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Articulating Ideas: the Poster Art of Luba Lukova (Luba Lukova: Designing Justice at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, Cincinnati, to March 22, 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 […]

Read | Comments Off on Articulating Ideas: the Poster Art of Luba Lukova (Luba Lukova: Designing Justice at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, Cincinnati, to March 22, 2022) | Tags: * · January 2022

Two Photographers: A Personal Appreciation Part One

In the autumn of 2019, two giants of American photographic arts died, a mere seven days apart from each other. They were close friends and neighbors in the New York of the ‘50s, at one time even working together on the same project (a film). Both were Jewish, and deeply humanistic, and both had children […]

Read | Comments Off on Two Photographers: A Personal Appreciation Part One | Tags: January/February 2020

Two Photographers: A Personal Appreciation Part Two

New York City in the 1950s and early ’60s was alive with art and music. The Abstract Expressionists were painting, the Beats were writing and reading poetry, performance art was taking off, jazz was everywhere and what would be called folk music was also being heard. Robert Frank was in his ‘30s making photographs, then […]

Read | Comments Off on Two Photographers: A Personal Appreciation Part Two | Tags: January/February 2020

Two Photographers: A Personal Appreciation

Part One In the autumn of 2019, two giants of American photographic arts died, a mere seven days apart from each other. They were close friends and neighbors in the New York of the ‘50s, at one time even working together on the same project (a film). Both were Jewish, and deeply humanistic, and both […]

Read | Comments Off on Two Photographers: A Personal Appreciation | Tags: December 2019

Étranger Résident: La Collection Marin Karmitz (Resident Alien: the Marin Karmitz Collection), La maison rouge, Paris, October 15, 2017 – January 21, 2018

Bittersweet is a term often used to describe simultaneous positive and negative feelings. What I felt recently upon leaving the exhibition Étranger Résident: La Collection Marin Karmitz at Paris’ La mason rouge requires a stronger term, something connoting being both energized and enervated, for quite different reasons. Since it opened ten years ago La mason rouge [lower […]

Read | Comments Off on Étranger Résident: La Collection Marin Karmitz (Resident Alien: the Marin Karmitz Collection), La maison rouge, Paris, October 15, 2017 – January 21, 2018 | Tags: * · December 2017

American Photography’s Lurch Toward the Conceptual

Two of the three FotoFocus 2016 exhibitions offered at the Art Academy of Cincinnati were curated by former AAC photography instructor, Will Knipscher. These included the historical body of work Evidence, created by Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan in the 1970s, plus two bodies of new work by Mandel with his new collaborator, wife Chantal Zakari, […]

Read | Comments Off on American Photography’s Lurch Toward the Conceptual | Tags: * · October/November 2016

Photo Road Trippin’

Recently I took a road trip from the Queen City to the Motor City to see The Open Road: Photography and the American Road Trip at the Detroit Institute of Arts. On the way back I stopped at the Toledo Museum of Art to catch The American West: Photographs of a New Frontier. Appropriately, The Open Road is a traveling […]

Read | Comments Off on Photo Road Trippin’ | Tags: Summer 2016