June 27th, 2020 | by Ekin Erkan | published in *, June 2020
Recently, given the fomenting protests following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery (amongst countless others), much discussion has erupted amongst contemporary artist-activists about the proper place for art and the aestheticization of politics. This is, of course, by no means a novel conversation. Historically, the aestheticization of politics has been disparaged […]
June 27th, 2020 | by Jonathan Kamholtz | published in *, June 2020
James VanDerZee (1886-1983) produced somewhere between 75,000 and 100,000 photographs in his creative lifetime, maybe even more, almost all of them of African Americans who lived in or were passing through Harlem. He had a fraught relationship to street photography and worked predominantly out of his studio. At the height of his career in the […]
June 27th, 2020 | by Cynthia Kukla | published in *, June 2020
What to write about Mark Bradford? His ascent into the art world seems to border on the magical. His story makes for a perfect Hollywood movie if Hollywood was inclined to turn its lens to artists more often, which it does not. Mark Bradford is African-American, born and raised in South Los Angeles, in the same […]
June 27th, 2020 | by Susan Byrnes | published in *, June 2020
Can’t you see it Can’t you feel it It’s all in the air I can’t stand the pressure much longer Somebody say a prayer Alabama’s gotten me so upset Tennessee made me lose my rest And everybody knows about Mississippi goddam -Nina Simone In 1963, Nina Simone wrote this song in protest of the atrocities […]
June 27th, 2020 | by Steve Kemple | published in *, June 2020
![Kahlil Robert Irving “Ground Water From Screen Falls [(Collaged Media + Midwest STREET)]” at the Contemporary Arts Center](http://aeqai.com/main/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/DSC8949-1-150x150.jpg)
Engaging with Kahlil Robert Irvings’s installation requires action. Its scale requires moving one’s body, viewing it first from afar and then up close. From a distance, such as viewed from outside standing on 6th street, it’s a frenetic tableau of screenshots. There are memes and browser tabs, overlapping digital prints filling the lobby’s central wall. […]
May 23rd, 2020 | by Cynthia Kukla | published in *, May 2020
This first image shows Hildegarde receiving Divine Inspiration and sharing it with the monk Volmar. She was famous throughout central Europe in the late Middle Ages, advisor to kings; venerable abbess, composer and musician, artist and mystic. She is called the ‘Sibyl of the Rhine.’ Hildegard of Bingen was as Sir Roger Penrose is to […]
May 23rd, 2020 | by Annabel Osberg | published in *, May 2020
Mother Superior and her creepy bearded henchman have come to retrieve the septet of uniformed captives from their human beehive. It is time for the girls to go to work. As always, mysterious hypnotic forces compel them to mount their bicycles, starry-eyed, and follow their captors towards the tower. The tails of their habits become […]
May 23rd, 2020 | by Susan Byrnes | published in *, May 2020
During this time of the pandemic, in addition to reading, what I have been doing a lot of is walking. Every day, sometimes going two or even three times, just for the purpose of getting out of the house, getting some space to think or reflect. A change of scenery at a slow pace. An […]
May 23rd, 2020 | by Jonathan Kamholtz | published in *, May 2020
A few years ago, way back when art could still be encountered in person, Emily Bauman, Photography Curatorial Assistant at the CAM, wrote an online note about the experience of being able to handle and see up close a cyanotype by Anna Atkins, the figure who is generally credited with being the first woman photographer […]
May 23rd, 2020 | by Laura Hobson | published in *, May 2020
What goes into acquiring art institutionally? Aeqai takes a look at the Cincinnati Art Museum and the Skirball Museum at Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion. Cynthia Amneus, curator, fashion arts and textiles at CAM, is an expert in acquisitions which can be gifts or purchases. Sometimes, a curator will receive a call […]
April 25th, 2020 | by Jonathan Kamholtz | published in *
The High Renaissance portrait sought to depict dignity—the sense of worthiness that was, typically, an even more valuable quality in a portrait than likeness—in repose. The great 16th century portraits tried to capture what was least changing about their subjects. Though the period knew, of course, that human beings were subject to time, they assumed […]
April 25th, 2020 | by Cynthia Kukla | published in *
