Artist, Austin Thomas Swings Through Spaces Gallery In Cleveland

The blog's ambitious title implying that it covers creative culture from Pittsburgh to Cleveland is still more a goal than reality. Sadly, I have only been to Cleveland once during an Easter break when several places were closed. Still better than anyone else other than Rust Wire is doing in building any connections at all.

An artist I admire from NYC just did a nice post about her visit to one of the key hubs of creativity in Cleveland, Spaces Gallery.

Check it out here.

Curators and artist's should keep up on this space which pretty regularly puts out calls for artist's --both regional and national.

Steve Lambert's Make Capitalism Work For Me: Electronic Sign Project On Kickstarter

Yet an other "is that art?" piece blurring the line between technology, conceptual art and activism will be debuting in Cleveland, in association with Spaces Gallery.

The artist, Steve Lambert is planning to erect a huge sign asking the yes or no question, "does capitalism work for me?", and display real time results.

He's trying to help his planned tour of the sign around the country and pay for some of the other associated costs through Kickstarter.


See the Kickstarter video.

The plan to ask a very simplistic and loaded question and then tour the work around a series of "art world" type locations, where the "answer", is likely to come out the same seems childish and self serving. However, putting the work outside and various other opportunities for deeper engagement like a planned book-make this pretty interesting.

Who knows where all this will lead? That's what I like.

From the artist's website.

"Lambert made international news after the 2008 US election with The New York Times “Special Edition,” a replica of the “paper of record” announcing the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other good news. He has collaborated with groups from the Yes Men to the Graffiti Research Lab and Greenpeace. He is also the founder of the Center for Artistic Activism, the Anti-Advertising Agency, and Add-Art (a Firefox add-on that replaces online advertising with art) and SelfControl (which blocks grownups from distracting websites so they can get work done).

Steve’s projects and art works have won awards from Prix Ars Electronica, Rhizome/The New Museum, the Creative Work Fund, Adbusters Media Foundation, the California Arts Council, and others. His work has been shown at galleries, art spaces, and museums nationally and internationally, and in the collections of The Sheldon Museum, the Progressive Insurance Company, and The United States Library of Congress. Lambert has discussed his work live on NPR, the BBC, and CNN, and been reported on internationally in outlets including Associated Press, the New York Times, the Guardian, Harper’s Magazine, The Believer, Good, Dwell, ARTnews, Punk Planet, and Newsweek."

March Regional Arts Roundup

A late attempt to roundup some of the more interesting shows in the wider Northeast Ohio, Western PA region. Many of the ones I mentioned last month are still up and won't be highlighted. It's a big area so lots of stuff isn't mentioned.

The extensive show of 130 of M.C. Escher's prints at the Akron Art Museum running till May 29th is high on my to do list.


Cleveland

Cleveland Museum

FYI, The Cleveland Museum is huge; the closest thing this region has to a Met and there are a number of great shows going on there at any given time. Not to insult Cleveland, but this place alone justifies a trip. A few important shows are coming down there.

In Honor of the Cleveland Arts Prize Closes March 13!

"This exhibition commemorates the 50th anniversary of the Cleveland Arts Prize, featuring some 30 works in all media created by former visual arts prize winners whose work is in the permanent collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art. The museum’s partners in this wide-reaching celebration—MOCA Cleveland, SPACES, and the Sculpture Center—will feature exciting, newly commissioned programs held throughout the summer to draw attention to the excellence of the arts in Cleveland through the lens of the Cleveland Arts Prize. The museum’s exhibition is accompanied by the Annual Awards event for the Cleveland Arts Prize, which will be hosted in the newly renovated Gartner Auditorium on June 26, 2010."

June 13, 2010–March 13, 2011

Sorry, I dropped the ball on telling you about this show.



