Art

The Print Club of Cleveland's 33rd annual Fine Print Fair took place on September 15-17, 2017, at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Before the weekend opening of the Fine Print Fair to the public, there was an opening night benefit preview, "A Prints of a Party," on Thursday, September 14. 

While, as members of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Julie and I attend many events at the museum, we were not aware of the Fine Print Fair. Therefore, I was very pleased when Sarah Palagyi invited us to the "A Prints of a Party" preview by contacting me via the Column & Stripe Twitter account. Unfortunately, Julie had another commitment that night and was unable to join me.

I attended the BlueBridge Networks Third Non-Profit IT Innovation Summit on July 27, 2017, at the Cleveland Museum of Art as a guest of Kevin Goodman, managing director and partner at BlueBridge Networks.

This was the second time I have attended this nonprofit IT summit, having attended in the BlueBridge Networks Non-Profit IT Innovation Summit II on November 5, 2014. I want to thank Kevin Goodman for inviting me again, and let the presenters know how much I appreciate them taking time to share their knowledge. 

Back in 2012, we wrote about attending a Crash Party, which introduced the ArtLens App and related gallery. Through this event, we became fascinated with the ways that the Cleveland Museum of Art uses technology to engage their visitors. Since 2012, we have visited the gallery and used the app many times and have written several ArtLens-related blog posts. We have watched both the ArtLens App and related gallery gradually evolve to expand their functionality and ease of use.

When we were invited by Cleveland Museum of Art Chief Information Officer Jane Alexander to attend the 2017 ArtLens Crash Party on June 21st, we knew that major changes were coming -- changes that were not just evolutionary, but revolutionary!

We were fortunate to receive an invitation to attend the April 26, 2017, Cleveland Museum of Art's "Alex Katz Media and Influencer Exhibition Preview."  The exhibition opened on Sunday, April 30, 2017, and will continue through Sunday, August 6, 2017. 

The museum's Director of Communications, Caroline Guscott, and Communications Associate, Kelley Notaro, greeted us as we arrived to start the evening. They introduced us to Curator of American Painting and Sculpture Mark Cole. It was great to have Mark Cole at the preview, so that we could ask questions about the paintings and learn some art history of the time period represented by this exhibition of Alex Katz's work.

We also met Diana K. Tuite, the Katz Curator from the Colby College Museum of Art.

Two months before the Creative Fusion Spectacular, on Saturday, September 17, 2016, my wife, Julie, and I attended an art event of The Cleveland Foundation's Creative Fusion program. There we saw three new Cleveland murals being created as we watched, near Transformer Station in Hingetown.

Then, when I heard that The Cleveland Foundation had arranged with Ohio City Incorporated to have their Creative Fusion Spectacular on Saturday, November 19, 2016, I knew I wanted to attend to take a special tour of the finished neighborhood murals, and see the temporary Creative Fusion Gallery at 2529 Detroit Avenue, Cleveland.

A year ago, we were invited via Twitter to go on the final CircleTrek Walking Tour of University Circle for 2015. We really wanted to go, but unfortunately we had a conflict.

We have been very busy in 2016, and it feels like suddenly it is one year later. Luckily, we saw a tweet announcing the "...final FREE #CircleTrek guided walking tour of the season," and Julie signed us up to attend!

It was a brisk morning on Saturday, October 22, 2016, when we found ourselves with a group of other people interested in learning about our city's University Circle. As we were on the tour, we kept finding personal and family connections. This made the tour more interesting to us, as we personally related to the history and current developments of Cleveland's University Circle.

Like many of our adventures, it all started with a tweet!

Through this tweet, we learned about and decided to attend the Akron Art Prize Finale Reception on Saturday, October 1, 2016. We enjoyed seeing all the Akron Art Prize entries first at Summit Artspace, and then attending the awards reception at the Akron Art Museum.

We had such a good time and were so impressed with the artwork, that we wanted to share our photos and tweets/retweets from the event.

The 2016 IngenuityFest weekend took place on Friday, September 23rd, through Sunday, September 25th. This is the fifth annual blog post I have written about IngenuityFest, plus I have written about other Ingenuity Cleveland-sponsored events.

Every year, I try to live the full IngenuityFest experience by attending all three days and talking to as many exhibitors as possible. It was really great this year to reconnect with some of the artists and techies I met in previous years, and get to know some tech people that I had read about online, but had not met in person. IngenuityFest is like an annual reunion of creative people in Cleveland! 

Every year, we visit and write a blog post about the Cleveland Museum of Art's Chalk Festival. It is one of our favorite events in our community. This year, we also visited other art events on the same weekend, so we included our @sos_jr tweets with photos of these events as well. Enjoy!