Damn. I should take drugs when I paint. Look at French painter Gustav Moreau. He must have taken something to make these mind-bending paintings in the 1800’s. I know contemporary painter Peter Doig takes drugs because he admitted so, figures; his paintings are breathtakingly hypnotic, mystical, irrationally emotional and compelling. But Moreau? He’s dead. We […]
April 25th, 2020 | by Annabel Osberg | published in *
During this time of quarantine, it’s enjoyable to get lost in The Kitchen Garden on the Eyot (1946) by Leonora Carrington (1917-2011). Delicately limned in egg tempera on a small panel, the scene is easy to enter online, and its cryptic serenity casts a rosy glow over one’s feelings of confinement. A sense of mystery […]
April 25th, 2020 | by Steve Kemple | published in *, April 2020
“These capricious vagabonds fly somewhat in the manner of bats,” Camille Flammarion wrote in 1872[1], “which seem to dive at the turrets, and suddenly turn back, describing a parabola, to vanish in an unexpected direction.” Although the French astronomer was describing the movement of comets through the cosmos, he may as well have been describing […]
April 25th, 2020 | by Megan Bickel | published in *, April 2020
There are / were a lot of holidays effected by COVID-19 measures this spring; Ramadan, Passover, and Easter to name the heavyweights. For me what stood with a heavier weight than normal was Earth Day. Every year on April 22, we celebrate the beginning of what is now known as the official beginning of the […]
March 28th, 2020 | by Cynthia Kukla | published in *
It is a major coup that the Cincinnati Art Museum is showcasing the work of the renowned African-American artist Romare Bearden who launched his career during the height of the early twentieth-century’s Harlem Renaissance in New York. The exhibition “Something Over Something Else”: Romare Bearden’s Profile Series gives Cincinnatians a visual treat this spring and […]
March 28th, 2020 | by Steve Kemple | published in *, March 2020
It was a drizzly Tuesday afternoon. With long sleeves balled around his hands, Matt Distel opened the front door of The Carnegie. The previous Friday would have been a big night for the Exhibitions Director, but along with art and cultural events across the country, the opening reception for four new shows was cancelled due […]
March 28th, 2020 | by Laura Hobson | published in *
From soup to nuts. Ever wonder how a piece of art makes it to the gallery floor? Here’s an inside look at the Cincinnati Arts Association’s Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery and the Cincinnati Art Museum and how that happens. Weston Art Gallery shows an eclectic mix of emerging and professional artists […]
March 28th, 2020 | by Marlene Steele | published in *, March 2020
A contemporary analysis of social stress is the subject of investigation of Perin Mahler’s colorful, large scale narrative figure paintings at the Manifest Gallery in Walnut Hills. On viewing this work serially, one cannot avoid becoming cognizant of the artist’s social perceptions as well as his personal introspections which inspire the narrative scenarios of these […]
March 28th, 2020 | by Jonathan Kamholtz | published in *
I was looking forward to reviewing the N. C. Wyeth show at the Taft, and was planning on seeing it on a Sunday with my wife. We’d see the show, have brunch, check out the gift shop. On Friday the 13th—I know, right?—I went online to check out the museum’s hours—is it that they open […]
February 15th, 2020 | by Jonathan Kamholtz | published in *
When I first came to Cincinnati, I was told that I-75 had been designed by someone who had heard of an interstate highway but never actually seen one. At times, it feels like it was little more than a good guess on the builders’ part. I-75 sprouts red barrels as empty fields sprout crabgrass, and […]
February 15th, 2020 | by Christopher Carter | published in *, January/February 2020
Revolutionary: Being American Today advances a poignant, collaborative statement about the contradictions of contemporary U.S. citizenship. At once historically dense and urgently contemporary, it draws together works by John Brooks, Kiah Celeste, Amanda Curreri, Stephanie Cuyubamba Kong, Brianna Harlan, Anissa Lewis, Melissa Vandenberg, and Renzo Velez. Curator Jessica Oberdick assembles those works in ways that […]
February 15th, 2020 | by Josh Beckelhimer | published in *, January/February 2020
On view through April 5th at the Weston is an exhibition by a Cincinnati native and current New York dweller, Todd Pavlisko. Pavlisko’s “Pop Supernatural,” is – as you might guess – guided by conversations with popular culture. The Weston’s two floors organize the exhibition. The entrance level floor holds a few different threads, while […]
