloo Arts to Lucinda Einhouse at the Beck Center and […]

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