CREATIVE ESSENCE 1900-2000

Steel and rubber, oil and iron, salt and concrete. Cleveland's contribution to the American mosaic has largely been summed of in terms of heavy industry. But art has also been nurtured and exported from the creative rolling mills of the North Coast – materials stoked in the furnaces of the imagination, the factories of the mind. The product of a series of public discussions held beginning throughout Cleveland in January 2000, CREATIVE ESSENCE grows from an effort by the Cleveland Artists Foundation to define what is distinctive about the character of arts and aesthetic design in this region. From this new threshold at the dawning of the 21st century, CREATIVE ESSENCE allows you a look back on more than a hundred years of artists and cultural development in the region, where the likes of Viktor Schreckengost, Frank Ghery, Paul Travis, Margaret Bourke-White, Frank Wilcox and Henry Keller left an indelible imprint. Public art and monuments from WPA projects in the 1930s still surround us, while the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Cleveland Institute of Art, SPACES Gallery, the Akron Art Museum, NOVA Gallery, the Canton Art Museum and other institutions continue to bequeath a legacy of invention, decoration and “some sort of magic,” for today and tomorrow.