The Glory of the Painted Page Manuscript
Illuminations from the Permanent Collection
November 6, 2010-April 17, 2011

"The history of manuscript illumination corresponds almost exactly with the epoch we know as the Middle Ages, a vast period of about a thousand years. An illuminated manuscript is a book that was written and decorated by hand sometime between the fall of Rome, in the late 5th century AD, and the perfection of printing technology towards the end of the 15th century. Its texts were written on vellum (animal skin), not paper. These were enlivened by the application of colorful inks, pigments, and gold. In antiquity, literature was thought of as something spoken or heard. The Middle Ages broke with this tradition by considering a literary text as something to be revealed visually to be understood through the written word. Often elaborately decorated in a multitude of styles and formats, illuminated manuscripts flourished in ecclesiastical, monastic, devotional, courtly, legal, and academic contexts throughout the Middle Ages and early Renaissance. This exhibition presents a selection of liturgical, academic, and biblical leaves from the museum’s permanent collection."

MOCA Cleveland

Three contemporary artist shows there, two of which I covered last month.

Javier Téllez : Letter on the Blind, for the Use of Those Who SeeOn view January 28th, 2011 through May 8th, 2011

"Commissioned by Creative Time and Galerie Peter Kilchmann for the 2008 Whitney Biennial, Javier Téllez's stirring film, Letter on the Blind, for the Use of Those Who See (2007) documents six blind people as they touch and respond to a live elephant. Based loosely on an Indian fable, the film balances footage of these interactions with verbal commentary by each subject about his or her blindness. The rawness of the environment - an empty swimming pool in Brooklyn's McCarren Park - sharpens the rich poignancy of the individual's distinct, often profound physical and emotional response to the elephant. A compelling portrayal of non-visual perception through a visual medium, the work probes the value of sight in the interpretation of reality."

Spaces Gallery

Manic Growth
Elizabeth Dunfee
February 11 - April 01, 2011

"Akron-based artist Elizabeth Dunfee uses lyrical painting and mixed-media elements as a means to explore the consistent introduction of synthetic chemicals to our natural environment. Particularly, she weighs the alteration and manipulation of natural elements with the effects that they produce in human bodies. The resulting exhibition, Manic Growth, consisting of a large-scale "painting" environment will be on view at SPACES February 11 through April 1, 2011.

Dunfee employs microscopic cell imagery blown up to wall-sized proportions and then infuses the painting with three-dimensional objects, video and synthetic, "toxic" color to form a tension between the natural and the introduced. Her multi-media collage is a metaphor for the juxtaposition of chemical elements that lead to both beneficial as well as catastrophic results. This installation environment depicts a manic growth where she notes how altering our world for "survival" forms a paradoxical relationship with it."

Camp Cleveland
Machine Project, Emily Lacy, Nate Page, Ezra Buchla, Corey Fogel, Liz Glynn, Asher Hartman, Haruko Tanaka, Adam Overton, Laura Steenberge
February 11 - April 01, 2011

Put in plain English these are a loose group of artists who take over the space and create an ongoing series of events, performances, readings and ongoing installation projects.

Spaces Website

Sculpture Center (Cleveland)

Qian Li: No Matter How Hard I Yell and Daniel McDonald: Reluctant Redemption

Exhibition dates: March 11 – April 16, 2011

"Qian Li’s mixed media installations of sculpture and projected video incorporate memories, dreams, and visualizations of her troubled childhood and traditional Chinese background. She constructs a world of desperation, mental and physical pain, anxiety, and restlessness. Three different works will examine separate traumatic instances that have shaped her expression through art. These works take on a therapeutic aspect for the artist but the brutal emotional honesty of the pieces confronts the viewer directly.
To add another dimension of meaning and response to the artwork of No Matter How Hard I Yell, composers of FiveOne, Cleveland’s new music ensemble, are writing original music for solo instruments for each of Li's pieces."

"Daniel McDonald’s sculptures give form to the internal dilemmas he feels from the overlap of his spiritual upbringing and cultural convictions. Never quite comfortable in the socio-cultural environment of his Mormon childhood, McDonald’s works are partially cathartic but he also seeks to relate to the viewer by addressing broader social concerns such as stereotyping, manipulation and self-evaluation. His three sculptures in Reluctant Redemption examine what he deems “faith-promoting” stories, those which are fed to masses in order to create motivation through unconquerable goals and situations. By creating a dialogue with the work, McDonald hopes to create some resolution for his personal fixation while also scrutinizing the correlations and differences between expectations and eventualities."

