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 […]

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 […]

“‘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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]