Archive for November, 2019

November Issue of Aeqai Online

November 24th, 2019  |  by  |  published in Announcements

The November issue of Aeqai has just posted; we decided to put this issue up a week early,  in order to avoid the demands and pleasures of the upcoming Thanksgiving weekend. We have a fascinating issue, reviews and essays of exhibitions both in this region and from Houston, Hydra (Greece), New York and LA. Our […]

Drifting and Digging: Birgit Jensen’s Flugblätter at Clay Street Press Gallery

November 24th, 2019  |  by  |  published in *

Drifting and Digging: Birgit Jensen’s Flugblätter at Clay Street Press Gallery

In Birgit Jensen’s Flugblätter (Flying Letters), nothing settles comfortably into place. The purportedly autonomous artist ruptures into the collective. The collective expands and contracts like a breathing organism, dismissing its own consistency with Whitmanesque abandon. The radically distributed artist takes transformation as its topic, working paradoxically to make temporal processes concrete, all while inhabiting the […]

“DARK: Shadows, Nightscapes, and Darkness,” Manifest Gallery, through December 6, 2019

November 24th, 2019  |  by  |  published in *

“DARK: Shadows, Nightscapes, and Darkness,” Manifest Gallery, through December 6, 2019

“Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness.” A single sentence from Anne Frank encapsulates Manifest Gallery’s “DARK: Shadows, Nightscapes, and Darkness” exhibition. From a pool of’ 359 works by 103 artists representing five countries, 30 states, and the District of Columbia, the blind jury selected 17 pieces by 15 […]

Robert and Chuck’s grand adventure: “Into the Wilderness” Eisele Gallery, Cincinnati

November 24th, 2019  |  by  |  published in *, November 2019

Robert and Chuck's grand adventure: "Into the Wilderness"  Eisele Gallery, Cincinnati

Leave your comfort zone and imagine trekking into the wilds of Wyoming with artists Chuck Marshall and Robert Hagberg. Descriptive plein air paintings, several of them executed in the wilds, are contemporary interpretations of  Wyoming wilderness currently exhibited at Eisele Gallery. The concept that inspired the “Into the Wilderness” experience of Hagberg and Marshall, was […]

Castanets and Castas: “Treasures from the Hispanic Society Museum and Library” at the Cincinnati Art Museum, October 25, 2019-January 19, 2020

November 24th, 2019  |  by  |  published in *

Castanets and Castas: “Treasures from the Hispanic Society Museum and Library” at the Cincinnati Art Museum, October 25, 2019-January 19, 2020

This is a big show with a big story to tell, one that both celebrates and critically examines what it means to be Hispanic. The show focuses on, but is not limited to, European Spain, which it follows through many of its incarnations: an ancient civilization, a Roman outpost, a Christian outpost, a center of […]

Paul Mpagi Sepuya at the Blaffer Art Museum

November 24th, 2019  |  by  |  published in *, November 2019

Paul Mpagi Sepuya at the Blaffer Art Museum

“Yes, I understand these,” I might have said to myself on my first encounter with Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s photographs at Houston’s Blaffer Art Museum. In the Los Angeles photographer’s first major museum survey, arriving from the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis, fragments of figures bend and tangle against cool walls and in dark rooms. […]

Profile of Joe Girandola

November 24th, 2019  |  by  |  published in November 2019

Profile of Joe Girandola

Joseph Girandola, president of the Art Academy of Cincinnati since mid-summer, first came here in 2012 to join the faculty of University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning (DAAP), after living and working in such varied and often storied locations as Los Angeles, Santa Fe, Philadelphia, Omaha. What, we asked, was it […]

Bits N’ Pieces Jo Ann Berger and Suzanne Fisher Caza Sikes Gallery

November 24th, 2019  |  by  |  published in November 2019

Bits N' Pieces  Jo Ann Berger and Suzanne Fisher  Caza Sikes Gallery

Sometimes disparate styles meld together to create a more cohesive whole.  “Bits N’ Pieces” brings together Suzanne Fisher, a multimedia artist and mosaic muralist, and Jo Ann Berger, a toy designer and eclectic artist who both use found and discarded objects as well as unorthodox design to create contemporary art that borrows from the past. […]

