The May issue of aeqai has just posted, bringing a wide variety of reviews of exhibitions from the region and from LA and New York. We begin this issue with Susan Byrnes’ magnificent review of the opening show at the newly renovated The Contemporary Dayton, a nonprofit there that’s made a big and bold move […]
Archive for May, 2021
Zachary Armstrong, Curtis Barnes, and Cauleen Smith Shows Inaugurate a New Home for The Contemporary Dayton
May 29th, 2021 | by Susan Byrnes | published in *, May 2021
The Contemporary Dayton (aka The Co), formerly known as the Dayton Visual Arts Center, has moved. Its new home is a 6000+ sq ft. space featuring five galleries, including a video viewing room, that give it almost double the size it had at its previous location. The space itself is located in a years-in-the-making renovation […]
Mystic Materialism: Jay Bolotin at the Carl Solway Gallery
May 29th, 2021 | by Christopher Carter | published in *, May 2021
Jay Bolotin began exhibiting works of art at the Carl Solway Gallery in the 1970s. Nearly fifty years later, he maintains his relationship with the venue, which has staged a retrospective surveying his catalog of drawings, writings, sculpture, theatre, music, and film. That catalog pays homage to a variety of predecessors, demonstrating his deep feeling […]
Aleatory Aesthetics: Appraising the Aesthetics of “Chance” in Gerhard Richter’s Cage Paintings
May 29th, 2021 | by Ekin Erkan | published in *, May 2021
Gerhard Richter’s Cage paintings (2006), on display at the Gagosian Gallery at 541 West 24th Street, are named after the composer John Cage, apparently drawing on the theme of coincidence. The paintings are massive, sprawling works, constructed from intersecting fields, lines, and swaths of uneven smears that reflect the broad squeegee tool which Richter dragged […]
“Silver Lining: An Outdoor Photography Show,” organized by The Clifton Cultural Arts Center and installed along the fence of the Rawson Woods Bird Preserve at the intersection of Middleton and McAlpin Avenues, Cincinnati
May 29th, 2021 | by Karen Chambers | published in *, May 2021
To state the obvious, the pandemic changed all of our lives, except, perhaps, the agoraphobic. The rest of us learned how to bake bread, cleaning out store shelves of packets of yeast, as well as tp. We made lists of things we could finally do–reorganize our closets–but didn’t. Sweat pants sales soared and khakis bottomed […]
Promise, Witness, Remembrance. Speed Museum. Louisville, Kentucky
May 29th, 2021 | by Megan Bickel | published in *, May 2021
Sam Gilliam’s Carousel Form II (1969) and Alisha Wormsley’s afro-futurist manifesto, “There are Black people in the Future,” announce their presence as you walk into the first gallery of Promise, Witness, Remembrance. Gilliam’s Carousel hovers. It is a monolith of canvas, pigment, and pure zeal. Promise, Witness, Remembrance at the Speed Art Museum “reflects on the […]
Stolen Land: Artistic Legacies of California Indians
May 29th, 2021 | by Josh Beckelhimer | published in May 2021
The Autry Museum of the American West feels hidden within LA’s Griffith Park. Its exhibition When I Remember I See Red: American Indian Art and Activism in California is on view through November 14th. The exhibition presents a diverse collection of contemporary work by artists of Native American descent, seeking to venerate their cultural endurance […]
Emil Alzamora’s Broken Figures Struggle to Find Their Way
May 29th, 2021 | by Annabel Osberg | published in May 2021
The eight figurative sculptures comprising Emil Alzamora’s show, “Waymaker,” evoke somber aspects of the human condition. Lacerated, contorted, and dismembered, these generic persons appear as victims of circumstances whose origins and nature remain tantalizingly mysterious. Contributing to a sense of instability and disjunction, Alzamora’s combinations of motley materials such as wood, plaster, wax, and metal […]
Cincinnati’s Juneteenth Tradition Continues in Spite of the Pandemic
May 29th, 2021 | by Laura Hobson | published in May 2021
Cincinnati’s Juneteenth Celebration began with Lydia Morgan in 1988. She accompanied her husband Noel on a business conference in Phoenix, Arizona where they met another couple. The wife said, “We’re going to the Juneteenth festival,” She was an entertainer and that’s how she knew about it. In a local park were Native Americans, African Americans […]
“Foregone” by Russell Banks
May 29th, 2021 | by Daniel Brown | published in May 2021
Russell Banks has long been one of America’s most prominent novelists, and his new book, “Foregone”, is a work of staggering genius, complex and nuanced; it raises fascinating questions about identity and storytelling and the truths therein. The narrator, Fife, is a dying documentary filmmaker in Canada; four of his former students/acolytes have come to […]
“The Recent East” by Thomas Grattan
May 29th, 2021 | by Daniel Brown | published in May 2021
A new novel by Thomas Grattan, “The Recent East”, is surprisingly powerful, a fascinating look at a family, starting in East Germany and ending up in the newly unified Germany (the book takes the reader from the ’60s to the ’90s), but in the same small town. This multigenerational novel begins in the small town; […]