February 15th, 2020 | by Laura Hobson | published in *
“The city has room for three different art centers,” said Elise Solomon, director of learning and engagement at the Taft Museum of Art. Shawnee Turner, Elizabeth Hardin-Klink and Emily Holtrop, her counterparts at the Contemporary Arts Center (CAM) and the Cincinnati Art Museum (CAM) respectively would agree. Often under the radar, they all actively develop […]
February 15th, 2020 | by Stewart Maxwell | published in *, January/February 2020
In the midst of Downtown Cincinnati, there is a much beloved architecturally and historically significant building celebrating its 200th birthday. With the exception of a few other early American and European Colonial and Native American structures on this continent, most have not survived and even fewer in this region of our country. Cincinnati was founded […]
December 28th, 2019 | by Jonathan Kamholtz | published in *
Sohrab Hura is a young Indian photographer (b. 1981) who in 2016 came to the cities, towns, and countryside that stretch along the Mississippi River from Cairo, Illinois, down to the Gulf of Mexico, looking to understand a section of the United States that was profoundly unfamiliar to him. Along the way, he wanted to […]
December 28th, 2019 | by Steve Kemple | published in *, December 2019
Changes of shape, new forms, are the theme which my spirit impels me now to recite. Inspire me, O gods, and spin me a thread from the world’s beginning… —Ovid, Prologue to Metamorphoses[1] In Joomi Chung’s Image Space/Memory Space, there are mountains and motorbikes, traffic cones and tree branches, satellites and skyscrapers, flocks of birds […]
December 28th, 2019 | by Will Newman | published in *, December 2019
The bohemian life and creative mission that drove Henry Lawrence Faulkner encompassed more than visual art, but it is perhaps his stylized and sometimes colorist work that most indelibly left an impression on the world. Extraordinarily prolific, Faulkner left behind more than 5,000 works. He was both a romantic and pragmatic, at times knowing that […]
December 28th, 2019 | by Marlene Steele | published in *, December 2019
The Dayton Art Institute continues its celebration of its Centennial year by highlighting the career of one of Dayton’s most successful 20th century artists: Ernest Blumenschein. This exhibition of 15 works examines his love of the spontaneous sketch, his stature as a fine oil painter and his remarkable contribution to his community in the American […]
December 28th, 2019 | by Daniel Brown | published in *, December 2019
2019 was an exceptionally fine year for new fiction. My list of the best fiction of this year was difficult to make, as so many excellent choices are available. In reading other such lists (“The New York Times Book Review”; “The New Yorker”, NPR, Amazon, amongst others), I noted that these lists have few novels […]
November 24th, 2019 | by Christopher Carter | published in *, November 2019
In Birgit Jensen’s Flugblätter (Flying Letters), nothing settles comfortably into place. The purportedly autonomous artist ruptures into the collective. The collective expands and contracts like a breathing organism, dismissing its own consistency with Whitmanesque abandon. The radically distributed artist takes transformation as its topic, working paradoxically to make temporal processes concrete, all while inhabiting the […]
November 24th, 2019 | by Karen Chambers | published in *
“Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness.” A single sentence from Anne Frank encapsulates Manifest Gallery’s “DARK: Shadows, Nightscapes, and Darkness” exhibition. From a pool of’ 359 works by 103 artists representing five countries, 30 states, and the District of Columbia, the blind jury selected 17 pieces by 15 […]
November 24th, 2019 | by Marlene Steele | published in *, November 2019
Leave your comfort zone and imagine trekking into the wilds of Wyoming with artists Chuck Marshall and Robert Hagberg. Descriptive plein air paintings, several of them executed in the wilds, are contemporary interpretations of Wyoming wilderness currently exhibited at Eisele Gallery. The concept that inspired the “Into the Wilderness” experience of Hagberg and Marshall, was […]
November 24th, 2019 | by Jonathan Kamholtz | published in *
This is a big show with a big story to tell, one that both celebrates and critically examines what it means to be Hispanic. The show focuses on, but is not limited to, European Spain, which it follows through many of its incarnations: an ancient civilization, a Roman outpost, a Christian outpost, a center of […]
