April Regional Arts and Museum Roundup

A few interesting and very interesting arts events and shows in the greater Cleveburgh region. Actually, an understatement, this might be a good month for a road trip. Themes for the month seem to be African American Artists, Pattern In Contemporary Art, Folk Art and Craft, Lush Abstract Painting, Native American Art.

You can send your event to --- diggingpitt@gmail.com but I will only be posting a few.

Akron



Photo from museum website

Pattern ID @ The Akron Art Museum

January 23, 2010 - May 9, 2010
Karl and Bertl Arnstein Galleries

This show at The Akron about the use of pattern in contemporary art has been getting a lot of buzz and might very well be worth the trip.

"Over the last two decades, artists have increasingly turned to pattern and dress as a language with which to communicate who they are and where they come from. The experiences of culture clash, immigration and multi-ethnicity in our globalized world have driven artists to use this visual language to chart their personal and communal histories. Through pattern and dress, artists compress time and cross geographic boundaries to illustrate the various influences that inform their cultural identities. The artists freely mix motifs from popular culture, history and art history to transform the meanings of patterns. Pattern ID features 15 artists of diverse origins who have seized on pattern and dress as powerful visual connectors between themselves, their histories and their audiences."

Quite a list of global artists in this show

Mark Bradford
Iona Rozeal Brown
Nick Cave
Willie Cole
Lalla Essaydi
Samuel Fosso
James Gobel
Brian Jungen
Bharti Kher
Takashi Murakami
Yinka Shonibare
Mickalene Thomas
Aya Uekawa
Kehinde Wiley

Erie



Making It Better
Folk Arts In Pennsylvania Today (Show ends April 11)

Main Gallery
January 15, 2010 through April 11, 2010

“Making It Better” tells the story of 30 artists who work within and for their respective communities. The art, coming from every corner of the state, represents a wide array of traditions such as African dance, stonewall construction, Aztec clay flutes, Pysanky eggs, contemporary blacksmith work, and Vietnamese funerary portraits. Objects, photographs, film, music and interactive stations allow visitors to experience these traditions with all their senses. Dispelling the notions that folk art is “quaint” and “something from the past” this exhibit demonstrates that although most traditional arts are rooted in centuries’ old practices; they are meeting the needs of those living in very modern times."

Opening April 24th 87th annual juried Spring Show

Anyone want to post a review of it? Email me John Morris, diggingpitt@gmail.com

Cleveland

Cleveland Museum (MUST SEE SHOW !!!!!!!!!!!)



Horse Mask, about 1875–1900. Nimi’ipuu (Nez Perce) or possibly Cayuse, Idaho, Oregon, or east Washington. Thaw Collection, Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, N.Y., T0097. Photograph by John Bigelow Taylor (from museum website)

Art of the American Indians: The Thaw Collection

MARCH 7–MAY 30, 2010
Admission free (Please donate if you can or become a member)

We all know the ethics behind the collection of art from most traditional cultures. not only was it theft, but for most people these were not just "art", but a living part of their identity, life and religion. Bottom line is see these amazing objects while you can from the Eugene and Clare Thaw Collection of American Indian Art at the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York.

MOCA : Cleveland (Looks Like Another Must See Show!!!!!)

From Then to Now : Masterworks of Contemporary African American Art
On view January 29th, 2010 through May 9th, 2010

"Unprecedented in our region, the exhibition brings together for the first time the rich holdings of contemporary African American art drawn from preeminent collections of contemporary art in the region - the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, the Akron Art Museum, the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, Progressive Corporation, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Presented are works by many of the most important artists of our time in a range of media - works on paper, painting, sculpture, and installations. The exhibition features 27 artists, and begins with signature pieces by such pioneering figures of the 1970s and 1980s as Romare Bearden or Alma Thomas, and continues up to the present with prime examples of works by artists such as Leonardo Drew, Alison Saar, Willie Cole, David Hammons, Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, René Green, Kara Walker and Kehinde Wiley, among others. Addressing a range of themes and issues, the exhibition presents an overview of the rich cultural heritage voiced by contemporary African-American artists in their examination of history, identity, and memory."

