Thu 7/9-Sun 12/6
There’s been a lot of chatter about the Cleveland Museum of Art’s new juried show Lake Effect: Artists From Cleveland Now which opens at the Transformer Station this week and runs through early December.
It put out a call for artists and received 1,700 submissions from 950 artists, unsurprisingly considering there was no submission fee. They selected 66 works for the show.
While they say that they created “an exhibition that honors the breadth of creative voices shaping Cleveland today,” with “selected artworks [that] collectively map a contemporary landscape shaped by local histories, global currents, and the unique cultural ecology of Northeast Ohio,” it’s hard to see how this could be done in the 66 works the limited space of the Transformer Station offers room for. The Northeast Ohio visual arts scene is currently exploding with talents of all types and generations, and everyone will scan the list of names and spotting major omissions while also seeing names they’re unfamiliar with. And since the show was juried by CMA staff, one has to wonder if they were able to identify the artists behind many of the entries.
The organization are quick to assure us that this isn’t a re-do of the museum’s long-running May Show (1919-1993) and indeed, that show, while it often received a similar number of entries, was much more expansive, given the space within CMA it had to show work.
The show will be open Thursday-Sunday. Admission is free.