Truthfully when I walked into the CAC Thursday night I was only thinking one thing, I’m about to willingly see my first uncircumcised piece of man bits because of art. In an age where government officials and fundamentalists argue over the labeling of gendered bathrooms and most women are openly appalled at the amount of […]

  At the end of every school year, as the weather begins to warm and excitement grows with the anticipation of things to come, the University of Cincinnati College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning puts on a very special runway show. For visitors, it’s an opportunity to see the innovative work of the department’s […]

In May of 2015, B’nai B’rith International and Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR) announced that the art and artifacts of the former B’nai B’rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum would be transferred to HUC-JIR Skirball Museum for the purposes of preserving and displaying this culture defining collection of sacred, secular fine and decorative […]

A Conversation with Stephen Bowen Tim Karoleff   Stephen is one of the contemporary young design talents to know. His avant garde approach is as unique as it is exciting. Eliciting humor and delight in a variety of media, Stephen is adept at giving form to his surrounding impulses.   Stephen practices design professionally at […]

Both artist and patron Alice Weston, and dealer/art guru Carl Solway were rightly honored this month, Weston at a celebration of the twentieth anniversary of The Weston Gallery in The Aronoff Center downtown, which she and her late husband Harris initially funded, and thus are responsible for that superb gallery’s virtual existence, and Solway at […]

In the early 1980s, I was a roving, punk clubbing twenty-something and a nascent print salesman for the Hennegan Company with a sidelong interest in art , though with little knowledge of it. Through a friend, the wonderful graphic designer, Chuck Byrne of Colophon I (and Hennegan) was given the opportunity to produce the printing […]

What makes Carl Solway an exceptional and indeed special art dealer?  His lengthy career began some 50 years ago  when he opened the Flair Gallery.  Located on Race Street in what was then an extension of Pogue’s Department Store, it was later moved to West Fourth Street, when the building he had occupied was torn […]

I have a very special fondness for the Solways, because my relationship with that family predates my meeting Carl himself and buying art from him, which began in 1970.  My sister’s best friend throughout high school and long beyond was Tammy Solway, Carl’s half sister, and my own family and Tammy’s mother (Harry Solway, owner […]

Picture this if you will: it’s early 1970’s and you move to Cincinnati to join the “art community”;, no you are not alone in the back of a train station rotunda, you’re trying to find the cosmic center of  the art world in the heart of River City.  There it is, “Not in New York” […]

“…you see me disappearing like sugar in water.” —from Rain Trip by Diane Wakoski MY RIGHT HAND My right hand is caving in. The muscles retreat as if on the front line under fire, disappearing. The winter sun a sudden development through thick clouds through this dirty kitchen window lands on my hand as it […]

Butterflies   We are all born caterpillars fuzzy and crawling, amused by the sky and her shape-shifters: first a dragon, then an angel.   We flail our limbs testing their stretch and retraction grasping on to grass to see it bend before resting in its vastness.   We grow longer with appetites fiending like a […]

Now that I’m getting more and more ideas for finding books from The New Yorker, rather than from The New York Times Book Review, from the one-page section titled”Briefly Noted”, I’m finding a plethora of excellent novels often not reviewed elsewhere.  Tender, by Belinda McKeon, is one such novel, and it’s one of the loveliest, […]

The North Water, by Ian McGuire, is a combination adventure tale, morality play, historical novel, and singularly astute assessment of the characters of men under the most extreme of circumstances, particularly keen on understanding how easily money corrupts men.  One of the last whaling ships to go to, basically, The North Pole, at a time […]

David Means’s Hystopia is a much-anticipated novel–deservedly so, let me say up front–that looks at both veterans of the Vietnam War and two young women whose boyfriends were killed there–from a mostly Surreal perspective, or, one might say, from the perspectives of those on a variety of mind-altering drugs, and/or somewhere in between these different […]