Victor Babin
Newsweek magazine called them “the most brilliant two-piano team of our generation.” And few would have challenged the accolade. Indeed, the husband and wife team of Victor Babin and Vitya Vronsky (1909–1992) are regarded by many as one of the great classical piano duos of the 20th century. Born, respectively, in Moscow and Kiev, the two Russian […]
Ed Mieczkowski
In 2004, as Ed Mieczkowski lay near death in a hospital in Houston with an aortic aneurism, a “rescue caravan” of cars and trucks was rushing to his Cleveland studio, where bulldozers were preparing to demolish the building on which the artist’s lease had expired. Inside were more than 100 paintings, drawings and constructions. Irreplaceable, commercially […]
Donald Erb
Donald Erb, Cleveland’s most illustrious and controversial 20th-century composer, explored fresh sonorities and forged new paths in more than 100 boldly imaginative works. He shocked the audience in 1965 when the Cleveland Orchestra first performed his Symphony of Overtures. At the end, the composer was booed and pelted with pennies. The audience reaction to Erb’s forward-looking style was also […]
Don Robertson
“There are two kinds of writers,” Don Robertson liked to say, recalling the classic comparison of Thomas Wolfe to F. Scott Fitzgerald, “put-’er-iners and take-’er-outers. I’m a put-’er-iner. If I’m a loud mouth or a windbag, so be it. Anyway, that’s the way real people talk—around the bush, repeating themselves.” What Robertson was trying to capture, […]
William D. Ellis
Although William Donahue Ellis was born to be a writer, his readers might be forgiven if they assume he once received formal training in other disciplines. Seemingly part archaeologist, part anthropologist, part genealogist, and part psychologist, Ellis mined the centuries to unearth the raw material he would mold into his fiction and nonfiction books. With no instrument […]
Raymond Wilding-White
You might have expected, back in 1967, to find one of Cleveland’s foremost exponents of avant-garde music occupying a distinguished chair at some hallowed refuge of the arts and humanities such as Western Reserve University. In fact, you would have found your man in front of a class on the other side of Euclid Avenue, on […]
John Clague
“I have always been fascinated by nature,” John Clague once told a reporter, “and the possibility of creating something as astonishing as the very first turtle I ever saw.” The celebrated Cleveland sculptor was referring to the basketball-size spheres he began making in the early 1990s that were cut open to reveal mysterious structures of gleaming […]
John Terence Kelly
he enormous geodesic dome that looms above the corporate headquarters of ASM International (formerly the American Society for Metals) in Novelty, Ohio, 20 miles east of Cleveland, has been turning heads along Route 87 for more than 50 years. The sheer boldness of its conception, realized in 1958 when Eisenhower was in the White House, still […]
Frederick J. Lipp
In the spring of 1968 Frederick J. Lipp belatedly received the Cleveland Arts Prize, not only for his provocative and deeply thoughtful first novel, Rulers of Darkness, published two years earlier, but for a body of writing in another medium for which he had gained little notice, though it was seen and enjoyed by millions of Americans. This […]
Frederick A. Miller
The fascination with mass-produced, identical products—from automobiles to tableware—that swept America in the early years of the 20th century made millionaires of men like Henry Ford, who, if he did not invent, at least perfected assembly line production. Frederick A. Miller preferred to think of this fascination as a kind of national “trance.” Fortunately for him, […]