January 2018
In Concert: Mantra Percussion
28/01/18
CMA@Transformer Station
Fri, 02/23/2018 - 7:30pm to 8:45pm
Purchase Tickets
Committed to honoring the past and expanding the future of percussion music, Mantra Percussion brings to life new works by living composers, collaborates with artists from diverse genres and styles, and questions what it means to communicate music through percussion instruments. Mantra Percussion engages new audiences by challenging the standard concert format through evening-length events that look toward a grander artistic vision. Hailed by the New York Times as “finely polished. . . a fresh source of energy,” Mantra Percussion has commissioned or premiered over 40 new works for percussion ensemble since it formed in 2009. They perform Michael Gordon’s evening-length percussion sextet Timber, which they co-commissioned; they also gave the work’s US premiere.
$25, CMA members $22.
As part of it's on-going partnership with the Cleveland Museum of Art, Transformer Station is pleased to host this concert organized and presented by the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Interview: Dana Schutz
28/01/18
The Dana Schutz Q&A: a major contemporary artist speaks at Transformer Station
By Steven Litt, The Plain Dealer
CLEVELAND, Ohio - Dana Schutz, the renowned contemporary artist whose recent paintings and drawings are on view at the Transformer Station gallery in Ohio City, is a star with a strong local connection.
Before her swift rise to acclaim in New York in the early 2000s, she earned a bachelor of fine arts degree at the Cleveland Institute of Art, the independent art college located in a city that helped shape her work and career.
In a conversation at the gallery before the opening of her show on Friday, Jan. 19, Schutz, 41, a native of Livonia, MI, spoke about her work and her ties to Cleveland.
She also shared her latest thoughts about the controversy she stirred last spring during the Biennial exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
Black artists protested Schutz's decision to exhibit her painting of the murdered and disfigured Jim Crow victim Emmett Till in an open coffin.
For Schutz, the episode raised questions about what it means to paint such difficult, historically specific subjects after having focused for years primarily on imaginary subjects, such as her series on humans who could eat parts of their own bodies and regenerate them.
Entitled "Eating Atom Bombs," the Transformer Station show, organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art, explores America's current mood of division and conflict under President Trump, but without referring to specific historical moments, such as the Emmett Till painting.
What follows is an edited version of the conversation. Read More...
By Steven Litt, The Plain Dealer
CLEVELAND, Ohio - Dana Schutz, the renowned contemporary artist whose recent paintings and drawings are on view at the Transformer Station gallery in Ohio City, is a star with a strong local connection.
Before her swift rise to acclaim in New York in the early 2000s, she earned a bachelor of fine arts degree at the Cleveland Institute of Art, the independent art college located in a city that helped shape her work and career.
In a conversation at the gallery before the opening of her show on Friday, Jan. 19, Schutz, 41, a native of Livonia, MI, spoke about her work and her ties to Cleveland.
She also shared her latest thoughts about the controversy she stirred last spring during the Biennial exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
Black artists protested Schutz's decision to exhibit her painting of the murdered and disfigured Jim Crow victim Emmett Till in an open coffin.
For Schutz, the episode raised questions about what it means to paint such difficult, historically specific subjects after having focused for years primarily on imaginary subjects, such as her series on humans who could eat parts of their own bodies and regenerate them.
Entitled "Eating Atom Bombs," the Transformer Station show, organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art, explores America's current mood of division and conflict under President Trump, but without referring to specific historical moments, such as the Emmett Till painting.
What follows is an edited version of the conversation. Read More...
Review: Dana Schutz
21/01/18
By Steven Litt, The Plain Dealer
CLEVELAND, Ohio - There's nothing overtly political about the Cleveland Museum of Art's show of big, juicy, new paintings and drawings by Dana Schutz that opened Friday night at the Transformer Station gallery in Ohio City.
But it's hard to avoid the sensation that Schutz, who sparked controversy last year at the Whitney Biennial in New York with her painting of Jim Crow murder victim Emmett Till in his coffin, is channeling the existential dread of the Trump era, just as she sought to explore American racism in her contribution to the Whitney show.
If the time of Trump means living with threat of nuclear war, presidential tweetstorms and strife over immigration, racial divisions, gender conflict and cutting the social safety net, Schutz seems to be very much in the moment. Read More...