Terminal Tower Exhibit Brochure 2018
“Cleveland’s Enduring Symbol
52 Stories of the Terminal Tower”
The link is here
www.teachingcleveland.org
Terminal Tower Exhibit Brochure 2018
“Cleveland’s Enduring Symbol
52 Stories of the Terminal Tower”
The link is here
MUSEUM RIGHT TO DROP MAY SHOW
March 4, 1995 | Plain Dealer, The (Cleveland, OH)
| Page: 8E | Section: ARTS & LIVING | Column: ART CRITIC
The Cleveland Museum of Art’s annual juried exhibition of local art, has been the apex of local artistic accomplishment since it began in 1919. That’s exactly what has been wrong with it, and exactly why the museum is right to dump it.
Cleveland needs higher goals to which local artists can aspire.
The May Show played a vital role in nurturing generations of artists before and after World War II. But as artists have increasingly shown work in new commercial and nonprofit galleries, frame shops, theater lobbies, corporate offices, colleges and universities, the May Show’s raison d’etre evaporated. Instead of being a proud medium for the appreciation of local art, it became a tired vehicle for overexposure and redundancy.
Museum Director Robert P. Bergman, who came to Cleveland in 1993, has stated publicly for more than a year he would experiment with ways in which the museum exhibits local contemporary art. He said the May Show wasn’t sacrosanct. But it wasn’t until last week that he said the show was off for the near future.
His announcement was occasioned by artists who daily were calling Tom Hinson, the museum’s curator of contemporary art, to ask for May Show entry blanks, as they have every winter for decades. Predictably, many artists complained that the museum was forsaking them by canning the May Show. But it isn’t. Nor is it turning its back on contemporary art.
In August, the museum will host an exhibition on contemporary art inspired by the secular sainthood of Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe. Admittedly, the show is an attempt to piggyback on the Labor Day weekend opening of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. But it’s a welcome change after years in which the museum failed to devote major space to contemporary art from outside the Western Reserve.
In 1996, the city’s bicentennial year, the museum is planning a much-needed historical survey on art in the city from 1796 to 1945, tentatively titled “Transformations in Cleveland Art.” The show will include a catalog, which will be a major contribution to public understanding of the city’s art.
The museum is also planning a collaborative exhibition for 1996 with the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art and Spaces. Artists from the region, the nation and from other countries will be asked to create new works inspired by the city itself.
Exciting as they sound, these shows would not have been possible if the May Showwere still on the calendar. Budget cuts in 1992 limited the museum to four slots a year for major shows, one of which is devoted to contemporary art. Repeating the May Show ad infinitum would prevent the kind of experimentation Bergman wants to explore.
The next two years will give time for a debate on how the city’s leading arts institutions should serve the region’s artists. Without question, they have an obligation to nurture local talent. But the May Show is not the way.
All the show asked of artists was that they produce one or two good works a year – the limit they could display in the exhibition. By focusing attention thinly on a hundred or more artists, the show appealed to boosterism rather than deep understanding.
All the show asked of collectors was that they come and graze once a year. Apparently, this didn’t fuel a thriving commercial gallery scene, because the city doesn’t have one. Northeast Ohio has a generous supply of artists who want their work appreciated and scores of widely scattered exhibit venues. But the number of serious commercial galleries is minute. Rather than stimulate the local market, the museum may have hurt it by selling works out of the May Show.
For the museum, the show put curators and other jurors in a passive role unflattering for an institution that otherwise prides itself on intellectual rigor. The format required curators or jurors to choose the artworks from those submitted by artists who chose to submit. If the best artists didn’t submit anything, they remained invisible, and the audience remained none the wiser.
It could be argued that the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art and Spaces – two important nonprofit exhibit spaces that have emerged in the past 20 years – have filled the gap in contemporary art. They have, but only up to a point.
Spaces concentrates on emerging artists from around the region and the nation, which effectively duplicates the May Show’s primary function as the patron of local artistic talent searches.
The center also has focused attention on emerging local talent, although it does much more by organizing retrospective shows on midcareer artists and by staging ambitious theme shows.
But while the center’s ambitions are national in scope, it can’t afford to do contemporary shows on the order of the sprawling survey of German neo-expressionist painting mounted by the Toledo Museum of Art in the winter of 1988-89. Nor can the center aspire to the likes of the Guggenheim Museum’s Roy Lichtenstein retrospective, which the Wexner Center in Columbus will show next fall.
The Cleveland Museum of Art can, and should, host such exhibitions. Furthermore, it should organize its own contemporary shows, whether local, regional or national in scope, with the same scholarly standards it applies to the art of ancient Greece or 16th-century Japan.
