Greetings in 2022! A new beginning on many fronts.This month, Aeqai is offering several excellent reviews of regional shows for our readership to consider. The fierce poster design of Luba Lukova: Designing Justice, featured at the Freedom Center Skirball Gallery, is evaluated by William Messer. Internationally lauded, Lukova’s iconic images are in the forefront of […]
Archive for January, 2022
Articulating Ideas: the Poster Art of Luba Lukova (Luba Lukova: Designing Justice at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, Cincinnati, to March 22, 2022)
January 31st, 2022 | by William Messer | published in *, January 2022
The history of poster art and/or the “art poster” is surprisingly short, beginning with French lithographers in the 1880s, often produced by artists trained as painters, yet created for commercial ends: advertising a product, place, service or event. From this point of view, not much has changed. But posters have also been used to express […]
Invitations to Emergence: “The Regional” at Contemporary Arts Center, December 10, 2021-March 20, 2022
January 31st, 2022 | by Jonathan Kamholtz | published in *, January 2022
I would say that in my experience, The Contemporary Arts Center has not been the sort of museum much interested in exploring the tastes and talents of Cincinnati, let alone the Midwest at large. To do that might require, for example, regular curated exhibits of the artists of the region, and they haven’t done that. […]
More Than a Starry Night: ‘Through Vincent’s Eyes: Van Gogh and His Sources’ Columbus Museum of Art, November 2021
January 31st, 2022 | by Cynthia Kukla | published in *, January 2022
Seeing ‘Through Vincent’s Eyes: Van Gogh and His Sources’ that opened in November 2021 at Columbus Museum of Art is stunning for its insights into Van Gogh’s world, literally. At a time when this beloved artist has been Disneyfied by the blockbuster Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience which is a 20,000 square foot light and […]
But the Box has 6
January 31st, 2022 | by Cole Carothers | published in *, January 2022
Manifest Gallery’s current exhibition The Five Themes Project is an expansive undertaking; not unlike re-inventing the Whole Earth Catalog. This time, however, it’s not about self-sufficiency and ecology but perceptions about the world and mankind’s relationship with it. The five themes – Wilderness→ Rural→ Suburban→ Urban→ Post-Urban – are installed as a somewhat chronological survey […]
Lyrics in Vases
January 31st, 2022 | by Ekin Erkan | published in *, January 2022
Kwan Jin Oh’s “Emptying and Filling”, on view at Kate Oh Gallery from January 1 – 30, 2022, teeters on intermedia, balancing formal prowess with poetic lyricism. This is evident in how Jin Oh’s paintings, each of which display ceramic moon jars, cleverly play with dimensionality and photorealism, albeit without allowing for any one facet to overdetermine […]
Ralston Crawford: Air + Space + War
January 31st, 2022 | by Marlene Steele | published in January 2022
The aero-dynamic legacy of Dayton, Ohio is the backdrop of the current exhibition at the Dayton Art Institute documenting the career and art of artist/illustrator Ralston Crawford, Entitled Air + Space + War, the exhibition divides this documentation into three areas of focus: Crawford’s photography and aviation background, the development of visual spacial language and […]
“Caution Kneeling Bus”: Rachel Harrison’s Artistic Remediation
January 31st, 2022 | by Josh Beckelhimer | published in January 2022
The night before I went to Regen Projects in Hollywood to see Rachel Harrison’s Caution Kneeling Bus, a friend and I watched John McTiernan’s 1987 film Predator. In that extravagant action film, Arnold Schwarzenegger and a band of gnarled soldiers face off against a veiled alien figure in a Central American jungle while attempting to complete a Heart of […]
December Issue of Aeqai Online
January 2nd, 2022 | by Marlene Steele | published in Announcements
With this last publication of 2021, we offer several excellent reviews for our readership to consider. Erkin gives us Around the Circle: Kandinsky at the Guggenheim. Explore this master of the abstract The Cincinnati Art Museum reopens the completely renovated Near Eastern Gallery with a fresh vision of their collection as reviewed by Cynthia Kukla […]
Vasily Kandinsky: Around the Circle
January 2nd, 2022 | by Ekin Erkan | published in *, December 2021
Abstractionism—think Kandinsky—denied representation altogether, but assumed all the conventions of pictorial space, hence the nonrepresentational use of color, line, form, and so on. J.M. Bernstein, “Freedom From Nature” in Hegel and the Arts, ed. Stephen Houlgate (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 220. Approaching it in one way I see no essential difference between a line […]
Twenty-first Century Museum Interprets Ancient Middle Eastern Art.
January 2nd, 2022 | by Cynthia Kukla | published in *, December 2021
Visitors to the Cincinnati Art Museum may have noticed that the first gallery on the right past the entrance – the Middle East Gallery – has been closed about a year. In a marvelous four-year research project, the museum made significant physical and curatorial changes to the museum’s existing 2,800-square-foot ancient Middle East that reopened […]
Can’t Buy Me Love: “Simply Brilliant: Artist-Jewelers of the 1960s and 1970s” at Cincinnati Art Museum, October 22, 2021-February 6, 2022
January 2nd, 2022 | by Jonathan Kamholtz | published in *, December 2021
I can’t think of the last art show I saw where I wanted to write, off the top, about its sound track. In the course of two visits to “Simply Brilliant,” the Cincinnati Art Museum’s stunning two-room exhibit of some 120 pieces of extremely fine jewelry from the master designers of the 1960s and 1970s—all […]
Concord and Discord: Examining Ancient Stories
January 2nd, 2022 | by Gary Gaffney | published in *, December 2021
“Concord and Discord: Examining Ancient Stories” is a two person show of the work of area artists, Mary Anne Donovan and Cynthia Kukla. In many ways, though, it is a single show as well. Themes, palettes, strategies, motifs and formal approaches bounce back and forth between the work of both artists. Each artist invites the […]
Drawing Every Day
January 2nd, 2022 | by Frank Herrmann | published in *, December 2021
In 1970, I started my first year in the MFA program at the University of Cincinnati. The MFA studios were at that time in old houses behind St George Church on Scioto and Classen Streets. While moving into my studio, I noticed a man in gray coveralls working on his 1950 Chevy pickup. I first […]
ArtsWave: the Engine for Arts in Greater Cincinnati
January 2nd, 2022 | by Laura Hobson | published in December 2021
You don’t have to go to New York or Chicago to see first-rate productions. They are right here. ArtsWave plays a crucial role in support of arts in Greater Cincinnati helping it succeed as a region. It is the first and largest united arts fund in the county. The arts bring us joy, an escape […]
“Tiki Man” by Thom Atkinson
January 2nd, 2022 | by Robin Winter | published in December 2021
The night I met Thom Atkinson, he read a story aloud at a writers conference. The first page of his work had me laughing so hard I cried, inelegantly, yes, even snottily. Seven pages later, the story moved with inevitable conviction to a point so terrible, so humanly tragic it became too wrenching for tears. […]
