Aeqai is back with our December issue. We’ve taken this opportunity to give you more profiles this month, as so many galleries and nonprofits are showing their holiday wares/exhibitions/displays, though we also offer some key reviews. We hope that you’ve had or will take the chance to see the new neon installation by area artist Tony Lunesman on the outside of The Cincinnati Art Museum building, near where The Art Academy entrance used to be: it’s whimsy and evocative, and aeqai has a video that our writer/videographer Regan Brown made of Tony describing the work and its contexts; Brown has also written a splendid, brilliant analysis of mediums like neon, emerging full force into the art world and general culture, inspired by his thoughts about Lunesman’s sculpture. Other reviews this month come from Keith Banner, who looks with grace and quietude at a group show at Clifton Cultural Arts Center. Sue Ann Painter gives us a fine overview of all three exhibitions now on display at The Weston Gallery at The Aronoff Center, now about to celebrate its 20th anniversary.
Because of that anniversary, Mike Rutledge offers an insightful and thorough profile of Weston Gallery Director Dennis Harrington. Other profiles this month include one on sculptor Felix Eboigbe by Laura Hobson, and a long , astute profile/interview with Art Museum Associate Curator Brian Sholis. That profile also wraps around Sholis’ views on photography, which are also sensitive and fresh and rewarding to read. Saad Ghosn’s monthly column Art and social change looks at visual artist Halena Cline and literary artist Bucky Ignatius this month. Louis Zoellar Bickett’s series of photographs called “Fourth of July” portray all kinds of different people in Lexington, Ky. over a period of many months, and represents aeqai’s look at American people at the end of 2014.
Kevin Ott returns with an overview of sets of prints on display from Clay Street Press at The Carnegie, four sets, representing decades of work in and for this community of artists and their friends. Part of this show has also been on display at UC/DAAP Gallery. I offer my own lengthy essay on Bukang Kim’s painting exhibition at the Cincinnati Art Museum; it was commissioned by Kim and appears with her permission. That essay will become a catalogue for her museum show, which opened in mid-December and runs through April. Christine Huskisson, our Lexington correspondent/critic, sends us a series of columns mainly from her own digital online journal, UnderMain, about the origins and directions that public art and mural art are going in Lexington. Next month, we’ll hear from ArtWorks Executive Director Tamara Harkavy about new plans for similar work in and around Greater Cincinnati.
Sue Ann Painter traveled to Miami for the famous art fair there, and she offers highly important observations particularly about the architecture scene down there in both Miami and Miami Beach; Miami is being transformed architecturally, and those changes wrap right around the Miami Basel Art Fair (as she proposes that our FotoFocus may wrap around Cincinnati’s downtown/OTR architectural renovations and additions. Jane Durrell offers a priorly printed piece on a vacation she took with children and grandchildren some years back in a Palladian villa in Italy: it’s a great read both about architecture and family life during a holiday vacation.
Maxwell Redder has returned from honeymoon and world travels and presents four new poems, based upon these travels; aeqai is pleased to welcome him back. Last month, aeqai posted a guest column by Princeton, New Jersey writer Huck Fairman, and this month we offer some of his poems, as well as my own review of his newest novel, Athena. And my annual “best fiction of the year” list appears in this issue; this list was begun in the year 2000 ; I offer my choice of the best twelve works of fiction and a list of also recommended others; many were priorly reviewed in aeqai as well, in longer versions.
Aeqai is also very proud and pleased to announce that our online journal is a recipient of a generous grant from The Haile Foundation, whose logo you will see on our site. We’ll be back in around a month; in the meantime, please send us your comments and thoughts, which we always welcome.
Daniel Brown
Editor, AEQAI (www.aeqai.com)