It could be that the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art should be the new home of an annual or biannual survey of regional art. The center has the space, the staff, the resources, the central location and the parking. It also has a mission that could encompass an annual, biennial or triennial local survey show.
Whatever happens, the museum is wise to break the lockstep rhythm of a once prestigious annual show that has gone stale. Now it can go about the business of doing the exhibitions that only it can do.
The blaze that sparked the modern environmental movement . . . or did it?
Click here to read
Brent Larkin Writes about Lonnie Burten Jr.
cleveland.com 11/16/2016
The full article is here
Councilman Lonnie Burten (center, with beard-Press Collection)
Excerpt below:
It was late morning on Nov. 29, 1984, when Jackson, David Donaldson and Sam Johnson were watching Councilman Lonnie Burten single-handedly tear down his boyhood home on East 38th Street in Cleveland’s Central neighborhood.
The home had been firebombed, most likely by some thugs who wanted to teach the crusading Burten a lesson.
Now city inspectors wanted the house demolished. And Burten, as was his way, was determined to do it himself.
“I remember this distinctly,” recalled Jackson, sitting at a table in his City Hall office. “Lonnie was standing next to a truck. We were talking, when he put his hands on the hood and laid his head on the truck.”
The friends gently put Burten in the back seat of a car and rushed him to St. Vincent Charity Hospital.
It was too late.
Lonnie Burten — Cleveland City Council’s rebel with a cause, a legend who came to power by defeating one of the shrewdest men to ever hold elected office in Cleveland (Charlie Carr), and who several years earlier had come within a whisker of unseating the most powerful council president in city history (George Forbes) — was dead of a heart attack at the young age of 40.
Burten’s seat on council went to Preston Terry III. Jackson, a lawyer with a job in the council clerk’s office, had no interest in it.
“I just wanted to help Lonnie,” recalled Jackson. “That was it. He was my friend. We shared a passion for life and an understanding of the situation we were in. I had no inclination for a life in politics, none whatsoever.”
Like all mayors, Jackson has his shortcomings. But he will never forget where he came from.
Nor will he forget one of the best friends he’s ever had.
“You don’t have many friends in life. You have people you know. Lonnie was a friend. And if he had not died, I would have not been a councilman, let alone a mayor.”
@CleCityCouncil Member Lonnie Burten (1978). Lonnie built homes in his neighborhood for residents of his ward. (photo: Cleveland Memory)
Roldo Bartimole writes about late Cleveland Councilperson Lonnie Burten Jr. in 2009
Sometimes you try to put people into boxes they don’t fit into. Mayor Frank Jackson is one of those people difficult to place. At least for me.
Is he just another politician? Or is he, as he says, “the right man” for the times. These not so good times.
I talked to Mayor Jackson because I happen to look at an old clipping that told me something about him and where he came from. I wanted to know more.
The clip was something I wrote in 1984 about the death of Lonnie Burten. Burten had been the Councilman of Ward 5, the city’s poorest ward, in Jackson’s Central area. Jackson didn’t succeed Burten after he died but he did eventually take that seat. He became a rescuer of that depressed ward. As its Councilman, Jackson brought it bundles of federal money.
Lonnie Burten had toppled two of the toughest old-time black politicians – Charlie Carr and Jimmy Bell. He got shot by someone during one of the campaigns against Carr. He survived that attack.
However, he died by heart attack at 40. I wrote upon Burten’s death: “Burten had the potential to become a true folk here. He did not achieve that status because he seemed to lack focus for his tremendous energy and thus the impact that creates legends.”
Burten and Jackson were youthful friends. When Jackson moved to 38th and Central, “Burten was the first person to knock on our door” and they became friends over the years. Burten went to college; Jackson to the Army.
People told Burten he was crazy” to run against Carr. Crazy enough to get shot but live to defeat the legendary Carr in 1981. Jackson and the late David Donaldson, despite the danger, campaigned with Burten.
Burten later tried to topple Council President George Forbes. He came within a vote of winning. Councilman Mike White put so much pressure on first-term Councilman (now judge) Larry Jones that Jones changed his vote from Burten to Forbes.
I told Lonnie that he needed 13 votes not just 11 votes,” recalled Jackson.
Preston Terry III succeeded Burten with Jackson”s help. But, as Jackson puts it, things went awry” and Jackson ran and defeated Terry in 1989.
Jackson laughed. He didn”t really want to be a Councilman. He was a city prosecutor at the time. He laughed again because he said, I didn”t want to be Council President,” followed by I didn’t want to be Mayor either.” It seems Jackson rises without any visible passion for power.
