Timothy Callaghan makes art of the places that he sees in the ordinariness of his life. It is in some ways a contrary to the frequent practice of artists to travel to generate new ideas, looking for the unfamiliar, the dramatic, the exotic. (Admittedly there is benefit to this, as travel is one of the ways that we can see […]
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On view as part of Curlee Raven Holton’s solo exhibition Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and Spirit at William Busta Projects in Waterloo this fall, the modest size serigraph relief, A Dance of Joy and Pain (2024), summons the unusually spectacular autumn gracing Cleveland this year. Orange-crimson burns like a flame against a shrinking azure expanse, glow emitting a boundless, jubilant, […]
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Framed works of art can be imagined as windows. In art history and criticism, that’s a time-worn perception. Marcel Duchamp turned the idea inside out in his epic Étant donnés, a work of art that presents as a door with peepholes. Looking through the peepholes, the viewer experiences an illuminating, erotic world. Then you wonder what is being illuminated—the tableau […]
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When I walk alongside Lake Erie’s beach, I peel my eyes open for rocks of all different shapes, sizes, and textures, keeping the ones most divine to me contained in my pocket. The ones which are flat are perfect forms for skipping across the water, flickering movements which follow. In Matthew Kolodziej’s solo show at William Busta Projects titled, Comet, […]
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Since the start of his career in the 1990s, the work of Dexter Davis has been expressive of the emotional and magical core of our humanity. Mostly, his work as been a dissective portraiture, reaching into the complex variability of how we face the world. He constructs, tears apart, rearranges, patches together, shreds and assembles. Much as all of us […]
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Kristen Cliffel’s delightfully textured ceramics are familiar around northeast Ohio in group shows, galleries, and museums. At William Busta Projects, Cliffel’s solo exhibition, Working from Home, occupies two rooms and is poignant in all the right ways Cliffel’s work is an exploration of what she calls “domestic mythologies.” According to her website, “our culture surrounds us with pervasive archetypal myths […]
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What could be more obvious or more pleasing than paintings of your hometown? Maybe with a comforting recognition of local landmarks? Maybe enhanced with a new flourish? This was the appeal of the Cleveland Calendars published in the 1980s and 1990s by International Printing Company, who commissioned a different artist each year. These annual commissions included Mary Lou Ferbert, Moses […]
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Laurence Channing had his first one-person show in 1991 at the William Busta Gallery on Murray Hill Road, Cleveland. His charcoal drawings, at once romantic and elegant and disquieting, found an audience in exhibitions that followed in 1992, 1994, and 1995. In 1997 he also presented prints—three drypoints and a lithograph. In the next few years he created five additional […]
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There is something about how we remember things, and then there is something about how we wish to remember things, and then there is something about how we wish things that we remember were different. These are some of the lenses of history. Mary Jo Bole draws upon her experiences, wide-ranging around Cleveland since childhood, while just a little drunk […]
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Exploring lives and culture through the landscape has long been a subject for Jacob Koestler, particularly through the evidence of human impact and passing time. That manner of storytelling is at the heart of his and collaborator Michael McDermit’s new book Strange Devotion, which debuted in an exhibit at William Busta Projects on Waterloo in September. Its stories unfold in […]
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