Tyler Shields Flirts with Danger and Darkness

November 24th, 2019  |  by  |  published in November 2019

Tyler Shields Flirts with Danger and Darkness

Tyler Shields, a photographer who’s been described as “the Warhol of his generation” by Sotheby’s, came to Cincinnati this month to open his new exhibition “Fairytale” at Hyde Park’s Miller Gallery. The comparison to Warhol may raise eyebrows in skepticism. There’s no doubt that it’s hard to pinpoint a more influential contemporary artist than Warhol. […]

The Aesthetic Experience of Machine Learning: Grounding Control

November 24th, 2019  |  by  |  published in November 2019

The Aesthetic Experience of Machine Learning: Grounding Control

Turkish media artist Refik Anadol’s public art installation synthesizing architecture and intermedia, Machine Hallucination, is quite possibly one of the most interesting recent new media works of our epoch. This is explicitly because the piece not only integrates machine learning but presents a neural net in action. The piece has a dataset of over 300 […]

Site Specifics – Kiki Smith: Memory at Project Space Slaughterhouse

November 24th, 2019  |  by  |  published in November 2019

Site Specifics - Kiki Smith: Memory at Project Space Slaughterhouse

Each year the Athens, Greece-based Deste Foundation commissions an artist to create an exhibition for Project Space Slaughterhouse, a small stone building once used to slaughter goats, perched on a cliff overlooking the Aegean Sea on the island of Hydra. Since its inception in 2009, the space has shown the work of artworld luminaries from […]

Harvest: A Photo-essay

November 24th, 2019  |  by  |  published in November 2019

Harvest: A Photo-essay

“Harvest.” The very name cultivates savory mental images: farms bearing crops in extensive rows; gardens dotted with aromatic delights; green fields as far as they eye can see; fruits and vegetables plucked from fertile earth. Indeed this tillage is productive, though its yield is not so lush. There are no farmers gleaning fruit from the […]

Woman’s Art Club of Cincinnati is Still Going Strong

November 24th, 2019  |  by  |  published in November 2019

Woman’s Art Club of Cincinnati is Still Going Strong

The Woman’s Art Club of Cincinnati is the oldest existing woman’s art club, dating to 1892, operating without interruption in the United States.  President Dodie Loewe doesn’t know of any other clubs nationally similar to this one.  She showed up at a WACC meeting several years ago.  “I was just there to see what it’s […]

“Olive, Again” by Elizabeth Strout

November 24th, 2019  |  by  |  published in November 2019

Olive Kittredge, one of the most beloved–and feisty–characters in contemporary literature (the novel “Olive Kittredge” won The Pulitzer Prize) has returned in Elizabeth Strout’s new novel “Olive, Again”, and Strout’s older Olive is as compelling a character as she was in the original novel.  Elizabeth Strout also happens to write perfect, flawless prose; her sentences […]

“The Shadow King” by Maaza Mengiste

November 24th, 2019  |  by  |  published in November 2019

Ethiopian-born novelist Maaza Mengiste has just burst onto the literary scene with her magnificent novel “The Shadow King”.  (An increasingly large number of African, and/or African-born writers, mostly women, are astonishing the literary world with their fiction; “The Old Drift”, by Namwali Serpell, is another example from 2019, surely to be on most everyone’s best […]

“Union Station”, “The Topeka School” and “The Grammarians”

November 24th, 2019  |  by  |  published in November 2019

I’m learning that when “The New York Times Book Review” tells its readers that new books are experimental, or are breaking new boundaries in the structures of the work, or that the writers are breaking new ground in either short fiction (Zadie Smith’s new stories in “Union Station” or the novel itself (Ben Lerner’s “The […]

“Find Me” by Andre Aciman

November 24th, 2019  |  by  |  published in November 2019

Two of the most sophisticated and beautifully written novels, both dealing with the dynamics of desire, sexuality, gender, and a strong emphasis on memory and time–appeared recently.  “Find Me”, Andre Aciman’s sequel of sorts to his wildly successful “Call Me By Your Name” (which was also made into a much-praised movie), contains some of the […]