And that’s the strange thing. I believe him. From time to time for years I would make it up to Jackson’s Council office for talks. He never gave me the impression of wanting a higher office. He did have very strong opinions and I’d say a streak of stubbornness for his views.
But he also always played his cards close to the chest.
Mayor Jackson’s re-election spokesman Tom Andrzejewski said, “It’s still painful” for Jackson when I asked to talk to the Mayor about Burten’s influence upon him.
Jackson, in his low key way, said, “He passed away. It bothered me. We were pretty close.”
Jackson did say that he often thinks of Burten.
Burten was a larger than life person though likely pretty much forgotten or unknown to most Clevelanders.
Burten, I wrote in 1984, was always a study in contrasts. Avoiding drink, meat and smoking and apparently in good physical condition, he died of a heart attack. He was stricken while demolishing a house he once lived in on East 38th Street. He had lived in a corner of the house, which was heated by a kerosene space heater. Damage from a fire had made the house uninhabitable.
The fire had destroyed many of Burten’s belongings. Among the rubbish a visiting reporter found a leather-bound copy of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. Burten gave the copy to him.
He was a politician, a ghetto philosopher, a carpenter, auto mechanic, even an artist. One of his pieces, a multi-media portrait of an elderly black man, hangs in an office at Case Western Reserve University.”
He had a natural and charismatic flair,” said a professor told me.
He told me Burten had aspirations of being an academic but he told Burton his future was in politics, not academia.
Isn’t that what Cleveland needs right now? Someone with charisma. Unfortunately, Burten died. And it’s not clear he ever would have been able to go as far as Jackson has.
Jackson says he’s the right man to be mayor of Cleveland at this time. It’s clear to me that he was in the right place to take advantage of Jane Campbell’s inability to understand Cleveland politics. She was there for the picking; he for the taking.
I’ve been curious about whether Mayor Jackson had an ideology behind his political ambitions. It doesn’t seem so.
He does say “You always remember where you came from. You always go back home.” That’s his political reference point.
I believe he means it, too.
However, Jackson has been a mayor – unlike, say Dennis Kucinich – who has gone along with all the major projects that don’t seem so favorable for the economically deprived. He favors the Medical Mart and Convention Center, the expensive Port Authority relocation and all kinds of development subsidies.
Though he says of his philosophy, “You can’t live large when others are suffering.”
I don”t believe he’s living large. He laughs when people say he doesn’t really live in his home in the deprived Central area. “They say I really live in Shaker,” he says laughing.
Maybe Frank Jackson is the right person to be mayor of Cleveland right now. But for how long? I asked him how long he thought he wanted to be Mayor of Cleveland.
He says he wants to build on his foundation. He sees balancing the budget as a major achievement. It is an achievement when so much of government is drowning in red ink. But it’s a holding action.
The closest he comes to giving a hint of when he’s likely ready to leave the office is this: “I don”t want to be an impediment to my own purpose.” It’s often hard for politicians to recognize that point.
Jackson is a low key kind of guy. He projects a steady hand at the helm, even if that”s the mark of a caretaker Mayor.
The person who upends him will have to offer Clevelanders – and voters will have to be ready to accept – some flair and excitement. They will have to be a sharp contrast to Jackson.
It may not be long, I believe, when Cleveland will want someone who gives them something to look forward to, some spark and flair. Someone who will promise more than a balanced budget.
I don’t think it’s this election. I don’t think we can wait too much longer. Cleveland needs a big lift.
5 Days That Shook City Council Plain Dealer November 15, 1981
An analysis of the failed attempt to wrest control of Cleveland City Council during November 1981
The first link is here
The second link is here
The post summary of forum is here
Tuesday July 17, 2018
“Ohio Gun Laws: What are our options?”
Heights Public Library Main 7-8:30pm
Representatives from:
League of Women Voters of Ohio Lobby Corps
Moms Demand Action
Ohio Coalition Against Gun Violence
Ohioans for Gun Safety
moderated by
Darrielle Snipes, Ideastream/WCPN
All open to the public. Please contact if you have questions about any of these events: teachingcleveland@earthlink.net
CLEVELAND’S ENDEARING SYMBOL: 52 STORIES OF THE TERMINAL TOWER
The link to the book is here
Curated and designed by Bill Barrow and Donna Stewart, originators of the Cleveland Memory Project at Cleveland State University’s Michael Schwartz Library, the exhibit drew on that library’s Special Collections, but it also featured newly created artworks and video, and material from a remarkable array of community partners, including
No dry, dusty museum piece, the exhibition was an affectionate and informative look at the role of the tower in the life of the city.