November 24th, 2019 | by Steve Kemple | published in *, November 2019
“Yes, I understand these,” I might have said to myself on my first encounter with Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s photographs at Houston’s Blaffer Art Museum. In the Los Angeles photographer’s first major museum survey, arriving from the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis, fragments of figures bend and tangle against cool walls and in dark rooms. […]
October 26th, 2019 | by Jonathan Kamholtz | published in *
I grew up in New York, and so the Hudson River was the river of my childhood. As a child, I thought of it starting in New York City rather than ending there, and then it went, straight and broad, some 300 miles north into the mysterious territory those from the city called “upstate.” It […]
October 26th, 2019 | by Christopher Carter | published in *, October 2019
More than thirty years after Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center staged a mid-career celebration of Robert Colescott, the arts center has assembled the first survey of his life’s work. Art and Race Matters features 85 pieces produced over more than five decades, taking the viewer from his early studies at Berkeley to his sojourn at the […]
October 26th, 2019 | by Cynthia Kukla | published in *
In this the one-hundredth anniversary of the Women’s Suffragette Movement, the Cincinnati Art Museum joins numerous museums across America to focus on and celebrate women’s equality. But the Cincinnati contribution is oh-so-different. The curator, Ainsley M. Cameron, Curator of South Asian Art, Islamic Art & Antiquities at the Cincinnati Art Museum explained that all eight […]
October 26th, 2019 | by Susan Byrnes | published in *
In the exhibition “Dress Up, Speak Up: Regalia & Resistance”, 21C Chief Curator Alice Gray Stites assembles an impressive group of international artists whose work subverts, reinterprets, and reframes representations of cultural power, communal dignity, and personal agency through costume and its context. While regalia is a familiar term, indicating a formal outfit or ornament […]
October 26th, 2019 | by Karen Chambers | published in *
“They (Herman and Bessie Wessel) believed that recording the infinitely varied pageantry of the visible world with paint was an exceedingly and challenging pursuit; one that dwelled not on the ebb and flow of any fashionable modernist creed, but rather on the simple and timeless of joy of living.” 1 That is the beginning of […]
September 28th, 2019 | by Ekin Erkan | published in *, September 2019
In my home country, Turkey, the amorphous term “terrorist” has adopted folk-lore speculative projections: from a baklava magnate to journalist dissenters and high school teachers, from professors to artists, the unpredictability of being labeled a “terrorist” blankets all such dissenters who dare problematize the ruling AK Party/President Erdoğan. One such case is that of Oktay […]
September 28th, 2019 | by Ena Nearon | published in *, September 2019
Intersectionality, a deconstructionist critical theory that attempts to identify how different aspects of political and social discrimination overlap and impact marginalized members of our society, is a term that was coined by black feminist scholar, Kimberle’ Williams Crenshaw in 1989. It includes various forms of social stratification, such as class, race, sexual orientation, age, religion, […]
September 28th, 2019 | by Christopher Carter | published in *, September 2019
The Art of the Automaton at Caza Sikes Gallery in Oakley boasts an array of interactive machines designed by seven artists from across the United States. They have honed their craft as builders since childhood, traveling to such places as Bali, Tanzania, Nigeria, Senegal, and Peru to develop their technique. Works by Dewey Blocksma, Randall […]
September 28th, 2019 | by Jonathan Kamholtz | published in *
Some art work we are likely to do alone, as little outside assistance is required: street photography, for example, or sketching wildflowers in the woods, or singing in the shower. Other types require support systems of various sorts: a string quartet or bronze casting. Artists frequently pool their resources to draw nude models, though they […]
September 28th, 2019 | by Josh Beckelhimer | published in *, September 2019
Through October 10-13, the city will roll out the massive, citywide light-based art spectacle BLINK for the second time after a successful first go around in 2017. The outdoor festival, however, isn’t the only attraction that people should gravitate toward to view interesting light-based work. It’s perhaps appropriate that the smaller exhibition, “Emanate,” is featured […]
