Art

I was so glad to attend the Flights of Fancy - An Ingenuity Bal on May 4, 2024, at the IngenuityLabs (5401 Hamilton Avenue, Cleveland) for two reasons. First, is that I attend IngenuityFest practically every year, and write about my great experiences enjoying the event in my Ingenuity Cleveland blog posts. Thus, I wanted to attend the Ingenuity Bal fundraiser to support IngenuityFest 2024 and the year-round programing of Ingenuity Cleveland. The second reason is that I have great memories of attending this fundraiser for Ingenuity Cleveland many years ago, and I knew it would be a blast

As I entered the building, I was fortunate to be able to talk briefly to Ingenuity Cleveland Executive Artistic Director Emily Appelbaum, and thank her for her good work. She had made it a point to approach me and give me an invitation to the Ingenuity Bal at the April 26, 2024, Greater Cleveland Partnership/COSE and Assembly for the Arts "Art at Work "networking event. I greatly appreciated her making sure that I knew about the event. I am glad I was able to attend. At the end of the evening, I made a point to get a photo of Emily Appelbaum and me for this blog post, but unfortunately the photo was too dark and blurry to use here due to the atmospheric lighting. I decided to use her photo from the Ingenuity Cleveland Team Members web page, since it also shows you her extensive experience. We are fortunate to have Emily Appelbaum's expert leadership in Cleveland, organizing our community's creative people.

Cleveland Ghostbusters - Fashion Rock Project - aerialists - costumes - belly dancers - acrobats - circus fun - jugglers - crafts - dancing - and so much more! I hope my photos/videos from the evening give you a sense of the excitement which is Cleveland's Ingenuity!

When I arrived at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the place was hopping! I saw several youth groups arrive, and many people in the Ames Family Atrium enjoying fine prints, or a meal from the Provenance Café. There was so much being offered at the museum, and I was grateful to be there when the museum opened at 10:00 am to spend the full day exploring!

I want to share with you the following three art exhibitions that I knew about when I arrived on Friday, April 26, 2024, plus the immersive experience that the museum's staff recommended I visit:

1. Print Club of Cleveland’s 39th Fine Print Fair

2. Korean Couture: Generations of Revolution Preview and Tour

3. April 25, 2024, blog post: "Africa & Byzantium" Preview - Cleveland Museum of Art

4. Into the Seven Jeweled Mountain: An Immersive Experience

Thank you to the Cleveland Museum of Art for inviting us to the Wednesday, April 10, 2024, preview of the Africa & Byzantium exhibition, which included remarks by VIP delegates, and a tour of the exhibition. The exhibition is open to the public Sunday, April 14 through Sunday, July 21, 2024. It took over four years to bring Africa & Byzantium to the Cleveland Museum of Art. We appreciate being among the first people in Greater Cleveland to view these historic artworks, many of which have never been shown in the United States.

We created this blog post to share our photos from our visit, along with our impressions of the exhibition.

The invitation to attend came as a result of our support of the Cleveland Museum of Art with our many sosAssociates.com blog posts about the museum. We enjoyed the event, and wrote this blog post to share our experience at Africa & Byzantium at the Cleveland Museum of Art. We plan to use our membership benefit to return to see the exhibition again. We were very grateful to be able to attend the preview!

We are very fortunate in Cleveland to have Manabu Ikeda: Flowers from the Wreckage make its United State debut at our very own moCa Cleveland in Uptown Cleveland - University Circle. When I saw Manabu Ikeda's exhibition, along with two other new exhibitions, as part of the moCa Cleveland Opening Night Celebration, I knew I would need to come back a few more times. There is so much to see in the details of Manabu Ikeda's artwork. Fortunately, the exhibition is in Cleveland through May 26, 2024, and moCa Cleveland is always FREE and open to all.

This blog post is about the February 2, 2024, moCa Cleveland Opening Night Celebration, and my March 29, 2024, return visit during a Studio Access with Manabu Ikeda session at moCa Cleveland.

I decided to write this blog post for two purposes:

• First, to thank the leadership of Maelstrom Collaborative Arts for their Saturnalia 2024 gathering which took place on Saturday, January 27, 2024.

  . . . kick off our sixth year with the return of Saturnalia, our night to celebrate the art and artsy made at Maelstrom Collaborative Arts!

• Second, and the more important reason, is that Saturnalia 2024 represents a return to normality, and kicks off the realization of more great art events in the future!

  Our last Saturnalia party was December 2019! Obviously, a lot has changed since then . . .
  
  We had such plans at that Saturnalia, plans that did not account for a global pandemic. But despite it all, we continued to make an array of boundary-pushing art.

I support what Maelstrom Collaborative Arts has created, and I was impressed by the friendliness of everyone at Saturnalia 2024. The format of the evening allowed the performers to become the audience for other performers, and therefore encouraged everyone to socialize.

I hope this blog post encourages you to learn more about Maelstrom Collaborative Arts and to partake in some of their entertainment!

Now that I have returned from my Appalachian Trail adventure trip, I want to take the time to publish this blog post about my visit to the Norman Rockwell Museum one month ago on Tuesday, September 26, 2023.

