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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Kristina Paabus, winner of the CAN Journal Prize at the 2018 CAN Triennial, is influenced by the systems and strategies of perception we use to contain and negotiate our surroundings. Working within the polarities of myths and truths, Paabus pays special attention to aspects of our information-drenched society that are often taken for granted or overlooked. Involved with ideas that […]
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Painter Mark Howard’s public art work is ubiquitous—from trash cans downtown and in the Heights to the walls at Hopkins Airport and beyond. Once a regular presence in the art scene, he’s been low-key in recent years. We caught up with him to talk about what makes the right gallery, what public art owes to the public and big-time foot […]
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Last year in his New Jersey studio, Cai Guo-Qiang ignited the gunpowder for his work Cuyahoga River Lightning: Drawing for the Cleveland Museum of Art. Stretching nearly forty feet long, the artist traced the familiar curving path of Cleveland’s famous river—from the site of the historic fire in the summer of 1969 to the mouth at Lake Erie—using explosions. The […]
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We’ve said since the beginning that CAN Journal is a mirror of the art scene here. The truth of that, however, depends on who happens to be standing in front of it. For the last two years, Cleveland artists have been talking about racial inequity in our art scene—a conversation pushed along by Cuyahoga Arts and Culture’s efforts to […]
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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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Stephen Calhoun is an artist of paradoxes. Concretely, his works are photographs altered through generative computational processes. The finished products are luminous mandalas, characterized by symmetry and color. However, Calhoun’s thinking and processes are characterized by ideas in tension. His images are the product of both painstaking craftsmanship and blind mechanical algorithms. His art is abstract, but made of photographs […]
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“In the early days we were surprised and delighted with a photograph…but we soon wanted something more. Because the photograph told us everything about the facts of nature and left out the mystery. Now, however hard-headed a man may be, he cannot stand too many facts; it is easy to get a surfeit of realities, and he wants a little […]
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Multi-media artist Ron Shelton’s work is currently installed at 78th Street Studios (our plastic world, as part of CAN Triennial) and Lakewood Family Health Center (Figures in the Solstice Steppers). He talks about TV, colors, Tidy Cats, plastics, his commentary on the Midwest and why his work sometimes disappears. JI: Tell me about High Art Fridays. What was the impetus […]
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After high-profile projects like the Cleveland Trust Building’s transformation into a grocery store, and with BAYarts’ adaptive re-use of the former Huntington Playhouse in the works, John Williams looks back—and forward. by Jeff Hagan John C. Williams does not consider himself an architect. He jokes that he accidentally signed up for his first architecture course because in the course catalog […]
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