March 3rd, 2019 | by Jonathan Kamholtz | published in *, Winter 2019
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 *, Winter 2019
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 *, Winter 2019
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 *, December 2018
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 *, December 2018
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 *, December 2018
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 *, November 2018
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 *, November 2018
“‘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 *, November 2018
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 *, October 2018
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 *, October 2018
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 […]
October 8th, 2018 | by Cynthia Kukla | published in *, September 2018
Collecting Calligraphy: Arts of the Islamic World Cincinnati Art Museum September 7, 2018–January 27, 2019 Long before the Middle East came into the political spotlight in recent decades, the Cincinnati Art Museum has been collecting Islamic calligraphy. It has done so since the 1940s. While Islamic calligraphy was originally developed to nourish and enlighten […]
October 8th, 2018 | by Christopher Carter | published in *, September 2018
Chris Engman’s Prospect and Refuge teaches us not to trust our eyes. On display at the Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery through November 18, the exhibit unsettles our senses of depth and scale, interior and exterior, origin and reproduction. It ushers us into artificial spaces and then immerses us in the tropes […]
October 8th, 2018 | by Tony Huffman | published in *, September 2018
“…[power is] a multiple and mobile field of force relations where far-reaching, but never completely stable effects of domination are produced.”[1] –Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Sedimentations: Assemblage as Social Repair is the most recent exhibition at The 8th Floor, an alternative art space affiliated with the Rubin Foundation and dedicated to expanding artistic […]
October 8th, 2018 | by Jonathan Kamholtz | published in *, September 2018
There is nothing ordinary about Erika NJ Allen’s photographs of downtown Cincinnati. Taken with a pinhole camera set at an exposure of nine days, the city looks as if it has been underwater for a millennium. We are not likely to take the pictures’ minimal suggestions of color for granted. It is unsettling how they […]
October 8th, 2018 | by Joelle Jameson | published in *, September 2018
In high school and college classrooms, Herman Melville’s 1851 novel “Moby-Dick, or, the Whale” is commonly used to illustrate Romantic and Naturalist themes. While it’s because of Keats that I picture Romanticism as a gasping tendon writhing under the holiness of the heart’s affections, my image of Naturalism—an ocean wave indifferently carrying us, screaming, an […]
August 26th, 2018 | by Jonathan Kamholtz | published in *, July/August 2018
Any way you look at it, there was a lot going on in American culture in the 1940s and 1950s. There was a hot war and then a Cold War. American heavy industry had never been more dominant at home and abroad, and union membership was at an all-time high. Car manufacturing and ownership was […]
August 26th, 2018 | by Christopher Carter | published in *, July/August 2018
Gallery exhibits often feature artists at a specific stage of their career, a period marked by consistent subjects or stylistic choices. Some shows take a more contrastive approach, capturing the creative process at distinct moments and inviting audiences to consider the evolution of perspective, tonality, and preferred media. Less common, however, are shows that feature […]
August 26th, 2018 | by Ekin Erkan | published in *, July/August 2018
Over the last year, Thunder-Sky, Inc. has been probing visual culture vis-à-vis consumers, products, and marketing, as this year’s theme has revolved around “Product Placement,” with the gallery presenting exhibitions that frame production and commerce. Certain shows over the last year at this gallery have been right on the mark regarding pop art aesthetics and […]
August 26th, 2018 | by Karen Chambers | published in *, July/August 2018
Usually when the topic of manufacturing in the U.S. comes up, it is as a lament of jobs lost to automation or outsourcing. Two Ohio-based artists beg to differ. In “Work/Surface” at the Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery, Matt Lynch and Curtis Goldstein present a suite of 10 scenes of factories operating […]
August 26th, 2018 | by Jonathan Kamholtz | published in *, July/August 2018
One way to see the goal of the Ansel Adams show at the Taft is that it traces the trajectory of Adams’s aesthetic and accomplishments from some of his earliest Pictorialist photos in the 1920s to a climax of sorts with his iconic “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico” (1941). As the show begins, Adams is a […]
