Keith Banner
Keith Banner, a social-worker for people with disabilities and a writer, lives in Cincinnati, Ohio. He teaches creative writing part-time at Miami University and has published two works of fiction, The Life I Lead, a novel, and The Smallest People Alive, a book of short stories. He has published numerous short stories and essays in magazines and journals, including American Folk Art Messenger, Other Voices, Washington Square, Kenyon Review, and Third Coast. He received an O. Henry prize for his short story, "The Smallest People Alive," and an Ohio Arts Council individual artist fellowship for fiction. The Smallest People Alive was named one of the best books of the year by Publisher's Weekly. Daniel Handler, in the Village Voice, writes about The Life I Lead: "In a time when so much new fiction is showy, or paltry, Banner reads like the real thing." Concerning The Smallest People Alive, Mary Brennon in the Seattle Times writes, "The wrenching title story is perhaps the best of the collection. Filled with small, indelible details, it manages, against all odds, to convey a powerful, redemptive sweetness. Banner is a writer to watch." He is also the cofounder of Visionaries & Voices, and Thunder-Sky, Inc., two non-profit arts organizations.
With his new bronze sculpture, “Pinocchio (Emotional),” a scary-monster/sweetie-pie welcoming people outside the Cincinnati Art Museum, Jim Dine conjures a lot of pop-culture ghosts and nightmares while also paying homage to the original 1883 children’s novel, The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi. The statue is imposing, and the glazed patina of it harkens back to Rodin. High [...]
The mystery in Jennifer Purdum’s paintings and drawings is flagrantly upfront, like a joke with a disturbing punch-line that really has nothing to do with the joke outside of being connected to it. In many of the pictures in “Inside/Out: Drawings and Paintings by Jennifer Purdum” now on display at the Clifton Cultural Arts Center [...]
Romantic and cinematic, the prints and collages in the retrospective “Impressions and Improvisations: The Prints of Romare Bearden,” (on display at the Taft Museum of Art through April 29, 2012) have a home-brewed flair matched with an aesthete’s precision. In each piece, Bearden seems to devote all his time and attention to grasping at the [...]
A stratified structure of litter (constructed of packaging that once housed Cheez-Its, cans of Bud Light and Diet Coke, and Pop-Secret microwavable bags of popcorn) rests precariously atop an old-school reel-to-reel tape recorder in Keith Benjamin’s “the weight,” a sculpture that teeters toward absurdity while evoking the loneliness and exactitude of a hoarder’s consciousness. Nothing [...]
Edward Said’s “Orientalism” as a concept and a way of seeing is one of those Western-World-shattering moments in academics (and beyond) in which European literature, philosophy, politics, culture, and art are re-imagined and re-positioned all at the same time as a vast and beautiful conspiracy of dunces: imperialism in the guise of books and paintings [...]
The wall text for Julião Sarmento’s exhibit (closing January 22, 2012) at the Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art promises an exhibit built on “the concept of the book as an aesthetic and visceral object.” It goes on to report that many of Sarmento’s drawings exemplify the “sensuous gesture of holding a book.” [...]
Like doodles scribbled on the edges of homework, Peter Saul’s exquisitely moronic pictures (on display mostly in lithographic form at Carl Solway Gallery through December 22, 2011) have a rote yet somehow ominous quality, a blurry merger of the popular and profane. While seeming to be birthed from boredom and cynicism like punk rock, they [...]
Rondle West’s Pop-Rococo universe is something to behold. He is a maximalist working with miniatures, creating visual flourishes and earth-bound chandeliers out of thrift-store cast-offs, knick-knacks, dolls, action-figures, and whatever else lands in his aesthetic ballroom/landfill. He does not seem to know when to stop and yet each of his sculptures feel perfectly edited and [...]
“Not Just Pretty Pictures: The Carl M. Jacobs III Collection” at the Cincinnati Art Museum “I am at war with the obvious,” Photographer William Eggleston once said when asked about his work. I have a feeling Carl M. Jacobs III, the collector the exhibit [...]
“Body of Art,” the exhibit currently at Prairie Gallery (on display through August 20, 2011), is a group show in which the weirdness and greatness of the individual works often outshine the reason they were pulled together in the first place. The show is a grab-bag of video, photography, sculpture, painting and drawing, and while [...]
“All things resist being written down,” Franz Kafka writes in an October 13, 1913 diary entry. Joey Versoza’s 2011artworks survey that resistance – objects refusing to go along with meaning, and meaning finding its way out of the experience of seeing. It’s hermeneutics [...]
Jeff Casto’s “Future Tense” at 1305 Gallery Jeff Casto’s shadowboxes and assemblages in “Future Tense,” his current exhibit at 1305 Gallery ending July 15, 2011, conjure Joseph Cornell’s Utopia Parkway workshop, as well as Pee Wee Herman’s Playhouse, extracting wistfulness from detritus, seriousness from folly. The toys, junk and other materials used in Casto’s art [...]
Outside of “Outsiderness” Thornton Dial, Courttney Cooper, and other “Hard Truths” In an essay in the catalog for “Hard Truths,” Thornton Dial’s brilliant retrospective at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (up until September 15, 2011), Greg Tate takes on the “hard truths” involved [...]
Out Of Kitsch and Into Dream: “The Amazing American Circus Poster: the Strobridge Lithographing Company” allows art to encompass life in a way that transforms both. The show, beautifully and meticulously curated and installed, has an epic quality, as if the curator were pulling together props and sentiments for a big-budget fever-dream/movie showcasing tropes from [...]
Weebles Wobble and Boy Do They Fall Down “Tony Dotson: Shock and Awe” (up through April 9, 2011 at PAC Gallery in Walnut Hills) pushes Dotson’s smart-alecky yet innocently streamlined aesthetic into newer and fiercer territories. The show comes off like Philip Guston took all of his gritty/funky oeuvre through a car-wash and arranged each [...]