And check out the fact that all these great works are from Ohio Colections. (Like the Progressive Collection) Ohio, unlike western PA, is home to a number of very significant contemporary art collectors.

Shaheen Modern and Contemporary Art



Gianna Commito
Falls, 2009
watercolor and casein on panel
30 x 24 inches

Untitled (Painting): Gianna Commito, Scott Olson, Zak Prekop, Brian Sharp
Shaheen Modern and Contemporary Art
February 19, 2010 - April 2, 2010

(OOPS, looks like a wonderful show about to end)

William Busta Gallery



Matthew Kolodziej
Accumulations

March 19 - April 24 2010

William Busta Gallery
2731 Prospect Ave
Cleveland, Ohio

Wed-Sat 11 - 5.30
or by Apt.

The Scupture Center: Cleveland

2010 W2S Series
March 5 – April 10, 2010
Willard Tucker: Blackdamp
Main Gallery


Carrie Dickason: Cultivating Culture
Euclid Avenue Gallery
Friday, March 5

Looks like shows end April 10

William Tucker: Blackdamp

"This body of work is preoccupied with the industrial infrastructure that keeps online the system of the digital flows of electronic networks that define the space of contemporary life. Since the early 1990’s, the coal industry in Appalachia has converted to a more efficient form of surface mining to meet the increasing demand for cheap energy. After clear cutting the most bio-diverse temperate forest on the planet, heavy machine operators blast away thousands of feet of bedrock to reach razor thin veins of coal, while dumping the rock spoil into the valleys and streams below.

Blackdamp is the name given to poisonous gases that collect in sewers and coal mines, deep within the underground networks that sustain life above the surface. This body of work envisions what happens when the accumulating residues of an abject land-base can no longer be sealed off or sequestered. Once the material consequences of short-term development seep back in, literally and metaphorically, they disrupt the images of speed, simultaneity, and frictionless energy-use that life in the digital age has modeled in our brains."

Oberlin College

Well, actually the museum is closed for renovations but you can see 20 masterworks from the collection at The Met in NY, through late August.

"The AMAM is proud to present 20 of its European and American masterworks in the galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York during spring and summer 2010. The works on display, which span the 16th-20th centuries, will be integrated into the Met’s galleries, giving visitors the rare opportunity to see the AMAM works with those by the same artists or from similar contexts from the Met’s world-renowned collections. The AMAM’s important Ter Brugghen painting, St. Sebastian Tended by Irene, will be seen with the Met’s The Crucifixion with the Virgin and St. John by the same artist, and AMAM paintings by Domenichino, Sweerts, Turner, Monet, and Cézanne will hang alongside important works by those artists."

Youngstown

The Butler

A few shows of interest. (scroll down page)

Jedd Novatt
Jan 17, 2010 Through Jan 02, 2011

"Internationally recognized American sculptor Jedd Novatt will be exhibiting five of his works from his Chaos series. The work represent studies in scale, which Novatt uses as "drawings" for monumental works created in his studio in the Basque region of Spain. The five sculptures are in bronze and will be on view from January 17, 2010 to January 2, 2011. Jedd Novatt"

Esther Nisenthal Krinitz: Fabric of Survival
Mar 07, 2010 Through May 23, 2010

Esther Nisenthal Krinitz, along with her sister Mania, were the only members of their family, and among the few Jews in their Polish village, to survive the Holocaust. At the age of 15, Esther refused the Nazi order for the Jews to report to a nearby railroad station for relocation. She and her sister separated from their family and never saw them again. In 1977, at the age of 50, Krinitz began creating works of fabric art to depict her stories of survival. The exhibition is on loan from Art and Remembrance.