August 24th, 2019 | by Karen Chambers | published in *
As I whipped through “Kimono: Refashioning Contemporary Style” 1 at the Cincinnati Art Museum, several things struck me. First was the aptness of it title, which quite succinctly sums up its basic thesis that the kimono has inspired Western clothing design through its form and surface decoration beginning in the 1870s and continuing to the present. The […]
August 24th, 2019 | by C. Miles Turner | published in *, Summer 2019
Britni Bicknaver has had a very busy year. The Cincinnati native has exhibited new works in group shows at the Weston Art Gallery (Cincinnati, OH) and The Carnegie (Covington, KY) through the spring and summer of 2019, before opening her solo show Cinema of Memory at Reverb Art + Design (Cincinnati, OH) on August 7. […]
August 24th, 2019 | by Hannah Leow | published in *
Nestled in the niche neighborhood of Northside, Visionaries + Voices (V+V) is home to Kevin White, a contemporary and founding artist of the ability-forward hub. A solo-show of his work to date, Kevin White Retrospective catalogs the oeuvre of the prolific and present-day artist. Installations, paintings, and live-art comprise the show, as well as photographs […]
August 24th, 2019 | by Josh Beckelhimer | published in *, Summer 2019
Weightless by Christy Lee Rogers Through September 7 The Miller Gallery 2715 Erie Ave Cincinnati, OH 45208 “What lifts you up?” asks the prompt for Christy Lee Rogers photography exhibit Weightless, which appears at Cincinnati’s Miller Gallery. It’s a question that met my curiosity with an initial skepticism, as it’s a question that could’ve have […]
August 24th, 2019 | by Marlene Steele | published in *, Summer 2019
The moon, Earth’s singular satellite, has fascinated the earthbound human mind for thousands of years. The 50th anniversary of the successful 240,000 mile journey of American astronauts to the moon occurred in mid-July, 2019. Especially noted for the first steps on the lunar surface are native Ohioans Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. Their historic journey […]
June 30th, 2019 | by Christopher Carter | published in *, June/July 2019
Creatures: When Species Meet locates creative processes less in the imagination of singular artists than in the encounter between living things, their negotiation of each other’s habits and desires through media both traditional and emergent. As the show catalogs those processes, it disrupts humanist views of nonhuman animals, defending against their reduction to symbols within […]
June 30th, 2019 | by Jonathan Kamholtz | published in *
“Magnitude Seven” is neither the oldest nor the smallest show of small things in town, a distinction that probably goes to the Art Academy’s “Minumental” show every fall, which has run for over thirty years, and requires that each work be no larger than two inches in any direction. Jason Franz, Founding Executive Director and […]
June 30th, 2019 | by Karen Chambers | published in *
Sometimes it takes time for the aesthetic worth of something to be recognized. This most definitely was not the case with French advertising handbills AKA posters from its Golden Age, from 1880 to the late 1890s. They immediately attracted a passionate bunch of collectors, earning them the sobriquet affichomaniaques–poster maniacs. “L’ Affichomania: The Passion for French […]
June 30th, 2019 | by Ekin Erkan | published in *, June/July 2019
The Guggenheim’s spring retrospective of the seminal Swedish painter, Hilma Af Klint, has, naturally, evoked a multitude of art critics and visual culture scholars who laud her radical abstraction which, at the beginning of the 20th century, preceded Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian. Yet, where much attention has been given to the symbology and motifs riddling Klint’s […]
June 30th, 2019 | by Cynthia Kukla | published in *
“Egypt: The Time of the Pharaohs” Cincinnati Museum Center, 1301 Western Avenue Cincinnati, OH Through August 18, 2019 Step into a time when civilization grew along the Nile, pyramids dotted the skyline and people believed gods walked among us…… From the mythic Nile to the mighty Ohio, “Egypt: The Time of Pharaohs” made its U.S. […]
June 1st, 2019 | by Christopher Carter | published in *, May 2019
Stewart Goldman taught at the Art Academy of Cincinnati for over thirty years. An enduring presence in the Ohio art world, he has curated shows on printmaking and the visual aesthetics of opera, lectured on the long-term influence of the Renaissance, and headed up the Cincinnati Sculpture Council. He has frequently exhibited his work in […]
