Kenya Barris’s Black-ish, a Wednesday-night sitcom on regular old ABC television, is simultaneously zeitgeist-y genuine, frantically people-pleasing, and deliciously aware of its own precarious situation:  a high-energy comic take on the foibles and follies of a loving upper-middle-class African American family living in the lap of Southern California luxury.  That luxury and status are constantly […]

One of those shows that hits you over the head in a good way, “The Other Window” features lush, rainbow-bright paintings both stationed on walls and on pedestals and the floor.  It’s a funhouse sort of gig, but beautifully, self-consciously serious too. Emil Robinson has taken care of the wall portion with handsome, studious but […]

Robert Mapplethorpe was an aesthete’s aesthete, trying with each photograph he took to capture a kind of formal blissfulness that shreds philosophy, politics, conjecture, and any other form of bull-shit standing in the way of that “perfect moment” when what you see is exactly and horrifyingly and gleefully what you get, devoid of values, faith, […]

In the 41 tempera vignettes that make up “Heroism in Paint:  a Master Series by Jacob Lawrence” (currently on display at the Taft Museum of Art through January 17, 2016), Jacob Lawrence dramatizes the life of Toussaint Louverture, revered as the founding father of Haiti who led Haitians in their fight against slavery in the […]

Stationed inside the Cincinnati Public Library’s downtown branch, in the International Fiction alcove, is an archipelago of funky institutional wooden tables topped with glass rectangular boxes.  Inside the glass boxes are 55 illustrations by three artists depicting the cities Italo Calvino poetically maps in Invisible Cities, the shapely novel/epic-poem/dialogue that has an effortlessly epic quality […]

The current exhibit of Titus Kaphar’s works at the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, titled “The Vesper Project,” surveys history, heredity, race, architecture, and just plain old visual art, intermingling parody, autobiography, destruction, and reinvention into a chiaroscuro carnival of unearthly but somehow palpably earthbound delights.  All of Kaphar’s brilliant artistic/literary amalgamations and tricks manage to […]

Andy Warhol didn’t know who Pete Rose was, and Rose didn’t know who Warhol was.  They never met.  Warhol chose the photo on which he based his now Cincinnati-famous screen-print from a selection of newspaper shots sent to him, because Rose couldn’t (or maybe wouldn’t) make it to New York City to pose for a […]

Lindsey Henderson makes oddly familiar and familiarly odd puppet-like things that seem to bleed in and out of reality, like double visions flickering back into three dimensions.  “Things” might be a pejorative term, but that’s what they are:  beautifully off-kilter sculptures that sag and giggle and burp without making a sound.  The way the curator […]

Sometimes walking into and wandering through a museum, not really knowing what’s on view or really why you’re there other than it’s a museum, is one of the most pleasurable experiences that can happen to you – serendipity fashioned out of boredom, merging with a magic feeling, like getting lost and then finding out you […]

“Contemporary Narrative” is up through January 10, 2014 at the Clifton Cultural Arts Center, and it’s worth a look just to wander through the big space and appreciate some easy-on-the-eye drawings, paintings, ceramics, and other pieces that really don’t seem to narrate a contemporary story as much as convey whimsical little vignettes across a rainbow […]

When I think about Andy Warhol, I don’t just think about Liz Taylor.  I often remember his series of car-crash and electric-chair screen-prints (plus those ones of the people jumping to their deaths off of skyscrapers) just as much as his over-the-top prints that both parody and enthrone superstars like Liz, Farrah Fawcett, Elvis, and […]

“Envelope,” the show currently up at the Visionaries + Voices (V+V) Gallery in Northside (through November 14, 2014), is a beautiful display of twittering, delicate art from all over the world created solely for the purpose of being mailed back and forth. That simple “back and forth” premise somehow allows the drawings and doodles and […]

The painting at the center of “Conversations around American Gothic,” the new exhibit at Cincinnati Art Museum (up through November 16, 2014), is a classic, yet has a whispered, cautious meanness that allows it to be both poetically absurd and ironically iconic.  There’s a Norman-Rockwell plasticity that is about to melt here; a force inside […]

Almost 25 years ago, Bill Ross and I had our first two-person art show in Indianapolis, Indiana at 431 Gallery.  We were both 24 years old.  The title was “The Fifteen Dollar Museum” and was a manifesto of sorts, an accidental action plan for the rest of our lives.  431 Gallery was a cooperative, artist-run, […]

by Keith Banner Posh, intelligent and no-nonsense, “Cries in the Night:  German Expressionist Prints around World War 1” (June 21, 2014 to August 17, 2014 at the Cincinnati Art Museum) is both a scholarly tour de force and a pleasure just to look at.  Curated simply with blocks of necessary wall texts contextualizing and expanding […]

by Keith Banner A few months back I went to see the Mike Kelley retrospective at the New York City Museum of Modern Art PS 1 space, and I was floored.  More than floored actually – more like cosmically overwhelmed.   The show was exhaustive and high-style and punk and stupid and hyper-intelligent and mean-spirited and […]

by Keith Banner The exhibit currently haunting Semantics Gallery in Brighton is called “The Moon Show,” and it has the stylish quiet and unnerving grace of a palace right after a coup, or a vast suburban mall that’s just about kaput.  The whole thing is about a lot of stuff (fiction vs. nonfiction, art vs. […]

by Keith Banner The basement space at the Weston Art Gallery has always felt claustrophobic and a little spooky to me, like a staged scene in a really serious movie about abduction, no matter what art goes on the walls.  It’s the ceiling that does it, kind of looming over the whole area like a […]

