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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Over the summer of 2018, there arose a contentious legal dispute between two Cleveland-trained artists, Richard VanOver and Derek Hess, which has of late reached a settlement. VanOver, a graduate from the Cleveland Institute of Art who is currently active in his original home of Buffalo, New York, sought compensation deriving from the online sale of statuettes of Suicide Note, […]
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Commissioned in bulk, murals have recently proliferated around Cleveland At least one thing is happening very fast at City Hall: October 19, Mayor Frank Jackson’s office announced an extraordinary opportunity for a Cleveland artist—to help celebrate the tenth anniversary of our sister city relationship with Rouen, France, by traveling there to paint a large mural, eighty feet long by […]
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The Old Brooklyn Community Elementary School no longer has an art teacher. Sadly, such is the case at many area schools—art is one of the first things cut in high-need, high-poverty, urban school districts facing difficult budget decisions. For nearly twenty years, the Art House in historic Brooklyn Centre, a nonprofit arts center, has tried to fill that gap by […]
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Each issue of CAN looks ahead to a new season, but this time we’ve got to take a minute to look back on what just happened in Northeast Ohio. The FRONT International Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art is winding down. The inaugural CAN Triennial is behind us. Did Cleveland make you proud? In our view, the most important thing about […]
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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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The term blockbuster was probably first used to describe a museum exhibition in 1976, when throngs of visitors patiently waited in line to see the grandiose King Tut exhibition at the National Gallery. The show then toured the country and drew the astounding attendance of eight million people. What followed was a barrage of blockbusters over the years, usually featuring […]
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Before the internet spread aerosol-painted, hip-hop style across the world, the word “graffiti” did not instantly conjure the wildly colorful, mural-sized graphics that all but define the term these days. Graffiti is as old as walls, of course, and its history is woven with diverse threads and intentions. A deeply informed exhibit at the Massillon Museum of Art explores one […]
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“To a large extent, I’m doing this show because no one else is doing it,” says John Morris, speaking about Artbelt: New Art from the Rustbelt, which he curated and organized. The exhibit, now on display at Lakeland Community College, had two primary goals. Firstly, to showcase art made in the postindustrial Midwest while the world’s attention was turned to […]
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Jessica Pinsky interviews Christi Birchfield Jessica Pinsky: You have a background in printmaking, and your undergraduate and graduate degrees are both in print. Christi Birchfield: Correct. JP: But drawing is such an important part of your process. CB: Printmaking has given me the formula for building a piece. Layers become important—thinking about not only a singular image, but how, visually, […]
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