Curlee Raven Holton, at William Busta Projects

How do we know the world? How do we know how we belong? There are histories that are written and sometimes we tell ourselves that is all there is to know, provided, of course, that the history satisfies. If it is close but doesn’t quite satisfy, we fuss with it. This is a type of game—writing and rewriting history to […]

Read more

Huddled Around our Electronic Hearths, With an Ache to Touch

We huddle around our electronic hearths, looking at each other through the flames, with an ache to touch. When we rise, we look around at walls that enclose, finding safety in contemplative ways, uneasily worshipping these melancholy days. There is an important question that the William Busta Gallery and its projects have asked over and over and over: As artists […]

Read more

William Busta Projects to Open on Waterloo

These are empty hours, like times when you lay in bed, awake, uncertain of sleep.  Usually the arts celebrate direct engagement, experience that is intellectual and emotional and physical all at once.  In our current art life, mostly online, there are always things that are lost in translation, in the generations of reproduction.  Simply put, standing in front of a […]

Read more

Art from a Distance: Darius Steward

  In this installment of CAN Blog’s Art from a Distance series, painter Darius Steward talks about being at home with his family during the COVID crisis, and developing new ways to reach out to potential customers at a time when gallery exhibits are not an option. Steward’s work was featured both in FRONT International Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art […]

Read more

ART AND THE CROOKED RIVER: A PATH THROUGH HISTORY

The Waterways to Waterways cohort of Creative Fusion residents continues a long tradition of artistic response to the Cuyahoga. The general lay of the land surrounding Cleveland offers little drama to feed either artists’ or tourists’ desire for the extraordinary. Even the coast of our Great Lake offers little variation—with none of the outcroppings, peninsulas and offshore islands that usually […]

Read more

CAN Triennial Artist Roster Announced

The number of artists who applied to the curated CAN Triennial exhibition was enormous, and the range of their experience and accomplishment, the diversity of their techniques and perspectives all were inspiring. We should not be surprised: this is emblematic of the energy and intensity visible every week in the Cleveland art scene. In all, curators William Busta, Angelica Pozo, […]

Read more

Observations on what makes for successful careers: Epilogue

In earlier articles in this series, I wrote about art careers from the perspective of what I observed in successful artists. Here, I am more subjective, writing about the art business from my own perspective, from my own intuitions. I am less confident here, because there are many models for a gallery business, and these suggestions and observations apply best […]

Read more

STAY IN TOUCH

If an artist wishes to stay part of the ongoing narrative of ideas that is part of the intellectual life of curators, gallerists, and art patrons, they need to stay in touch.  You can’t presume that people will know what you are doing – or even that you still actively work as an artist – simply because you have a […]

Read more

Gloria Plevin at ARTneo: “transformed through selective imagination”

Like the breath of memory, the works of Gloria Plevin present a moment gracefully imagined and conscientiously realized in a personal consideration of time.  In that time there is stillness and then a presentation, and then something of reflection.  The works hold that stillness as a meditation without intent to surprise or disturb.  But there is cautious mystery that takes […]

Read more

Know Art: Observations on What Makes for Successful Careers

Once in a while I have startled audiences at lectures with the provocative suggestion that I’ve met many artists who don’t like art.  Sure, they like their own art, but they don’t seem to be that interested in art that’s done by anyone else, either now or in the past. If someone likes baseball, they read about it every day […]

Read more
1 2