In at least one way, Akron is the center of it all. The Erie-Ohio Canal, which ran northward to Cleveland and southward to Portsmouth on the Ohio River, measured itself from Akron – Locks 1 and up north through the finish in the Flats area of Cleveland and Locks 1 and up heading south. Section […]

There’s something about standing face-to-face with the ocean across an expansive sandy beach. Not timelessness as lots of folks write about it, but a quickening of life, a feel of force, room to take a breath. Not everyone sees it that way, of course, including four Akron-area photographers who got together to present their collective […]

Bring your favorite fold-out chair, sport some cool shades, come with a small appetite and great thirst, and join the crowds at the Akron Art Museum (AAM) on Thursday evenings for the 28th season of the Downtown@Dusk summer music series. This year kicked off with the smooth rhythm and blues sounds of the Wanda Hunt […]

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. That’s a concept that Ghana-born abstract artist El Anatsui seems to thrive on. Twelve of his best pieces are being shown at the Akron Art Museum (AAM), a Knight Arts grantee, in a mammoth display called “Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui.” Anatsui takes the detritus […]

Want to laugh, chuckle, and have wacky fun watching live theater? Go to Weathervane Playhouse, a Knight Arts grantee, and see its current production of “The Drowsy Chaperone.” There are lots of reasons why this show is successfully done – a slick and lively script for one from Tony Award-winning writers Bob Martin and Don […]

Apollo’s Fire (AF) is a class act. Jeannette Sorrell, who founded AF 20 years ago, has a thing going with it — and a sizable following both locally and internationally — through use of period/historic instruments and the presentation of the best and finest classical Baroque music. Apollo’s Fire founder and artistic director Jeanette Sorrell. Every […]

Gruff speech, confusion out the wazoo, outrageous characters  — that’s just the start of what’s in store for you when you go to see New World Performance Laboratory’s (NWPL) finely-performed production of Dorota Maslowska’s “A Couple of Poor, Polish-Speaking Romanians” (CPPSR) at the Balch Street Theatre. On surface, the story seems like familiar picaresque stuff, […]

Several high school-aged kids in the Akron area won’t have any problem saying what they did during their summer vacation. Students from many public and private high schools, along with at least one home-schooled student, responded to a city-wide call for auditions put out by the Akron Civic Theatre in cooperation with the Advocates for […]

Jim and Vanita Oelschlager have amassed nearly 800 pieces of Native American art and cultural objects and have recently made the big leap to lend about 200 of them for public display at the Center for the History of Psychology (CHP) at The University of Akron.  Strange how collections come into being, and stranger still […]

“Art should pervade” our world. That’s what Fred Bidwell, executive director of the advertising firm JWT Action, said during the installation of “The Shopper Dreams,” a work that he commissioned for his employees and the interested public. Bidwell’s agency promotes marketable items and is meant to lure shoppers in. “Most people,” he said, begin shopping “with […]