[From The New York Times]

CLEVELAND — The first-ever Front International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art here, conceived by the collector Fred Bidwell and directed by the artist and curator Michelle Grabner, is organized like a scavenger hunt. In addition to more or less self-contained shows at places like MoCA Cleveland and the Akron Art Museum, the festival includes a number of unusual stand-alone installations that seem designed to guide visitors all over the city and its surrounding suburbs.

Katrin Sigurdardottir mined clay in Iceland, formed it into tiles that she arranged in architectural stacks, and contributed several handsome and evocative photographs of those stacks to the Akron Art Museum’s well-balanced show, organized by Ms. Grabner and Ellen Rudolph, the museum’s chief curator. The tiles themselves Ms. Sigurdardottir buried around town, and one group, marked with a discreet sign in a grassy lot on an Akron back street, brings you right to the surprising doorstep of an ornate Lao temple.

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