June 1st, 2019 | by Cynthia Kukla | published in *
Part One opened April 26; Part Two opens June 7 and continues through September 2. Tuesday–Sunday, 11 a.m.–5 p.m. Thursdays, 11 a.m.–8 p.m. “No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man” took over the Cincinnati Art Museum starting April 26 and it will continue until September 2, 2019. According to Marian Goodell the ultimate goal of […]
June 1st, 2019 | by Jonathan Kamholtz | published in *
Well, despite what the show’s title might suggest, it’s not a blockbuster Rembrandt show. As the exhibition catalogue delicately notes, “we cannot be sure Rembrandt ever visited Dordrecht,” one of the oldest cities in all of the Netherlands and the fifth largest in its province after Rotterdam, The Hague, and Leiden. The show definitely will […]
June 1st, 2019 | by Marlene Steele | published in *, May 2019
An interesting exhibit of the curated work of a number of artists is a good reason to drop into Holly Spraul’s Wash Park Art gallery this summer. Nicole Trimble is continuing her series on women (how can one forget “Judy Slays”, Trimble’s update on the biblical story of Judith and Holofernes). Trimble’s piece in this […]
June 1st, 2019 | by Jane Durrell | published in *, May 2019
“I do enjoy showing my work,” Nancy Nordloh Neville told me. “It’s my life on review. You remember how and where you were when you painted it. You remember if the rain came before you were finished, if you made friends with the neighbors’ dog, or if you forgot an important supply.” A plein air […]
April 30th, 2019 | by Annie Dell'Aria | published in *, April 2019
A shallow stage, dramatic floor to ceiling curtain of silver mylar, pink lights, and disco ball have recently transformed the ground floor of Weston Art Gallery. Alluding to the settings of over-the-top performances of artifice, this open space literally sets the stage for Rachel Rampleman’s labyrinthine exploration of drag subcultures, body builders, make-up artists, and […]
April 30th, 2019 | by Christopher Carter | published in *, April 2019
Visual artist Diana Duncan Holmes and poet Timothy Riordan sustained a creative partnership across three decades, reaching from the late twentieth into the early twenty-first century. In his many years of service to Xavier University, and hers to Northern Kentucky University, they produced a range of multimedia artifacts that disclose the poetry of images, the […]
April 30th, 2019 | by Susan Byrnes | published in *
“In a culture where derangement and disequilibrium are the constant and inescapable climate of a politics of bewilderment, the militant tactic is not intoxication and excess but to come to our senses and learn to live in the space they open up” –Thomas A. Clark, from “Imagination” I return again and again to this line […]
April 30th, 2019 | by Jonathan Kamholtz | published in *
Whatever you think of the outcome, the Dayton Art Institute’s exhibit of 100 paintings from the collection of the National Academy of Design has been curated multiple times and by multiple standards. Since its founding in 1826, current members of the National Academy (NA) have chosen the artists who will admitted each year to add […]
April 30th, 2019 | by Marlene Steele | published in *, April 2019
The best public park views in the world are the subject matter of the best painters in the current exhibit at Eisele Gallery, Cincinnati. Mountain tops and serene valleys, rushing waves, hot springs and thermal pools are moulded into aesthetic statements by the nationally noted artists in a variety of media: oil, acrylic, pastel and […]
March 31st, 2019 | by Jonathan Kamholtz | published in *
The visual richness of Paris during the Belle Epoque would have followed people wherever they went, even out of doors. Posters must have been everywhere, depicting products for sale and announcing events and attractions both large and small on lithographed newsprint affixed to walls, fences, and kiosks specially designed for the purpose. The marketing of […]
March 31st, 2019 | by Tony Huffman | published in *, March 2019
This year’s iteration of The Armory Show marked its 25th anniversary, placing a considerable amount of pressure on Director Nicole Berry to execute the event at the level stakeholders in the art world have come to expect. First launched in 1994 at the Gramercy Park Hotel, The Gramercy International Art Fair has morphed into New […]
March 31st, 2019 | by Marlene Steele | published in *, March 2019
