As soon as Governor Mike DeWine issued stay at home orders, we knew the Summer 2020 issue of CAN Journal would be different from any we’ve published before. That’s because previews of exhibits and related events usually fill about half of the pages in this magazine, and inform the rest, as well. As gallery directors and artists shelter in place […]
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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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As local art galleries began shutting their doors due to the pandemic, planned exhibitions slowly started to be cancelled or postponed for the foreseeable future. Working artists, whose entire livelihood could be tied to one significant show, watched aghast and with little recourse as Ohio’s stay-at-home orders were extended. As the summer issue of CAN went to press, the summer […]
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In the shadow of COVID – 19, ARTneo/CAN Triennial exhibition prizewinner Christine Mauersberger confronts uncertainty with beauty and resolve In July of 2018, Christine Mauersberger installed Poisonous Beauty in the main stairwell of 78th Street Studios. The work was inspired by the 2017 algae bloom in Lake Erie—the worst since 2014. The algal blooms were the inevitable result of government inaction—the failure […]
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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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