Fri 5/19 @ 5-9PM
78th Street Studios will be THE place to be this Friday. Yes, we know it is every Third Friday but there are some really special things going on this month.
At HEDGE Gallery, there’ll be a show of new work by Liz Maugans, who manages to be a catalyst and sparkplug for the whole Cleveland arts scene while continuing to grow as an artists herself. Somehow, between being executive director of Zygote Press, a spokesperson for the Cleveland arts community in holding Cuyahoga Arts and Culture accountable for its promises, and curating an upcoming show at MOCA Cleveland, she finds time to produce her own work.
Her new show, Too Much Information, is a series of print-based collages incorporating text to look at the chaos and overstimulation of our daily lives. Maugans says it’s also a mid-life commentary.
“As I pivot from mother, wife and daughter of an aging parent, my autonomous voices delivers an invocation to interpreting narratives,” she says. “Statements cover many topics; failed relationships, lost youth, indiscretions, declining health, financial stability and parenting woes.
But her smaller pieces serve as a counterbalance to the more frenzied larger ones.
She says they are “buoyant and calming. They do not use text but instead deliver an escape through the combination of simple color and organic shapes and forms.”
In addition to Maugans’ show, HEDGE Gallery will be showing new work by Oregon-based artist David Masters and hosting the release party for CAN Journal, the quarterly visual art magazine Maugans helped found five years ago. Stop in and pick up a copy.
It’s a bittersweet opening at ZAINA Gallery, whose director Leila Khoury is moving to Chicago in July to pursue an architecture degree at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and closing the gallery. This is its final show.
Nesting is a solo show by Danielle Mužina, a painter and writer originally from Cleveland and now teaching at Edinboro University in Pennsylvania.
“Nests are temporary structures pieced together with fragments; the project of home is inventive, disjointed, and, most importantly, ongoing,” she says of her show. “My nesting ritual allows me to build a more fluid home, a fragmented whole that is open to both embracing beloved patterns and restlessly breaking them apart, to both imagining new futures and admitting the difficulty of abandoning comfortable habits.”
The show runs through Fri 6/16 when there will be a closing reception — your last chance to bid Leila farewell and wish her well.
At Tregoning & Co. you can get a first look at new work by local painter Matt Dibble in Puzzled Bipeds. Known for his abstract paintings, he’s dipping into figurative work here.
“It’s been said that even the angels ache for a body, sometimes,” he says in his artist statement. “If I did figurative work, what would it look like? I asked myself this question often. I soon realized that figures were part of my work for many years, an ongoing series of pen and ink drawings. I’m often asked where the figures originate. There is an ache in my body; on the outside everything is calm, the inside is much different.”
A new show at the Kenneth Paul Lesko called Flora & Fauna features the vivid work of Greenport, New York’s Scott McIntire, depicting flowers and insects in eye-popping colors and unusual perspectives.
And if you didn’t get the chance to stop in the Cleveland Print Room to see Multiple Exposure, featuring work created by young people in an afterschool photography program created by the Cleveland Print Room last year with a grant from the Cleveland Foundation, it’s moving to Dawn Tekler’s gallery at the back of the first floor of 78th Street Studios, just in time for this month’s Third Friday. Some of the artists will be there and their work will be for sale. Imagine seeing the excitement of fledging artist when you buy one of his or her pieces. You can also see Tekler’s own evocative encaustic landscapes.
Of course, there’s plenty more to check out among the more than 50 galleries, artist studios and shops on 78th Street Studios’ four floors. Come and wander!
Cleveland, OH 44102