Look How Far We’ve Come
July 8 – August 31, 2022
Exploring the theme “You Are Here,” the CAN Triennial celebrates the work of 126 artists in 16 venues, all over Cleveland. The exhibition at The Sculpture Center, the Artist Archives of the Western Reserve and the Cleveland Institute of Art – The Ann and Norman Roulet Student + Alumni Gallery is curated by the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Currently Under Curation Fellows.
Selected Artists
About the CAN Triennial: You Are Here
CAN Triennial: You Are Here is a multi-venue exhibition organized in collaboration with an intergenerational, diverse team of curators from a range of institutional affiliations. The curatorial team will assemble more than a dozen exhibitions that will, at times, examine place and location, and at other times skewer notions of culture and politics, and will also map to discussions around presence and loss. Together, these exhibitions will give us an experiential journey through the literal geography of our city, and the ever-complicated situational understandings of place, context, identity, and–ultimately action.
About CAN
Collective Arts Network (CAN) is a nonprofit organization serving the visual arts industry in and around Cleveland, providing a public forum for promotion, reporting, and reviews.
CAN’s origins date to a series of dialogs in 2011, organized by Zygote Press. Approximately 28 small to mid-sized visual art organizations met during the year to discuss mutually supportive strategies for stabilizing in difficult economic times. While the region was experiencing an outpouring of arts activity, including significant investment and revitalization of several neighborhoods, the deteriorating media environment had almost entirely abandoned coverage of visual art in Northeast Ohio. The need for communication was a constant topic in these conversations.
The organizations decided on a boot strap solution—to share the cost of producing their own publication. It was grass-roots, collective problem-solving. The first CAN Journal involved 28 organizations, supported by a matching grant from the Ohio Arts Council. It was published as a newsprint tabloid in January, 2012.
CAN Journal was re-envisioned and re-born as a quarterly magazine and website in June, 2012, with support from Consolidated Solutions and the George Gund Foundation. Since that time, membership in the collective grew from 28 organizations to nearly 100. Each issue of the print magazine includes dozens of galleries, museums, and related institutions previewing their own exhibits, as well as independent reporting, commentary, features, and reviews. Having previously operated through non-profit fiscal agents, CAN was recognized as an independent, tax-exempt nonprofit in 2015.
In 2018, responding to the international focus of the FRONT International Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, CAN presented the inaugural, regionally-focused CAN Triennial.
