City Feature: CLEVELAND
Great art does not have to come from New York and LA
Yes, many of the great American artists live and work in New York City and Los Angeles. FACT. But, if you live in the middle of the country, aka not in one of the aforementioned coastal cities, you know that there are so many wonderful artists living and working across our great nation.
HOT TIP: NYC and LA costs of living are exorbitant so artists outside of these huge markets enjoy much lower COL, and thus their art is much less expensive, but often just as high-quality as what is coming out of the emerging market in NYC and LA. That was a run-on sentence but I don’t care. I digress.
So, let us turn our attention to CLEVELAND. Say it in an Oprah voice, “CLEEEVELAAAANNNDDD!!!”
Honestly, Cleveland is a really dang cool city. Unlike the radically dad-sounding previous sentence, Cleveland is dope and has lots of great, world-class, might I add, cultural institutions, including but not limited to the Cleveland Orchestra, Cleveland Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, SPACES, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, etc… While our big arts and culture organizations are fabulous, we have but just a handful of galleries in our small but mighty arts ecosystem. So many of the artists who live and work here have to seek representation outside the city or are independent.
But, we’ve got a guy. There’s always a guy, right? He has been in the art biz since he could crawl and knows everyone, like everyone, in the art world. And he has a phenomenal gallery that marries the best of our local talent with all-stars of the century like Alex Katz and Frank Stella. His name is Brett Shaheen. His gallery is Shaheen Gallery. And a few of the amazing local artists to whom he has introduced me and I am now sharing with you are:
Rose Haserodt
TR Ericsson
Neil MacDonald
Do you live in a city filled with amazing local artists? Let me know where you live and maybe I will feature your city next!
As always, thank for being here!