Galleries, Art Centers, and Artists look forward to the new normal, whatever that may be. In March, when Ohio Governor Mike DeWine had just issued his stay-at-home order to slow the spread of COVID-19, there was a sense that riding out the crisis would be like holding your breath and diving under water before coming up for air again. Galleries […]
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“Don’t make any pictures of clipper ships. They don’t sell.” This apocryphal tidbit of economic advice for artists is attributed to the late Marvin Jones, professor of art and printmaking at Cleveland State University from 1976 to 2005. Never mind the ongoing pushmi-pullyu argument of art and commerce; most artists are makers who sell what they make. In this issue […]
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Martha Cooper was one of the early documentarians of New York graffiti. Her 1984 book with Henry Chalfant, Subway Art, ranks alongside Jon Naar and Norman Mailer’s seminal 1974 volume The Faith of Graffiti as one of the primary records of the then-nascent form. We bring her up now because in March, the Cleveland International Film Festival will screen the Selina Miles documentary […]
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The painting of portraits has a long and storied history. For hundreds of years, artists have sought to capture likenesses on canvas. In a post-postmodern world, portraiture still has a role to play, but what is it exactly? In a world of selfie sticks and Instagram filters, people still seek out traditional painted portraits, but the status of these paintings […]
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Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio by John “Derf” Backderf is a graphic novelization of the four days leading up to the Kent State Massacre of May 4, 1970, where bystanders were shot by the Ohio National Guard, which had been called upon to suppress student protests of the war in Vietnam. Derf is a storied underground comic-book artist, but this will […]
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I was surprised by Louis B. Burroughs’ works on canvas, after seeing photographs of a few of them in catalogs and on the painter’s website. I knew they were big, but it’s hard to imagine the impact of a large painting in real space. Several mural-like compositions, each ten and twelve feet long, were displayed down one side of the […]
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Now that he’s retired, David King has time to get to work. For three decades, King taught art in Chagrin Falls schools. He is proud of his students. “They make me look good,” he says of them. And he puts his money where his mouth is: Throughout his Cleveland Heights home, he’s hung works by Chagrin Falls graduates who’ve gone […]
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Our series on art and disability has discussed inclusion in the arts, accessibility in the Cleveland scene, and the historical disability stories hiding in plain view at the Cleveland Museum of Art. This fourth (and final) article features the voices and artwork of local disabled artists we’ve had the honor of speaking with. Artists with disabilities exist at every level […]
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Democratizing, inclusive, acknowledging and addressing conflicts Readers may or may not have known about an organization called the International Conference of Museums, but there is in fact such a thing, and it is based in Paris, and it does have 40,000 members, representing 20,000 museums around the world. In Ohio, they include the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Cincinnati Art […]
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The core of Stranger Beings is a mind-bending selection of dozens of eccentric works gleaned, in sober fact, from the widely known collection of the Richard and Alita Rogers Family Foundation. Known also as the Hieronymus collection (so-called after Hieronymus Bosch, Renaissance master of the grotesque), the eclectic mix of art objects has been an ongoing labor of love for […]
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