by Keith Banner In 1964, Susan Sontag wrote an essay called “Notes on ‘Camp’” that still wraps and winds its tentacles throughout culture today.  Basically a survey of “Camp’s” meanings, practices and perversions, the essay reads like a Bible for drag, piss-elegance and artful political incorrectness used to both disembowel and deconstruct the mainstream.  When […]

by Keith Banner Hollis Hammonds has close encounters of the terrestrial kind in her new show at DAAP Galleries called “Worthless Matter.”  A stockpile and survey of her recent work, the show displays Hammonds’ skills at drawing and lets us in on a consciousness that is both vividly sedate to the point of entrancement, and […]

by Keith Banner Diane Landry’s “by every wind that blows” at the Contemporary Arts Center downtown (up through March 2, 2014) is revelatory and mundane at the same time, a beautiful mix of thought and action that shimmers in your mind a long time after witnessing it. Landry uses banal objects like empty water-bottles, plastic […]

Clear as a Bell: Peter Halley at Solway Gallery    By Keith Banner   Sometimes I walk in the dead mall near where I live when I want to clear my head. Tranquility emanates from all the shut-down luxury, the rubbed-off logos above vast empty storefronts, the black-garbage-bagged entrances surrounded in high-gloss marble and hard-wood. […]

Radical without a Cause:  “Matisse:  A Life in Color”  at the Indianapolis Museum of Art By Keith Banner A docent was giving a tour of “Matisse:  A Life in Color” at the Indianapolis Museum of Art when I was strolling through.  I overheard her say, “Matisse didn’t have any social causes in his work.  He […]

You Know What I Mean: Joey Versoza and JR at the Contemporary Arts Center By Keith Banner Joey Versoza’s “Is This It,” at the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) through February 2, 2014, offers continual clues to a mystery that’s disintegrating while you stand inside its contexts and riddles. Versoza uses video, found objects, photography, […]

The Fetish Line: “Andy Warhol: Athletes” and “The Art of Sport” at the Dayton Art Institute By Keith Banner “He’s SO beautiful,” Andy Warhol swoons in quoted text next to his Day-Glo portrait of O.J. Simpson in “Andy Warhol: Athletes,” a show of commissioned pieces Warhol did in 1977 installed on aqua walls at the […]

Stone-Cold Ineffable: Ai Weiwei’s “According to What?” By Keith Banner Ai Weiwei’s “According to What?” (currently at the Indianapolis Museum of Art through July 17, 2013) is pure perfection. An Apple-Store consumerist clarity defines and propels the whole enterprise, a clean, polished fetishism that somehow becomes spiritual in its carefulness. Weiwei is obviously a purist, […]

Super Cooper: Art without Words By Keith Banner In a New York Magazine article about the recent opening of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute’s exhibit “Punk: Chaos to Couture,” Nitsuh Abebe writes: “In music, punk remains what the critic Frank Kogan calls a ‘Superword,’ a term whose main purpose is for people to […]

Double Meaning:  “African American Art since 1950: Perspectives from the David C. Driskell Center” at the Taft Museum of Art by Keith Banner The Taft Museum of Art’s “African American Art since 1950: Perspectives from the David C. Driskell Center,” running from February 15 through April 28, 2013, tries very hard to live up to […]

Where Do Broken Hearts Go?  The Periphery Gets Centralized in Enlightened ~Keith Banner   In the freakishly astute situation comedy Enlightened (Sunday nights at 9:30 pm on HBO), tall and stately Laura Dern plays Amy Jellicoe, a great big loser beyond compare.  Amy’s whole life has gone into a black hole she seems hell-bent on […]

Keith Banner Welcome to the Hotel Synesthesia:  21C, Downtown Cincinnati By Keith Banner “If you don’t know where you are going any road can take you there.” ― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland   The day after 21C Cincinnati, the lush hotel/museum right next door to the Contemporary Art Center, opened, I went for a visit.  […]

Toy Stories:  “Altered States” at Miller Gallery By Keith Banner The paintings in “Altered States:  New Paintings by Rob Jefferson and Jonathan Queen” (currently up on the walls at Miller Gallery in Hyde Park through November 23, 2012) are beautifully executed works that exemplify eerie perfection.  The show is one of the best I’ve seen […]

Glamorama: Herb Ritts at the Cincinnati Art Museum, and Edward Steichen at the Taft Museum of Art by Keith Banner Herb Ritts’ show “L. A. Style” at the Cincinnati Art Museum (up through December 30, 2012) has an etched-in-stone, funereal quality fused with a kinky soullessness. Ritts is one of those seminal photographers of an […]

Superheroes get on my nerves.  Enough already.  In our fan-boy, Big-Baby-Man culture, where Batman and Spiderman are given as much significance and gravitas as King Lear and Hamlet, action figures have become prized status symbols, cialis online pharmacy and Comic-Con has become the main place to measure pop-culture significance, it’s easy to see why. But […]

  By: Keith Banner “Henry Ossawa Tanner: Modern Spirit,” currently on view through September 9, 2012 at the Cincinnati Art Museum, invokes the hush and grandeur of a nighttime cathedral with dark-toned walls and Midnight in Paris lighting, as if to set the stage for an upscale art-history coronation. Many of the paintings themselves give […]

By: Keith Banner In “Funny Mirrors,” a three-person show at AEC Gallery in Covington, Kentucky, Billy Simms drains a clown’s life of all color and joy, creating a wall-novel out of wood-block relief prints that is both astoundingly sad and gleefully sinister.  The way his bit of the show is hung, along a hallway at […]

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 […]