Accidental Art Festival

Cleveland's art galleries have created an accidental art festival
By Steven Litt, The Plain Dealer
October 02, 2009, 12:01AM
Cleveland artists love to complain that the city lacks a robust gallery scene and that good work never gets the attention it deserves.

Uh, sorry, that's not the case at the moment. The city's nonprofit and commercial galleries are knocking themselves out this fall, in the middle of a recession, to pay homage to scores of Cleveland artists. At this very moment, half a dozen key venues are showing more than 250 works by 100-plus local artists in shows that are selective, well focused, well organized and well worth seeing.

It all amounts to a virtual festival of Cleveland art. The problem is that the wave of shows is the result of individual, uncoordinated, go-it-alone efforts. You don't see any fliers proclaiming the event. But the lack of collaborative marketing shouldn't prevent us from appreciating the moment.

The accidental Cleveland art festival of 2009 includes more square footage of exhibit space and more art by blue-chip local artists than the Cleveland Museum of Art was ever able to cram in its once-vaunted May Show exhibitions. In fact, it's as if the May Show were happening all around us, right now.

Consider:


Through Jan. 10, the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland is showing a handsome exhibition on the Op Art paintings of Julian Stanczak, who, at age 80, ranks as one of the most important artists in Cleveland's history. The show captures the joy Stanczak finds in making precise geometric abstractions that tingle the eye with scintillating colors and vibrant patterns of line.


Through Saturday, Oct. 10, the Cleveland Institute of Art is holding its annual faculty show. This year's version is a lively one, with roughly 100 works by 43 artists. Highlights include Bill Brouillard's "Guns and Religion" installation of terra-cotta tiles molded in the shape of handguns, and the "Metaphoric Garden" sculptures by Barbara Stanczak (the wife of Julian Stanczak), in which the artist carved chunks of orange, translucent alabaster into abstract shapes resembling large, fleshy flower petals.


Through Saturday, Oct. 24, the Sculpture Center is displaying a fine retrospective on the work of its founder, David Davis, who died in 2002 at age 82. With more than 30 works from the 1970s through the 1990s, the exhibition makes the case that Davis was better at fashioning smaller, domestic-scale abstract sculptures than the larger public works installed around the city and close-in suburbs. Influenced by Russian Constructivism and the biomorphism of Jean Arp, Davis worked in a manner that was both rigorous and intuitive, combining gentle, organic shapes with folded and perforated planes, and sticklike linear frameworks.
The Cleveland Artists Foundation, through Saturday, Nov. 14, is celebrating its 25th anniversary with an exhibition of 56 works by 38 artists from its permanent collection, including excellent paintings by Elmer Brown, Viktor Schreckengost, Frederick Gottwald, Henry Keller and Paul Travis. The selection, accompanied by a handsome catalog, is a typically impressive effort for a small but important institution that deserves more attention than it receives in its location at the Beck Center for the Arts in Lakewood. The foundation, with more than 3,000 works in its permanent collection, should strike out on its own someday -- the sooner, the better.


Through Sunday, Oct. 25, the Cleveland Arts Prize is celebrating its 50th anniversary year with an exhibition of more than 40 works by 14 prizewinners, including Judith Salomon, Laurence Channing, Christopher Pekoc, Brent Kee Young and Linda Butler. The works on view, all selected by the artists themselves, are for sale, with proceeds to be split 60-40 by the artists and the nonprofit arts prize organization.

In two weeks, Bonfoey Gallery will salute Kent artist Joseph O'Sickey, 90, whose colorful garden scenes, still life and circus pictures take inspiration from the loose brushwork and joie de vivre of Henri Matisse. That show will run from Friday, Oct. 16, to Saturday, Nov. 28.

Steven Litt, The Plain DealerBiomorphic and geometric sculptures by David Davis are on view at the Sculpture Center's 20th anniversary salute to its founder.In addition to these shows, other notable displays of local art this season have included the recent posthumous retrospective at the Artists Archives of the Western Reserve on the career of Phyllis Sloane, who died in May in Santa Fe, N.M., at age 87. The show closed Saturday after an all-too-brief 10-day run. Sloane was known for tranquil still lifes and portraits of women in domestic settings, which she organized with bright areas of flat color and superb passages of drawing.

On top of that, the Cleveland Museum of Art's new East Wing features two new galleries devoted to Cleveland art, the first displays of their kind in the museum's 93-year history. One gallery focuses on 13 works by a dozen artists from the first half of the 20th century, including Charles Burchfield, Margaret Bourke-White and Hughie Lee-Smith. The other gallery features a mini-retrospective on the ceramics of New Jersey artist Toshiko Takaezu, who was born in Hawaii in 1922, and who taught at the Cleveland Institute of Art for nearly a decade starting in 1956.

Through Saturday, Arts Collinwood, at 15606 Waterloo Road, is showing an exhibition of dystopian urban landscapes by Randall Tiedman and somber, richly painted images by Douglas Max Utter.

Over at the Cleveland State University Art Gallery, 2307 Chester Ave., an exhibition of photographs of new urban landscapes in Turkey, by assistant professor Mark Slankard, is on view through Saturday.

Through Saturday, Oct. 31, Malcolm Brown Gallery in Shaker Heights is showing art quilts with African-American themes by Carolyn Mazloomi of West Chester, Ohio. Though not a Northeast Ohioan, Mazloomi is an important figure statewide.

At the William Busta Gallery, an exhibition on surreal sculptures and assemblages by Lorri Ott, a 2004 master-of-fine-art graduate of Kent State University, is on view through Saturday.

Taken all together, it's a season with a high percentage of thoughtful solo exhibitions and retrospectives, mixed with strong group shows and exhibitions of historical material covering a century of visual creativity in Cleveland. With everything that's on view, the key challenge is realizing what's out there, and taking the time to see as much of it as possible. Next year, if all the venues that focused on regional art this fall in such a broad way could draw attention to their efforts collectively, we might have a real Cleveland art festival instead of a virtual one.