July 1st, 2018 | by Annabel Osberg | published in *, June 2018
Los Angeles is home to so many eccentric museums that the city practically has its own ever-growing genre of weird museums with sundry specialized themes ranging from ice cream to death. Among these, one of the oldest and most intriguing is the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Everything about this institution is so otherworldly that it […]
July 1st, 2018 | by Jonathan Kamholtz | published in *, June 2018
It’s an ordinary day in Turtle Creek, Pennsylvania, about a dozen miles from Pittsburgh. Some leaves are turning yellow; there is a touch of fall in the air. The garbage has been collected and the mail has not yet been delivered (the cans are upside down along the edge of the street and the flags […]
July 1st, 2018 | by Ekin Erkan | published in *, June 2018
Minnesota-based multi-media artist Chris Larson’s work “Function is Redundant” is displayed at Cincinnati’s Contemporary Art Center and runs until September 2, 2018. In this large display of single and multi-channel video art installations, sculptures, paintings, and intermedia, Larson’s work incorporates large-scale ethereal photography, drawings and sound to supplement his documented process of structural abrogation. As […]
July 1st, 2018 | by Susan Byrnes | published in *, June 2018
The Riffe Gallery’s “Women to Watch Ohio – 2018” exhibit highlights ten female Ohio artists working in metal. The show was inspired by the selection of four Ohio artists shortlisted for the exhibition “Heavy Metal”, the National Museum of Women in the Arts’ (NMWA) Women to Watch biennial. Reto Thuring, Curator of Contemporary Art at […]
July 1st, 2018 | by Joelle Jameson | published in *, June 2018
The Harvard Art Museums and curator Jennifer Quick have pulled off a minor miracle with “Analog Culture,” an understated, poetic show of heart through a lens of craftsmanship, careful discipline, and the wavering line between producer and artist. It’s rare to find a show that is at once pointedly educational, culturally searing, historically significant, and […]
May 13th, 2018 | by Ekin Erkan | published in *, April/May 2018
Tom Bacher’s Per-40ming Trans-4-ming Phos-4-s-cent Paintings, which is showing at the Weston Art Gallery until June 10, 2018, displays a continuation of Bacher’s hyperrealist quotidian aesthetic re: luminescent paintings that find subjects in object studies, portraiture, and documentation processes. As the two-channel corridor video “Painting with Light” (2018) by YellowHaus Productions elucidates, Bacher’s exhibition […]
May 13th, 2018 | by Annie Dell'Aria | published in *, April/May 2018
Contemporary art has a number of interpretive frameworks, attempts to historicize the present moment that both distinguish it from what came before and draw genealogical lines from established art historical concepts. One branch of this diverse range of concepts is the return to romanticism in what some critics have referred to as New Sincerity, Post-postmodernism, […]
May 13th, 2018 | by Karen Chambers | published in *, April/May 2018
Something odd happened on the front lawn of The Taft Museum of Art. The world-renowned sculptor Patrick Dougherty, with the help of 150 volunteers, twisted and turned six tons of willow-tree saplings into Far Flung,a sprawling sculpture that visitors are encouraged to touch, walk through, or even sit a spell in. In keeping with The […]
May 13th, 2018 | by Jonathan Kamholtz | published in *, April/May 2018
You can be forgiven if you’d never heard of Guido Cagnacci before going to see the tiny but brilliant exhibit of three of his works at the Cincinnati Art Museum. You won’t find him in your Janson, or, for that matter, in many more weighty volumes devoted to Italian painters of the 17th century. […]
May 13th, 2018 | by Christopher Carter | published in *, April/May 2018
Matt and Paul Coors founded the Publico Gallery in Over-the-Rhine in 2003 and ran the operation until it closed in 2008. Ten years later, the Coors brothers are displaying their own works at the Clay Street Press Gallery, just a few steps from their former space. The show highlights the artists’ shared commitment to conceptual […]
March 31st, 2018 | by Karen Chambers | published in *, March 2018
Fashion is a fickle lover, and it jilted Louis Comfort Tiffany at the end of his career in the 1930s. He had been the American exemplar of Art Nouveau, or “new art,” which emerged in Europe in the 1890s after a century of revivals. But “new” eventually grows old, and by 1910 its curvilinear and sinuous lines […]
March 31st, 2018 | by Christopher Carter | published in *, March 2018
