Had a chance today to run into the Cleveland State University Art Gallery to check out a new show by Mike Levy, one of my favorite local photographers. The project Mere Witness consists of 27 black-and-white photos from African-American churches around the city and is a testament to the church communities' unflinching faith in the face of the harsh economic and social conditions that have come to define the modern urban environment in Cleveland.
Levy started shooting the project in 2002, working in a range of churches from the city's biggest and most powerful cornerstones to the handwritten signs of its smallest storefront churches, seeking to visually address the "intangible quality of faith" and perseverance, culminating in the question "how can people affected by hardship continue to have faith?"
Levy spent much of his career working as a photographer for the Cleveland Plain Dealer before leaving in 2006 to pursue his own projects. He now also teaches photojournalism at Kent State University. His book Cleveland's Urban Environment: The Sacred and the Transient, published in 2003, is a personal favorite on my shelf.
Mere Witness runs thru 8 March. While you're there, take a minute to check out some pretty awesome chiaroscuro landscapes by the painter Randall Tiedman in the Curious Terrain show.

Another local show that just opened along similar lines, titled Let All God's People Say Amen, features the work of Helen Liggett, a photographer and professor of urban planning in CSU's Levin College of Urban Affairs. Her project is the culmination of a five-year community project w/ Morning Star Baptist Church in Cleveland. Her show runs thru 5 April at Heights Arts Studio in Cleveland Heights.

Lastly, in New York a few happenings by some of my colleagues at Redux--
First, Danny Wilcox Frazier w/ an opening and book signing for his Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize-winning project Driftless: Photographs from Iowa, Thursday 21 February from 630-830pm at the Redux Gallery, 116 E. 16th St. 12th floor.
Next, Nathaniel Welch w/ an opening for his new book Jesse James and His Beautiful Machines, Friday 22 February from 6-9pm at powerHouse Arena, 37 Main St. in Brooklyn.