Sculpture Center Website

Akron Art Museum

M.C. Escher: Impossible RealitiesFebruary 12, 2011 - May 29, 2011

"M.C. Escher: Impossible Realities features 130 works by master printmaker Maurits Cornelis Escher, including woodcuts, lithographs, mezzotints, sculptures, and rare preparatory drawings that provide an in-depth view of the artist's creative processes. Featured in the exhibition are seminal and instantly recognizable works such as Drawing Hands and Reptiles, as well as the extremely rare lithograph stone for the making of Flat Worms.

The exhibition comes from the Herakleidon Museum in Athens, Greece, which houses one of the world's largest collections of Escher works. Akron is one of only two North American venues for this extraordinary loan."

Akron Art Museum website

Erie Art Museum

Hidden in Plain Sight: Art Treasures from Regional Collections
Main Gallery
October 23, 2010 through April 3, 2011

The perfect show for this post!

"Throughout our region—northwest Pennsylvania and neighboring New York and Ohio—are numerous collections containing outstanding works of art. Some, like the art museums in Cleveland and Buffalo, and the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, are well known to visitors from around the country; however, dozens of collections exist in small museums, historical societies, colleges, libraries and other institutions. These collections are often unknown to their local audience, let alone within the region. To celebrate the grand opening of the new galleries, the Museum has borrowed artworks from these various collections, providing an opportunity for our audience to sample the treasures that can be found throughout the region.

The exhibition features sculptures, paintings, drawings, Native American artifacts, furniture and more. Highlights include works by American artists Benjamin West, Gilbert Stuart, Ralph Albert Blakelock, Jasper Francis Cropsey, Thomas Hart Benton, Adolf Dehn, Walter Ufer and many others. Native American works include a rare, early Navajo serape, a painted parfleche and a set of pictograph drawings. Works created in the region include a portrait done by John James Audubon during a sojourn to Meadville, a wonderful collection of carved and painted folk art birds by a Crawford County farmer and sculptures by Marion Sanford. Crafts enthusiasts will enjoy Japanese pottery and baskets, a Calder weaving, a Wendell Castle table, sculptural ceramics by Daniel Rhodes and Ken Ferguson, and an unusual late 18th century Windsor chair. Many of these treasures have never been exhibited outside of their home institutions; some have never been exhibited at all."

Erie Art Museum website

Pittsburgh To Cleveland Monthly Art Recap

Very sorry, I have let the blog slide so much but thankfully a few people have at least kept it on life support.I've been busy and also lost on twitter, which has captured me with it's easy style and immediacy as a quick, open way to spark conversations or transfer info.

Also, in the time blog has been around, the almost complete lack of online coverage has been filled by many awesome sources from POP CITY, to Steeltown Anthem, The Pittsburgh Art Blog City Creative to the trusty, I Heart Pittsburgh. IMHO, what this blog can add to this might be a greater regional awareness.

So I'm promising to bring back the monthly regional rundown of shows and events outside Pittsburgh from Johnstown to Cleveland.

Cleveland

Cleveland Museum Of Art (some highlights)

Kim Beom: Objects Being Taught They Are Nothing But Tools

"First solo museum exhibition in the United States of the work of Korean artist Kim Beom. The exhibition includes three new mixed-media installations and selections of drawings from 1994 to the present. It will be on view in the museum’s 1,800-square-foot project gallery from November 13, 2010, until March 6, 2011."

CLE OP: Cleveland Op Art Pioneers

"During Op’s heyday in the 1960s, several artists who studied and worked in Cleveland became internationally known for their vital contributions to the movement. In addition, Cleveland was home to the only artist collaborative in the United States devoted to Op. Drawn primarily from the CMA’s permanent holdings and supplemented with loans from private collections, CLE OP: Cleveland Op Art Pioneers showcases work by key figures in the local Op Art scene during its formative years."