From March 2 through April 29, 2018, the Carnegie in Covington, Kentucky is spotlighting an emphatically local meditation on matters of national concern. The museum’s Hutson Gallery features the work of Anissa R. Lewis, Mary Clare Rietz, and a host of citizen-artists from Covington’s Eastside neighborhood, all of them proclaiming the dignity of the community […]
March 31st, 2018 | by Tony Huffman | published in *, March 2018
Perrotin’s opening exhibition in New York for 2018, Hans Hartung: A Constant Storm. Works from 1922 to 1989, featured a retrospective assessment of one of the pioneers of Lyrical Abstraction in Europe, including over 60 major works. This exhibition—which was on view from January 12 until February 18—marked the most extensive presentation of the artist’s […]
March 31st, 2018 | by Bret McCabe | published in *, March 2018
Two of the Stephen Towns’ gorgeous quilt pieces hang in an abbreviated hallway of the Baltimore Museum of Art. Rumination and Reckoning, the Baltimore artist’s debut solo museum show, is an intimate collection of his quilts from a recent, breakthrough body of fabric works, including a few new, unseen pieces. Two of these new works […]
March 31st, 2018 | by Ekin Erkan | published in *, March 2018
The Weston Art Gallery in the Aronoff Center features three works by American installation artist Malcolm Cochran: History Lessons (2011), Requiem (2018), and Washing Feet (1996-97). History Lessons features a looming fixture – a colossal poplar, steel, and polished whitewash stainless steel mirror. The base of the mirrors’ bracket is reminiscent of a sleek vessel, […]
February 19th, 2018 | by Ekin Erkan | published in *, January/February 2018
Traversing the Art Academy of Cincinnati’s galleries via the looming, metallic stairwell, Covergys Gallery is perhaps the easiest to miss between the larger Pearlman and Childlaw Galleries. A sweeping horizontal pocket within a wall, the second floor gallery is at once invitational and necessarily participatory – it simply can not be ignored, as it effectively […]
February 19th, 2018 | by Jonathan Kamholtz | published in *, January/February 2018
One of the least sculptural of the wondrous works at the mid-career retrospective of sculptor Glenn Kaino’s work at the Contemporary Arts Center is a two-dimensional graphic that looks like an ancient map that has been housed in an archive with a leaky roof. Shapes and outlines are beautiful but discontinuous; areas that might represent […]
February 19th, 2018 | by Daniel Brown | published in *, January/February 2018
Cincinnati Art Galleries has managed to represent the estate of the late modernist painter Jens Jensen, and an exhibition of this artist’s work is currently on view at Cincinnati Art Galleries downtown. It’s difficult to describe the delight and joy at looking at an excellent modernist in today’s highly politicized and digitalized postmodern world: Jensen’s […]
February 19th, 2018 | by Ekin Erkan | published in *, January/February 2018
Planned prior to Trump’s presidency, the 21C Museum Hotel’s The Future is Female displays a myriad of international female artists – ranging in their modalities and sociopolitical concerns – whose works bridge third and fourth-wave feminist concerns. Built on the foreground of second-wave feminism’s civil rights advances, the third-wave occupies subjectivity and inclusive diversity, […]
February 19th, 2018 | by Jane Durrell | published in *, January/February 2018
“I like artists and scientists,” Linda Schwartz told me. We were seated at the dining table in her art-filled house, with tea and a barely touched plate of cookies, talking about her career in art. The other two occupants of the house, a pair of small but stocky, very vocal black dogs, had been shushed […]
December 23rd, 2017 | by Jonathan Kamholtz | published in *, December 2017
The Reformation had its 500th anniversary this year. A movement that changed the ways Europeans read, worshipped, traded, and slaughtered each other, it also had the potential to change the nature of art. In part, this is because the various Protestant churches that sought to reform the Catholic hegemony tended, among other things, to take […]
December 23rd, 2017 | by Cynthia Kukla | published in *, December 2017
Painter extraordinaire Frank Herrmann means what he says. In a 2016 interview, Herrmann stated: “Never wait for the great idea or wait for the perfect moment when the work has stalled. You have to work through those moments, that may be depressing but just keep working.”1 Herrmann takes his own advice; his vivid new exhibition […]
December 23rd, 2017 | by William Messer | published in *, December 2017
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 […]
December 23rd, 2017 | by Karen Chambers | published in *, December 2017
“A Sense of Home: New Quilts by Heather Jones” complements the Taft Museum of Art’s “Elegant Geometry: British and American Mosaic Patchwork Quilts” exhibition. (See aeqai.com, November 2017.) Jones sees modern quilting as “look(ing) at traditional quilting and then do(ing) its own thing.” 1 For this quilt maker, “its own thing” marries tradition and contemporary abstract art in quilts […]
