Michael Gill Archives - Collective Arts Network

THE GOLD STANDARD: THE NEIGHBORHOOD RALLIES TO SAVE AN OLD BUILDING ON WATERLOO

Architecturally speaking, the so-called “Gold Building” is nothing to write home about. It’s just two storefronts at the street level, and office space along a hallway upstairs: standard stuff of the streetcar era. Hundreds of buildings like this still stand—even a century beyond their heyday—along the commercial corridors of Cleveland. But the Gold Building, on Waterloo at East 156th Street, had […]

STAYING IN THE CONVERSATION: UNDENIABLE, TELLING, FRONT-BURNER IMPORTANT

Michael Gill

Even without demographic research, it is safe to say CAN Journal has an overwhelmingly white readership. Collective Arts Network is an organization started by white people, and while our board of directors and membership of organizations are increasingly diverse, there is a lot of inertia in the region’s racial dynamic. For someone familiar with the art scene in Cleveland, that […]

INTERNATIONAL PRESSURE: POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC TURMOIL BROUGHT LETTERPRESS PRINTER SHADI AYOUB FROM BEIRUT TO CLEVELAND

Michael Gill

Shadi Ayoub greets visitors to his 961 Collective in the parking lot of the Osborn Building on Hamilton Avenue. He then walks them through industrial space occupied by Ingenuity Festival, back to his small, rectangular studio. On one side of the room are machines: two Heidelberg windmill letterpresses, an industrial paper cutter, a desk. On the other side are three […]

LOOKING FORWARD TO A BETTER FUTURE

Michael Gill

Norman Rockwell painted our cover image, From Concord to Tranquility, in 1971, and it was used to illustrate the Boy Scouts of America calendar in 1973. Rockwell—who famously painted hundreds of covers for the Saturday Evening Post—also painted dozens of illustrations for the Boy Scout magazine Boy’s Life, and for the Scouts’ annual calendars from 1925 to 1976. The people […]

BUCKLE UP AND EVOLVE

Michael Gill

We were not much more than halfway through the year when the horrors of 2020—so extreme, so numerous–became a kind of prompt for generating poetry. Across platforms, people would recite the litany of wildfires and floods, and police violence against People of Color, and one failure after the next to hold police accountable; they’d note the COVID pandemic, and the […]

Arte a distancia: MetroWest presenta exhibición de once artistas de Cleveland sobre el coronavirus

Michael Gill

La crisis de COVID ha propiciado que el arte público al aire libre tenga un papel más relevante. Es visible para todos, todo el tiempo, sin obligar a los espectadores a aglomerarse en multitudes en las galerías y a respirar un aire encerrado. Además, ofrece una alternativa única para unir a una comunidad,al proporcionar una experiencia común incluso cuando las […]

METROWEST PRESENTS ART AT A DISTANCE: ELEVEN CLEVELAND ARTISTS RESPOND TO THE COVID CRISIS

Michael Gill

The COVID crisis has created a world in which outdoor public art has an important role. It’s visible to everyone, all the time, without subjecting viewers to gallery crowds or indoor air. It has a unique way of bringing a community together, providing common experience even when people are isolated. That’s what has happened with several of the Creative Fusion […]

You Can’t Win If You Don’t Play

Michael Gill

You can’t win if you don’t play. That’s the kind of flippant, easy thing people say about the lottery. But it is an important message in the midst of the greatest challenge we face in the US, which is to deal with our history of racism. We can’t deal with it if we don’t try. You are not making progress […]

THE ART OF SURVIVING PANDEMIC

Michael Gill

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 […]

PRESS “RESUME PLAY”

Michael Gill

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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