March is nationally celebrated as Women’s History Month. In keeping with its stated mission of eliminating racism and empowering women, the Greater Cincinnati YWCA has mounted an exhibition encompassing the expressive works of nine local women who examine their own attitudes of identity, entitlement and personal experiences of victimization. The exhibiting artists are: Yvonne van […]
March 31st, 2019 | by Ekin Erkan | published in *, March 2019
As a researcher, theorist, and something of a contemporary continental philosophy-bent author in, my interests in new media theory, film studies, and comparative media are necessarily political, often siding with a turn towards “speculative realism,” Quentin Meillassoux’s “correlationism,” or François Laruelle’s “non-standard philosophy” at the expense of affect theory or those “poetics” that salvage media […]
March 31st, 2019 | by Jane Durrell | published in *, March 2019
“Cincinnati is a good city for creating a place for yourself,” Ena Nearon Menefield, who has been here since 1996, says. Her own background, as a woman of color, makes her an experienced judge in such matters. Originally from New York City, the place where she raised her children, and later resident in California, she […]
March 3rd, 2019 | by Jonathan Kamholtz | published in *
High modernism is well over a century old by now, and its roots are even older. How could that even have happened? The Phillips Collection in Washington D.C. was the first American museum devoted to modern art, opening in 1921, some eight years before MOMA. Though the title of the loan show at the Taft […]
March 3rd, 2019 | by Christopher Carter | published in *, Winter 2019
Award-winning writer and photographer Eric K. Hatch has made his reputation by focusing on landscapes and the built environment. So when an acquaintance who lost a son to an overdose encouraged him to address drug addiction, he at first hesitated, feeling unprepared to take on such a project. Yet after a meditative cross-country trip and […]
March 3rd, 2019 | by Susan Byrnes | published in *
A pair of curtains adorned with a large set of parentheses hung at the entrance to the exhibit “Proximity of Syllables” at the Weston Gallery make a pronouncement: as you pass through, you are entering a space of meaning made not by what is directly stated, but by what is implied, unsaid, sidelined, redacted, absent, […]
March 3rd, 2019 | by Karen Chambers | published in *
If there were any question about the importance of the Art Academy of Cincinnati (AAC) or the quality of its teachers and students, the thoughtful “Art Academy of Cincinnati at 150: A Celebration in Drawings and Prints” at the Cincinnati Art Museum (CAM) puts that to rest. The exhibition presents 90 drawings and prints by […]
March 3rd, 2019 | by Ekin Erkan | published in *, Winter 2019
British installation artist Alex Hibbitt’s Rhizome: Falling (2018) has traversed numerous gallery locales throughout the States in the last few years and hangs, suspended and static, in the Weston Gallery’s atrium ceiling. The work – a horizontal web of variegated materiality and form – while weighty, sputters a certain recherché of the ethereal, culling to […]
December 23rd, 2018 | by Jonathan Kamholtz | published in *
In Cole Carothers’s “Margin” (2008), we are in Northern Kentucky somewhere—I’m thinking probably Monmouth Street—where the roadway dips down under some train tracks. There is no glamor here, at least not in a conventional sense. Where we are has been zoned for what is called light industry, which typically means that the factories are neither […]
December 23rd, 2018 | by Megan Bickel | published in *, December 2018
According to the Speed Art Museum, Picasso to Pollock: Modern Masterworks from the Eskenazi Museum of Art showcases the impressive early 20th-century art collection owned by the Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University. It covers the breadth of nearly every major artistic movement that occurred between the years 1900 and 1950 in Europe and America. […]
December 23rd, 2018 | by Cynthia Kukla | published in *
As a prominent river town, the Queen City has long been a storehouse for culture. Picture Benjamin West’s massive painting Ophelia and Laertes – 109 x 152 1/2 inches – rolled up and secured to a barge coming down the Ohio River to its purchaser, none other than Cincinnati’s Nicholas Longworth. It was the first […]
December 23rd, 2018 | by Laura Hobson | published in *
Sharing a table and a meal together can make a community stronger. During a time of unrest nationally and internationally, this is the season to be thankful over a common dinner meeting new people and reaching out to those who are different from us. The Welcome Project reflects this theme in a year-long collaboration. It […]