December 23rd, 2017 | by Daniel Brown | published in *, December 2017
In spite of entire months going by with little fiction of note, 2017 did give serious readers some terrific fiction. Part of the problem is that publications offering book reviews have radically different ideas about what’s worth reading. And it’s an important time to be on the lookout for political correctness and other ideologies common […]
November 26th, 2017 | by Jonathan Kamholtz | published in *, November 2017
As you walk into Caza Sikes in Oakley to see the ambitious mini-retrospective of Cole Carothers’s paintings, you are greeted by a large scale self-portrait called “Livestrong” (2005). In it, he is standing in what for many of his paintings is his home away from home, the corner of his studio. It is brashly hung—it […]
November 26th, 2017 | by Karen Chambers | published in *, November 2017
I think one of the appeals of 17th-century Dutch genre painting is that the narratives they present are familiar to us. Lutes may be in short supply today, but guitars and other stringed instruments abound. Women still fuss at their toilette. Today we read emails on our phones, instead of having the tactile experience of holding […]
November 26th, 2017 | by Cynthia Kukla | published in *, November 2017
Like Impressionism, with its wild brushstrokes and look of abandon in representing the world shocked the smug Parisian Salon art community, so too, Art Noveau originally was intended to be moderne, to usher in the new century, the twentieth century. But now, oh those erotic cascades of hair in Alphonse Mucha’s women smoking in Job […]
November 26th, 2017 | by Daniel Burr | published in *, November 2017
In his most characteristic paintings, Cedric Cox fractures the world in order to bring it to a new whole. The recent work of this gifted local artist is on display in a solo exhibition at the Cincinnati Art Underground through January 13, 2018. The exhibit includes twelve large canvases and several smaller works. Cox completed […]
November 26th, 2017 | by Karen Chambers | published in *, November 2017
Girls aren’t good at math, but don’t tell that to the makers of the 19 mosaic patchwork quilts, made between 1776 and1890 in England and America, in “Elegant Geometry: British and American Mosaic Patchwork Quilts.” Mosaic patchwork, sometimes called “paper piecing,” originated in Britain at the beginning of the 18th century and was carried to America by British colonists. Its […]
October 29th, 2017 | by Cynthia Kukla | published in *, October 2017
Swoon makes magic. Swoon stirs souls. The world needs more Swoon. I get cynical about politically inspired art much of the time. Such art is often self-serving (great way for an artist to get a solo show in our hyper-correct gallery and museum environments.) Or simply, it is handy for an artist to use the […]
October 29th, 2017 | by Christopher Carter | published in *, October 2017
Whether appearing in pictorial narratives of the hunt or anthropomorphic representations of cultural traditions, the iconography of the nonhuman animal stalks the pathways of human epistemology. Wave Pool Gallery’s Animal Magnetism alludes powerfully to that history, not as a culminating insight but as the backdrop against which to make more subversive arguments. Those arguments posit […]
October 29th, 2017 | by Annie Dell'Aria | published in *, October 2017
Art fairs, biennials, and public art festivals, on the rise since the 1990s, define much of the post-1989 international art world. From Venice to New Orleans to Gwangju and everywhere in between, urban centers transform into art world Meccas and back again all over the globe, creating a map of flickering lights and a web […]
October 29th, 2017 | by Jonathan Kamholtz | published in *, October 2017
In the Music Room at the Taft, all of the paintings are grand. A few are truly monumental. In the Taft’s Sinton Room right now is an exhibition of another sort of painting, eight of them in all, the largest dimension of which is just a hair over a foot and a half tall. […]
October 29th, 2017 | by Jenny Perusek | published in *, October 2017
The title of the Cincinnati Art Museum’s new exhibition showcasing the work of Dutch fashion designer Iris Van Herpen is very aptly named Transforming Fashion. Van Herpen’s creations have changed the face of fashion design while redefining what it means to be a fashion designer in the 21st century. The exhibit itself has left this […]
September 23rd, 2017 | by Annie Dell'Aria | published in *, September 2017
Summer 2017 may very well be one of the most important art seasons in recent memory. In the wake of political turmoil and the record sale of a Basquiat for $110.5 million at auction, the art fairs of Europe aligned to create a Grand Tour for contemporary art devotees around the world at a moment […]
