Akron has always asserted its own identity and has never wanted to be subsumed into Greater Cleveland. So how does the city define itself in a positive sense, apart from not wanting to be gobbled by its neighbor to the north?
Exhibitions on view through the holidays at the Akron Art Museum provide some answers, at least from an artistic point of view. Given that some of the displays were meant to coincide with the city’s 2025 bicentennial, it’s worth seeing how they and other exhibits define the city’s sense of itself and, perhaps, its soul.
What they say, as a whole, is that Akron is a place with unexpected natural beauty, a gritty spirit of creative freedom and a sense of community pride and solidarity that comes from being overlooked and underestimated.
Local art hero
All of those qualities can be seen in the museum’s main bicentennial exhibition, a large-scale retrospective on the work of Akron native Alfred McMoore (1950-2009), an eccentric “outsider,’’ or self-trained artist, diagnosed as a schizophrenic in his teens…