December 23rd, 2018 | by Daniel Brown | published in *, December 2018
2018 was an odd year for fiction; good and occasionally superior books appeared throughout the year, though it took some sleuthing to find them. Nothing dominates other than an ominous tendency towards overpraising novels that tend towards the politically correct. If you read other lists of best novels of the year, you’ll notice a […]
December 2nd, 2018 | by Susan Byrnes | published in *
Nuclear Fallout: The Bomb in Three Archives at Antioch College’s Herndon Gallery investigates historical documentation and mines personal accounts to challenge cavalier attitudes and awaken concern about nuclear war. It does this through highly original re-imaginings of how information itself can be communicated, and how memories of the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki […]
December 2nd, 2018 | by Christopher Carter | published in *, November 2018
At the outset of the tumultuous 1960s, more than 25,000 Cincinnatians found themselves evicted from their homes by city planners. Those losses came as a result of the Kenyon Barr project, which the planners named after two major streets in the city’s Lower West End, and which promised to revitalize approximately 297 acres of largely […]
December 2nd, 2018 | by Annabel Osberg | published in *
“‘I’m living my life out in a cell in a row of beehives and when I wake up and think of it like I did last night it seems to me I’ll just go crazy! …All these flats just exactly like this one—all of ’em with exactly the same maroon in the furniture and rugs, […]
December 2nd, 2018 | by Jonathan Kamholtz | published in *
FotoFocus 2018 promised, in its thematic title, to burrow into the archives, and at the CAC, they uncovered something. The roots of its show, “No Two Alike,” go back to an artistic event of mid- to high-Modernism, when, in 1929, a small London gallery belonging to Dorothy Warren brought together the photographs of Karl Blossfeldt […]
December 2nd, 2018 | by Megan Bickel | published in *, November 2018
When I was an undergrad I fumbled into Sharon Butler’s essay “The New Casualists” published in “The Brooklyn Rail”. I found it at a crucial moment in my development as a painter. It was 2011 and I was searching for a reason to keep painting. I had recently discovered the depth and breadth to which […]
October 28th, 2018 | by Annie Dell'Aria | published in *, October 2018
Masks serve multiple metaphorical and social functions in the world. In ancient Rome, wax masks were cast directly from the faces of the dead, preserving the countenance beyond the life of the body. Ritual societies often employ masks spiritually, transforming the wearer into a being from the spirit world as part of a rite of […]
October 28th, 2018 | by Christopher Carter | published in *, October 2018
Tucked into a passageway on the second floor of the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company’s new building, re-Adorned | Catharsis displays the lavish results of collaboration among artistic specialties and diverse media. Photographer Tina Gutierrez and clothing designer Da’Mon R. Butler (a.k.a. NOMAD3176) mix cultures and materials in ways both delicate and flamboyant, bringing her Cuban-Appalachian sensibilities […]
October 28th, 2018 | by Jonathan Kamholtz | published in *
Ann Segal hasn’t done an ad for the iPhone camera, but—if it weren’t for her decision a long time ago to walk away from the commercial side of photography—she could. For the last 10 years of a 45 year career of taking photographs, she has exclusively used her iPhone, with remarkable success. In a professional […]
October 28th, 2018 | by Stewart Maxwell | published in *, October 2018
One of America’s most architecturally significant buildings will be reopening in November after a substantial $230 million restoration by GBBN Architects: Cincinnati’s Union Terminal. Completed in 1933 at the height of the Great Depression, this Art Deco palatial masterpiece was dedicated to passenger railroad transportation and travel at a scale in size and exquisiteness, with […]
October 28th, 2018 | by Karen Chambers | published in *
In my mind Eugène Atget (1857-1927) and Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) are intrinsically linked, like peanut butter and jelly, or, for the grownups, gin and tonic. So I was surprised when Kevin Moore, FotoFocus artistic director and curator and curator of “Paris to New York: Photographs by Eugène Atget and Berenice Abbott” at the Taft Museum […]