September 23rd, 2017 | by Christopher Carter | published in *, September 2017
A slow-burning ambiguity inhabits the title of Anthony Luensman’s New Works, which now hang at the Clay Street Press Gallery in Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine district. Most plainly, the pieces are new in the sense of making their first public appearance, of being still fresh in an era when things age at breakneck pace. The offspring of […]
September 23rd, 2017 | by Susan Byrnes | published in *, September 2017
Joseph Winterhalter: Painting consists of a suite of thirteen new works by this Cincinnati artist; five paintings and eight works on paper dated 2016 and 2017. For this show, Winterhalter focuses his conceptual gaze on the life and ideas of Guy Debord and Joe Strummer, men of successive generations who were both influential political […]
September 23rd, 2017 | by Tony Huffman | published in *, September 2017
On September 12, 1940 four French boys stumbled into a complex network of caves in southwestern France. Their discovery of innumerable Paleolithic cave paintings dating to 17-15,000 BCE (Figure 1) soon led to excavations of the Lascaux cave system and in turn significantly altered scholars’ conceptions of human development.1 As evidenced by the wall paintings […]
September 23rd, 2017 | by Jonathan Kamholtz | published in *, September 2017
Aeqai’s Editor-in-Chief, Daniel Brown, recently received a Lifetime Achievement award from Marquis Who’s Who, which has been recognizing American accomplishments in a variety of fields since 1899. I sat down with Danny earlier this month and we talked informally about his perspective on the art world and some of the various roles he has had […]
August 6th, 2017 | by Jonathan Kamholtz | published in *, July/August 2017
A careful visitor to the Cincinnati Art Museum’s very substantial exhibition of paintings, sculptures, furniture, documents, implements, and advertisements of many sorts might well leave with no clearer idea about what constitutes “folk art” than when he or she came in. What, exactly, are we looking at? We’re not even sure what to call […]
August 6th, 2017 | by Karen Chambers | published in *, July/August 2017
Mounting the stairs at the YWCA Women’s Art Gallery to see “Other Wordly,” the word that came to mind was “charming” as I encountered the paintings of one of three artists in the exhibition: Laine Bachman. Her hyper-realistic paintings have a fairytale quality, enchanting and entrancing. In her In the Undergrowth, (2011, acrylic on canvas, 46” […]
August 6th, 2017 | by Jack Wood | published in *, July/August 2017
Angela Teng’s To Have and to Hold opened on the 13th of May at Equinox Gallery, Vancouver, BC, and closed on the 17th of June. Teng’s monolithic crocheted paintings are composed of literal strands of acrylic paint, effectively colliding materiality and paint in the substrate of work that historically, and in many contemporary contexts too, […]
August 6th, 2017 | by Annie Dell'Aria | published in *, July/August 2017
Ugo Rondinone, born and based in Switzerland, is known for sculptures and installations with alternately an absence or an overabundance of color. Referred to by the artist quite literally as “night” and “day,” one oeuvre contains mostly greys, browns, and earth tones while the other—what’s on view now at the CAC—a vibrant spectrum of bright, […]
August 6th, 2017 | by Jonathan Kamholtz | published in *, July/August 2017
One doesn’t immediately think of the British for their heritage of great painting. As Britain rose as a great mercantile power starting in the 16th century, it had to import painters, typically from Northern Europe, to their isolated island. For two hundred years, those foreigners largely defined English visual accomplishments and taste. British portraiture never […]
June 10th, 2017 | by Jonathan Kamholtz | published in *, May/June 2017
Sometime in the 1980s, Michael Scheurer came across an Italian toy called a Puncherino. A Puncherino is a little like what in my neighborhood we called a BoLo, a toy for one which had a lightweight wooden paddle with a rubber ball attached by an elastic cord (always the first thing to break). The difference, […]
June 10th, 2017 | by Marlene Steele | published in *, May/June 2017
“The work of art employs a triggering device – a call to seek and reflect – that makes conscious what has been buried in the unconscious, drawing the viewer into awareness.” Clint Woods Cincinnati based artist and designer, Clint Woods, is currently exhibiting in the Lindner Gallery at the Kennedy Heights Art Center. Woods declares […]
June 10th, 2017 | by Karen Chambers | published in *, May/June 2017