Indian Kalighat Paintings

"This exhibition of Kalighat paintings will allow visitors an opportunity to view these rarely displayed Indian paintings, considered to be the beginning of modernism in Indian art. Originally created as souvenirs for nineteenth-century tourists, and regarded as a response to the sudden prosperity brought to Calcutta by the East India Company, the innovative and influential paintings are now highly regarded elements of museum and private collections. Motifs explored in the artwork include religious themes, Western material influence, and commentary regarding the changing social order. These highly stylized and brightly colored paintings also mock the newly affluent and depict contemporary newsworthy figures."

The Cleveland Museum has one of the largest and strongest asian art collections anywhere and there are several more Asian art exhibitions up. See all

MOCA Cleveland

Teresita Fernández : Blind LandscapeOn view January 28th, 2011 through May 8th, 2011

"Teresita Fernández is internationally known for immersive installations and evocative large-scale sculptures that address space, light, and perception. Made with polished stainless steel, glass, and other materials including plastic and graphite, Fernández's abstract sculptures incorporate reflection, light, and shadow in poetic, sometimes luminous formations that suggest natural phenomena. This survey presents a spectrum of the artist's most recent and ambitious projects created between 2005 and 2010. Featured among the exhibition's ten works is the artist's latest graphite and steel sculpture." (These things look really cool)

Lorri Ott : passive voicesOn view January 28th, 2011 through May 8th, 2011

In her new body of small-scale assemblages, artist Lorri Ott transforms synthetic and natural materials into poignant, evocative subjects. Through a process that is both calculated and spontaneous, Ott combines glossy colored resin with mundane found objects like rags, asphalt, and cardboard to create subtle but potent contrasts in form, technique, and medium. In rehabilitating banal objects to new life, Ott gives each work a unique yet ambiguous voice that supplants her own.

More

Spaces Gallery

The VaultSeptember 10 - February 13, 2011 closes next week!

Machine Project :Camp Cleveland
February 11-April 1 Opening February 11

"Machine Project operates as a loose confederacy of artists producing shows at locations ranging from the Santa Monica beach to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In addition they recently developed a year long project exploring how visitors experience the Hammer Museum. Within the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, Machine Project is a non-profit community space investigating art, technology, natural history, science, music, literature, and food. Within the Echo Park storefront as well as in projects held elsewhere they produce events, workshops, and site-specific installations using hands-on engagement to make rarefied knowledge accessible."

Youngstown

Butler Institute Of American Art

The museum also runs a number of satelite exhibit spaces (Why is this so rare?) but honestly, their website can make it hard to know whats up where.

Sydney Cash: Sculpture (Beecher Center, Youngstown)

"This exhibition features sculpture in which glass panels act as lenses that has reflective silver and/or copper imagery. This lens is mounted perpendicularly onto a wall or into a corner, and then illuminated with carefully targeted light. This results in reflected imagery above and cast shadows below the lens. These light sculptures change and intensify the background color, animating a wall's vertical plane."

OK, pooped, will do better next month.

October Regional Arts Roundup

An attempt to give a few highlights of shows in a slightly broader region mostly focusing on new exhibits and events opening in October or late September.

In Cleveland

The Cleveland Museum

Paul Gauguin: Paris, 1889
October 4, 2009–January 18, 2010

This landmark exhibition gathers about 75 paintings, works on paper, woodcarvings, and ceramics by Paul Gauguin and his contemporaries to explore how the artist created his signature style during the year 1889. Co-organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

The exhibition will also focus on Gauguin's early prints.