I had grown up with some humorous "Four Sporting Boys" Norman Rockwell prints that my mom framed for my room as a child, and which, as an adult, I put in my sons' room. I also was active in Scouting, and thus saw almost all of the Normal Rockwell "Boy Scouts" prints. They were displayed at the church where my troop had its meetings. The first time I visited the Norman Rockwell Museum, I thought I knew Norman Rockwell's artwork, but as I wrote in my thru-hike journal, seeing this original artwork was nothing less than amazing!!

However, I want to be clear that, as I learned on my first visit and confirmed on subsequent vists, while you may feel you know Norman Rockwell's work, it is not the same as seeing the original artwork. Look at the brush strokes -- get close and look at the texture -- take a museum guided tour to learn the story behind what you are seeing. Visit the Norman Rockwell Museum in person!

Every time I have visited the Norman Rockwell Museum, I have learned and seen something new. I hope this blog post encourages you to visit the museum if you are ever in Massachusetts. I look forward to visiting the museum again -- maybe even next year as I hike from Massachusetts into Vermont and beyond, as I continue north on the Appalachian Trail.

The day after attending IngenuityFest 2023: Biologies & Geologies (September 22 & 23, 2023), I left on a trip. Now that I have returned, I want to publicly express here how grateful I am to Ingenuity Cleveland leadership and their community partners for this year's gathering of creative people in Cleveland.

My son, Mike, and I enjoyed exploring the artistically lit caverns of Ingenuity Cleveland's 300,000-square-foot Hamilton Collaborative on the evening of Friday, September 22, 2023. There we found music, art, and much more!!

Then, on Saturday, September 23, 2023, Mike and I returned with our whole family to explore more. In addition to seeing more of the exhibitions I enjoyed Friday night, I spent time talking to people at the community organization booths in the upper part of the building. There is where I learned about the latest new happenings in Cleveland.

Since its founding in 2004, IngenuityFest has featured both technology and art. These are both areas that interest me greatly, so it is no surprise that I have been writing about IngenuityFest from the first year I started writing my blog in 2012.

I have been writing about IngenuityFest since 2012, but I have been taking my family to this great event for even longer. I look forward to attending again next year!

Starting with the 2012 Cleveland Museum of Art Chalk Festival, I have created a blog post every year to capture some of the incredible chalk art created on the Fine Arts Garden's stone pathways in front of the Cleveland Museum of Art. This includes both 2020, when #CMAChalkFestival was online only -- "Social Distancing Style" -- due to COVID-19, and 2021, when "a spur-of-the-moment trip south to take care of some family business prevented me from attending," but my son, Kevin F. Smith, saved the day by attending and sharing photos on social media.

I enjoyed creating chalk drawings at the event in 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017, but have not participated as an artist in recent years.

I am so glad I was able to attend the 34th Annual Cleveland Museum of Art Chalk Festival on Sunday, September 17, 2023 -- my 11th year taking photos and videos of the event. I hope you enjoy what I put together to capture the artwork and the atmosphere of the event.

I normally spend three full days at the annual IngenuityFest Weekend, but family commitments only allowed me to visit on Saturday, September 24, 2022, for three hours in the evening. I was so impressed with the event, I want to share in this blog post the photos/videos that I and others shared about the weekend. After 2020's IngenuityFest being canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and last year being an outdoor event at the Cleveland Metroparks, it was good to be back at a more traditional IngenuityFest Weekend of creativity at the Hamilton Collaborative location.

I also want to mention that one of the highlights, in addition to the incredible displays and performances, was reconnecting with people that I have not seen in person the last few years. It has been a difficult time for many people, and I am grateful to the artists who are IngenuityFest, and the sponsors that support their work.

Chalk Festival

Saturday and Sunday, September 10 and 11, 12:00–5:00 p.m.
Fine Arts Garden

Children and adults enjoy this annual event where community members join professional artists in using the walkways around the Fine Arts Garden as a colorful canvas. Begun in 1990, our festival is a modern expression of a Renaissance tradition from 16th-century Italy in which beggars copied paintings of the Madonna by Raphael and his contemporaries using chalk on the plazas outside cathedrals. Watching the chalk artists and enjoying the entertainment is free.

I was so glad to be back in person after two years!! In 2020, for the 31st annual Cleveland Museum of Art's Chalk Festival, the event went virtual due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Last year, "I was very disappointed that a spur-of-the-moment trip south to take care of some family business prevented me from attending ... " but "I was rewarded greatly by the Cleveland Twitterverse," who posted their photos online so that I was able to share them in my blog post.

I was so pleased that the 33rd Annual Chalk Festival would take place in the Fine Arts Garden on Saturday/Sunday, September 10 and 11, 2022, rain or shine! These were dates I could attend!!

The following is my eleventh Cleveland Chalk Festival blog post. I really enjoy seeing the creativity each year (which is why I even wrote blog posts for the two years I enjoyed remotely). Please retweet any tweets that have photos of chalk artwork you enjoy to encourage more people to attend and participate in future years!