Curated by Peter Huttinger, “Wordly” is the perfect title for this exhibition featuring John M. Bennett, Fred Ellenberger, and Avril Thurman and focusing on words as text or graphic elements. The word play is delicious. And the location is particularly apt as The Carnegie in Covington is one of the 2,509 libraries built by the […]
June 10th, 2017 | by Jack Wood | published in *, May/June 2017
As this past semester of graduate school ended, I was not sure if I would make the trip to New York or not. My anxiety was forestalling my plans as it often does, and I was tether balling the idea back and forth and around in my mind with heavy hands. Travel always makes me […]
June 10th, 2017 | by Jane Durrell | published in *, May/June 2017
Sara Caswell Pearce makes art with verve, gusto and infinite care. She delights in doing it. This artist is most regularly a print maker and collage artist, and she works in two smallish rooms across the hallway from one another on the upper floor of Brazee Studios in Oakley. Pearce and her husband live only […]
May 6th, 2017 | by Christopher Carter | published in *, April 2017
When Harvey Osterhoudt and William Renschler worked together at the Indiana University Art Museum in the 1970s, they began a dialogue about photography that would inform their work for the next forty years. Through the early months of 2017, Over-the-Rhine’s Iris BookCafé featured the results of that conversation in Subject Matters, a two-man show of […]
May 6th, 2017 | by Cynthia Kukla | published in *, April 2017
Cincinnati continues to harness the landscape lion: the Taft Museum exhibition of 2016, Daubigny, Monet, Van Gogh: Impressions of Landscape and two more stunners, the Cincinnati Art Museum’s Picturing the West: Masterworks of 19th-Century Landscape Photography and Van Gogh: Into the Undergrowth. Anyone fortunate enough to have seen all three exhibitions last year must certainly […]
May 6th, 2017 | by Jonathan Kamholtz | published in *, April 2017
As you work your way through the drawings on view in the pleasant warren of rooms at Manifest Gallery, something wonderful happens when you reach Lucas Bianchi’s “Self Portrait in Studio” (2016). The energy of Bianchi’s drawing is everywhere in evidence, and it tells you this is a young man mad about drawing. We’ve interrupted […]
May 6th, 2017 | by Marlene Steele | published in *, April 2017
Cincinnati Artist Cedric Michael Cox is exploring selected pieces from the collection of the Taft Museum of Art in his a new series of acrylics, entitled “Color & Rhythm” currently exhibited on site. The Taft Museum, a National historic landmark, was built about 1820 and is considered one of the finest examples of Federal […]
May 6th, 2017 | by Jane Durrell | published in *, April 2017
Leslie Shiels makes paintings and prints as her own response to life, to what she sees around her in solid fact and in underlying meaning. Talking with her, I had the feeling that she just can’t help it; when something interests her, bothers her, gives her an idea, she wants to make art of it. […]
March 19th, 2017 | by Susan Byrnes | published in *, March 2017
The realm of artist Kate Kern is the ethereal space of imagination, wherein she depicts an actual, tangible place that is like this world, but not quite. Here it is, a bare room, a few empty chairs, the wind ruffling the curtains. Here it is, the dense voids of deep sea and deep space. And […]
March 19th, 2017 | by Karen Chambers | published in *, March 2017
It was just before Valentine’s Day, when I saw the lavish “Bijoux Parisiens: French Jewelry from the Petit Palais, Paris” exhibition at the Taft Museum of Art, and how I longed for a wealthy beau. The show features some 75 pieces of French jewelry, primarily from the early 19th- to mid-20th centuries. They are from […]
March 19th, 2017 | by Cynthia Kukla | published in *, March 2017
I can’t decide if I should leap for joy or feel cheated by the art world when I discover yet another marvelous woman artist who has not received appropriate mainstream recognition. Here’s Kay WalkingStick, now in her eighties and thriving in her studio practice, who has had a vibrant career with early New York accolades. […]
March 19th, 2017 | by Annie Dell'Aria | published in *, March 2017
Artworks today enter digital markets of circulation. Even the seemingly dematerialized, non-commodifiable works of land art and conceptual art are subject to economies of reproduction and intellectual property. The contours and cracks of these networks inform four very recent artworks in The Wired, an exhibition currently on view at the Alice F. and Harris K. […]
March 19th, 2017 | by Karen Chambers | published in *, March 2017
On the quiet Tuesday that I visited the “Dressed to Kill: Japanese Arms and Armor” exhibition at the Cincinnati Art Museum, there were only a few people in the gallery, mostly middle-aged men. They were carefully studying the 11 suits of armor on view, but were equally intent on the many, many weapons on display: a […]
