Dana Oldfather’s paintings have always walked a fine line between abstraction and reality. Visual contextual clues could be found, if you dug deep enough—often hiding beneath her trademark bombastic layers of paint—but her new work, which will be on view at Youngstown State University’s McDonough Museum of Art this fall, shows the artist at her most representational. With this comes […]
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The best visual artists tend to tilt the status quo of perception, making us see a little differently. The worker in this age-old exchange between mind and matter renews human understanding, finding form anew, feeling the vertigo and vibrato of the edges of things, like a beachcomber on the shore of changing consciousness, as change and sameness wash by turn […]
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Interviews coordinated by Rebecca Cross SHAWN INTERVIEWS JANICE SHAWN POWELL: Talk about these newest works. JANICE LESSMAN-MOSS: I tend to work in pairs by putting enough warp on the loom at one time for two pieces. The first will be these colors, and the second will have similar color relationships, with different hues. SP: They’re both striking. JLM: Then I […]
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Once upon a time, in a notable European museum, I answered a broken chair lift by oozing down a flight of stairs into the Greek statuary room. There, I reenacted a scene from The Ring by dragging myself around, long hair trailing on the floor, staring up wistfully at the works of antiquity. After painfully pulling myself back up the […]
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Owning the history of the burning river | The first twelve fires on the Cuyahoga River didn’t get much attention or do much to change the way our industries or governments viewed one of Cleveland’s defining features. But the thirteenth fire, which took place in 1969 and was reported in Time magazine, captured the attention of the nation. Not only […]
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The AfriCOBRA co-founder, Cleveland resident, and CAN Triennial exhibition prize winner is busy with exhibits and speaking engagements in New York, Los Angeles, Venice, and Central Ohio. Wadsworth Jarrell is on the move. At 89 years old, Jarrell has an exhibiting schedule any artist could envy. In 2019 alone, his work has been featured at New York’s Skoto Gallery […]
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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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