Museums

Join Us to Celebrate the Opening of “Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940–1950”

The Cleveland Museum of Art invites you to attend the opening celebration of the special photography exhibition Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940–1950.

A simple email invitation led to an enjoyable evening in University Circle, beginning at the Cleveland Museum of Art and continuing at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Normally, these museums are not open late on Thursdays, but Thursday, March 21, 2019, was special!

This post about the Gordon Parks photography exhibition is the first of two blog posts about my evening in University Circle.

On March 3, 2019, I heard the exciting news:

OPEN HOUSE Includes Free Admission for All, Beginning March 16

I immediately made plans to attend the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland - moCa Cleveland Open House on March 16th!

It is great that we now have another art museum in Cleveland that opens its doors for all to enjoy without charging an admission fee!

On March 7, 2019, we decided to plan a family day. We first thought of places we had enjoyed in the past, but decided what we really wanted was a day together exploring places we had never visited as a family. Luckily, we remembered seeing a sign for The Warther Museum as we drove down Interstate 77. Every time we drove past the sign, we would say that we needed to find a time to visit The Warther Museum. Julie had great memories of visting The Warther Museum when she was a Girl Scout, and had been telling us for years that we needed to go there someday. She knew we would enjoy seeing the carvings, which included very detailed models of trains.

As we explored Google Maps for other places to visit in Ohio's Tuscarawas County, we decided to make trains the theme for the day, and go to the Dennison Railroad Depot Museum.

We made our plan to visit these two Ohio museums which are located in the City of Dover and the Village of Dennison -- just about an hour and a half south of Cleveland.

This blog post can't capture all the exciting implications of the Wednesday, January 23, 2019, Cleveland Museum of Art Open Access announcement!

Open Access at the Cleveland Museum of Art

The Cleveland Museum of Art announced on January 23, 2019, that it is an Open Access institution, using the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) designation for high-resolution images and data as related to its collection. At the Cleveland Museum of Art, Open Access means the public now has the ability to  share, collaborate, remix, and reuse images of many as 30,000 public-domain artworks from the CMA’s world-renowned collection of art for commercial and non-commercial purposes. In addition, portions of collections information (metadata) for more than 61,000 artworks, both in the public domain and those works with copyright or other restrictions, works are now available. 

This announcement that I will share information about in this post is just the beginning. It is only a hint of what is to come.

The Open Access partners of the Cleveland Museum of Art at the event showed some intitial uses for the all the Open Access artwork, but the potential for the future goes beyond what was presented on this first day. As the Creative Commons Chief Executive Officer Ryan Merkley said, "...this is a big deal."

Thank you, Cleveland Museum of Art, or bringing both Renaissance Splendor: Catherine de’ Medici’s Valois Tapestries and Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern to Cleveland! I look forward to coming back to the museum to see the exhibitions again with Julie, my co-blogger and wife.

On Friday, January 18, 2019, Stuart returned with Julie to show her these two major exhibitions. Both Wednesday and Friday nights are good weeknights to go to the Cleveland Museum of Art, since they are open later than other nights -- until 9:00 pm. Visiting the museum makes for a very enjoyable evening.

I was very fortunate to receive an email invitation to arrive early for the November 29, 2018, Cleveland Museum of Art's preview event. There is a lot of interest in the newly opened exhibitions at the Cleveland Museum of Art! The tickets for the weekend following the preview ended up selling out, and the night I attended brought in a good-sized crowd of Museum members to see the two major fall 2018 exhibitions:

• Renaissance Splendor: Catherine de’ Medici’s Valois Tapestries

• Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern

In this blog post, I will share what I and others observed and shared on Twitter (including photos of the artwork), along with some other comments and resources about these two exhibitions. I like that the museum is featuring both their Renaissance Splendor: Catherine de’ Medici’s Valois Tapestries and Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern exhibitions together, and offering special combined ticket pricing for the public (museum members get free tickets and their guests get discounted tickets).

When we published our FRONT - Oberlin blog post about our Sunday, August 5, 2018, visit to Oberlin College's Allen Memorial Art Museum, we expected to not have time to visit any more FRONT venues. Stuart had planned to be out of town in September 2018, but a change in plans brought him home early.

With a very busy weekend coming up at the end of September 2018, we decided to make time on Wednesday afternoon, September 26, 2018, to visit the Ohio City FRONT International Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art venues.

Since the opening of the FRONT International Triennial on Thursday, July 12, 2018, we have visited over fourteen venues. We want to take this opportunity to thank the organizers of, and the venues that hosted these great FRONT International Triennial exhibitions.

I had planned to be out of town in September 2018, but a change in plans brought me home early, allowing me to continue my annual tradition of creating a blog post of my photos from the Cleveland Museum of Art's Chalk Festival It is one of my favorite community events, which was celebrating its 29th year on the weekend of September 15-16, 2018! 

I have added my own chalk drawing in the past, but this year I rode my bike on the evening of Sunday, September 16, 2018, to see all the finished artwork after attending the Cleveland Cultural Gardens 73rd Annual One World Day.

Here are my 130 photos of the Cleveland Museum of Art's 29th Annual Chalk Festival, including my favorite pieces.

We had never been to Oberlin College's Allen Memorial Art Museum before. We are so grateful that the FRONT International Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art chose it and other Oberlin art venues for the inaugural year of FRONT. When we visited on Sunday, August 5, 2018, we were extremely pleased with the gem we found there.

On Saturday, August 4, 2018, I returned to the venues in Uptown Cleveland to show my family what I saw on the opening day of FRONT International Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art.

I hope you enjoy my photos in these tweets of my return visit to FRONT International Triennial in Uptown Cleveland.