MOCA Cleveland

Hugging and Wrestling : Contemporary Israeli Photography and Video
On view September 12th, 2009 through January 10th, 2010

Julian Stanczak : Recent Work
On view September 12th, 2009 through January 10th, 2010

Julian Stanczak's work helped to define the Op, or "perceptual," art movement of the 1960's. Since that time, Stanczak has continued to make groundbreaking work primarily here in Cleveland, where he was a professor at the Cleveland Institute of Art from 1964 - 1995. Visually stunning and metaphorically rich, Stanczaks newest works will be featured this fall in MOCA's 12th PULSE exhibition, a series presenting outstanding artists working in our region.

Artist talk on October 4th

Spaces Gallery

The Plum Academy
"An Institute for Situated Practices"

September 11 – October 23, 2009
Opening Reception: September 11, 6–9 p.m., free

Don't ask! Kind of a free form group of random readings, screenings, tours and talks.

CONVIVIUM33 GALLERY

The Best of Cleveland-CLEVELAND ARTS PRIZE WINNERS COLLABORATIVE

Nearly 50 years ago CAP began a tradition of identifying and honoring Cleveland’s outstanding artists on an annual basis. Since then the Arts Prize commissioned an Arts Prize medal, launched a scholarship program and established the tradition of holding an annual awards event to honor the accomplishments of Artists in Northeast Ohio.

Cleveland Arts Prize Winner’s Collaborative will showcase Cleveland’s best in the category of visual arts with a free public gallery exhibition and include two weekend workshops in the categories of design, literature and music and dance.

Akron

Akron Art Museum



The Legend of John Brown by Jacob Lawrence
October 16, 2009 - February 14, 2010

Judith Bear Isroff Gallery

"This fall marks the 150th anniversaries of John Brown’s anti-slavery raid on Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, and his December 2, 1859 execution. To commemorate this famous Akron resident, the Akron Art Museum presents selections from Jacob Lawrence’s celebrated print series The Legend of John Brown. Lawrence, one of the most significant American artists of the 20th century, was also the first African American to depict the story of the controversial white abolitionist.

Lawrence’s screenprint series is from the collection of the Akron Art Museum and will be joined by related images and artifacts from the Summit County Historical Society and the Special Collections Division of the Akron Summit County Public Library."

Also

Familiar Faces:
Chuck Close in Ohio Collections
September 5, 2009 - January 3, 2010

Youngstown

The Butler Institute Of American Art

Sep 06, 2009 Through Nov 29, 2009
Jasper Johns: Works on Paper 1994-2007 (Youngstown)

Presented in conjunction with Matthew Marks Gallery, New York City, this exhibition offers recent works on paper by America's master of the avant garde. An exhibition catalogue accompanies this show.

Erie

The Erie Art Museum



Selections from the Permanent Collection
of Edinboro University

Main Gallery
September 25, 2009 through January 4, 2010

"The exhibition, curated by Bruce Gallery Director John Bavaro, and organized by Erie Art Museum Director John Vanco, features a large sampling of lithographs, etchings and drawings by some of the most prominent names in Western art, including Picasso, Dali, Redon, Goya, Degas, Matisse, Chagall and many others. The exhibition also features excellent prints by Hiroshige, Hokusai, Kunisada and other Japanese masters. Some of the notable pieces featured in the show include a platter by Peter Voulkos, an original 1960’s era drawing by Peter Saul, a signed “Liz” silkscreen by Andy Warhol and two signed lithographs by Kathe Kollwitz.

Edinboro University’s collection is strongest in printmaking, but also includes sculpture, ceramics, painting, drawing, photography, and fibers. The collection is eclectic, with works ranging from 19th and early 20th Century lithographs to Pop Art prints and Photorealistic silkscreen pieces. It also contains selections from prominent Edinboro art alumni and purchase award acquisitions from the former Edinboro Print National Competition. Acquired through purchase or private donations, the artwork serves the campus and surrounding community through availability for study, teaching, exhibition and institutional loans."

Greensburg

Westmoreland Museum Of American Art

Four Perspectives on Fifty Years
Sunday September 27, 2009 - Sunday January 03, 2010


Also

James Osher: Three Seconds with the Masters
Sunday September 27, 2009 - Sunday January 03, 2010