Amber N. Ford
Bio
Carl Wittke
Academic historians, as a rule, prefer to observe time’s ragged pageant from a safe distance. Carl Wittke, though his objectivity was impeccable and his relentless pursuit of the facts at times astonishing, wrote from a rather different perspective. The very title of his monumental history of the nation’s immigrants, We Who Built America, suggests the pride and […]
William McVey
1964 CLEVELAND ARTS PRIZE FOR VISUAL ARTS Few artists have left as many monuments on the American landscape as sculptor William Mozart McVey. His nine-foot bronze Winston Churchill (1966) greets visitors to the British Embassy in Washington, D.C. Not far away, six statues sculpted by McVey between 1967 and 1974 can be found in the porch and crypt […]
Clara T. Rankin
Surrounded by music in her home as a child, Clara Rankin loved listening to her mother and two brothers play the piano, clarinet, saxophone, trumpet, and drums or to the Caruso recordings her father treasured. “I had music in my life all through school. I sang in the glee club, so voice was always […]
Thomas Munro
In the years leading up to and following World War II, there was a sea-change in the way we look at, talk about, think about art. Or at least in the way scholars, critics and serious students of art talk and think about it. And, though it has been challenged in recent years, and undergone some […]
Starling Cumberworth
His students remembered him as a kind man, a “witty and astute” teacher of music theory and composition at the Cleveland Music School Settlement, where he served on the faculty for three decades before retiring in 1970. Starling Cumberworth’s distinctive name was inspired, it seems, by his father’s fondness for the Starling-Loving Hospital in Columbus (now […]
Eleanor Frampton
In the 1930s, Eleanor Frampton was regarded as Cleveland’s leading authority on modern dance. By the time she died in 1973, she had become a local institution fondly known as “Frampie.” Born in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1896, Frampton came to town in 1931 to start a dance program at the Cleveland Institute of Music (CIM). She […]
Robert A. Little
The choice of Robert Andrews Little to receive the Cleveland Arts Prize in 1965 was a recognition not only of the excellence of his design work, but of his influential role in introducing the language and philosophy of architectural modernism to the city. He was also ahead of his time in designing homes with energy-saving features […]
Paul Travis
Paul Travis was born in 1891 in a place called Wellsville, an isolated rural corner of southeast Ohio. A 19th-century farm boy educated in rustic schoolhouses, he could easily have emulated those contemporaries who chose to pursue agriculture for the remainder of their lives. But Travis had two special talents—he could draw, and he could teach—and those […]
Klaus George Roy
If Klaus George Roy had never composed a note of music, his would still be a prominent name in Cleveland music and cultural circles. But, on top of his other accomplishments in a long and public career as the Cleveland Orchestra’s program annotator, he produced a distinctive body of original music that has been widely performed and […]