The Covington Arts scene is getting a shot of vitality with the arrival of new directors at the The Carnegie Visual and Performing Arts Center and its neighbor, the Covington Arts District.
Both Katie Brass and Natalie Bowers arrived in Covington just last fall. Brass came to the Carnegie Arts Center from Cincinnati's Contemporary Arts Center where she was development director.
And Bowers, a native of New Jersey, spent eight years in London working for a hedge fund before coming to Covington. While in London, Bowers also was a marketing director for a theater company and was an executive in philanthropy for the arts.
Now, Bowers said she is looking to apply "all the skills I have learned" as Covington Arts District manager.
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Artists have mused over the female form as far back as recorded history take us. Goddesses, warriors, saints and a cast-out from the Garden of Eden, women in art are numerous and varied. These many guises of Eve are on display in the group exhibitions at both Phyllis Weston-Annie Bolling Gallery and Manifest Gallery.
David Miretsky's pencil loves the female body. Three graphite drawings by Miretsky are included in the exhibit 'Inspiring Collectors: Various Art by Six Cincinnati Artists' at the Phyllis Weston Annie Bolling Gallery. The show boasts Frank McElwain, who is the only living artist with work in the Proctor & Gamble collection. There are also etchings created by Harry Shokler during the WPA projects of the 1930's. These works concern landscapes and skillful renderings of Cincinnati's historical sites. With regards to the female landscape, however, it is David Miretsky's territory.
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Thom Shaw, Cincinnati's finest living visual artist, is part muckraker, part commentator on visual and popular culture, part art historian, part didacticist and polemicist. He's also a consummate craftsman, autobiographer, narrator and, when he chooses to be, witticist. Shaw has, for decades, been the great explicator of the violence of urban black life to a mostly white art audience. He succeeds so brilliantly not to titillate a prominent middle class pruriently looking through the window of the poor, because he hybridizes his woodcut figures in a manner that has the strength, the timelessness and the eclectic genius of Picasso. Thom Shaw is as serious and ambitious an artist as we know.
If Picasso borrowed what was formerly called 'primitivism' from African masks and sculpture and integrated their reductionist, abstracted qualities into his art, then Thom Shaw does the exact opposite, building from African and American Cubist stylizations into and through European, particularly German, Expressionism.
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New Directors Energize Covington Arts
