“In the middle of the night, peering intensely at some small thing, I do become lost, consumed by the intensity of this condensed universe” – Christian Schmit (from Artist Statement for Lost in the Making) There is something foreboding about diving solo into a nocturnal inner world, especially of the diminutive sort. From The Adventures […]

“Drawing has always been a way to interact with what I see and feel – that could be the material world or the world of dreams and memory or some combination of all of these,” explains Cincinnati artist Kate Kern who studied at the University of Dayton (BFA) and the University of Cincinnati (MFA in […]

When you walk into “UNRAVELED: Textiles Reconsidered” at the Contemporary Arts Center, the first piece you encounter is Legacies, 2006, by Kari Steihaug (b. 1962, Norway; resides Oslo). With an unfinished sweater hanging high overhead, it dominates the gallery and is the perfect way to start the show visually and intellectually. It succinctly illustrates curator […]

Kennedy Heights Arts Center (KHAC) is host to artist in residence Susan Byrnes and her nostalgic narrative: Domestic Departures.  Conjuring the ever personal yet universal experience of home, her body of work engages the topic through a myriad of mediums, including sculpture, sound, performance, and more. From the historic 19th century architecture to the doorbell […]

Carl Solway (and family) have been so deeply entwined with the art gallery scene in Cincinnati that it takes a timeline on the wall to keep it all straight. He graduated from Walnut Hills in 1952; ten years later, he opened Flair Gallery at Fifth and Race. Ten years after that, he had two galleries […]

Much has been written about Joseph Cornell’s work, but for me it can be summed up by saying that his boxes created worlds that we are invited into. Their small size makes them intimate experiences, and we involuntarily shrink to fit into his universe. In a gallery handout1 for “Utopia Parkway Revisited: Contemporary Artists in […]

Gender is one of the first assessments we make. How does this instinctive process affect self identity and imposed identity? What happens if the self’s and society’s assessments conflict? Are we simply male or female? Why do we assign gender to objects? What is male? What is female? Why does it matter?   Printed on […]

In the early 1970s, Jo Ann Callis left Cincinnati, where she had grown up, for California. Some forty years later, FotoFocus brought her back. On February 24, 2016, she gave a lecture—really an annotated slide show of her work—at the Cincinnati Art Museum as part of its Lecture and Visiting Artist Series, and the following […]

How newly-founded must an American art museum be not to be awash in paintings by the painters of the Barbizon School, either on display or, perhaps more likely these days, in storage? The works of Corot, Rousseau, Millet, Daubigny, and a number of artists loosely allied with them represent an important but frequently not fully […]

In the artist’s statement accompanying Matthew Metzger’s showing of ten new paintings at Miller Gallery, Metzger articulately lays out some of his goals: “In an overwhelming landscape, harsh, indifferent, opposite to arguably our most endearing human traits, we recognize our humanness.” In a nutshell, Metzger is here describing our relationship to the sublime, an aesthetic […]

“Fiber?” is this year’s material-based exhibition in C-LINK Gallery at Brazee Street Studios. It features 13 Cincinnati-based artists: Sandra Palmer Ciolino, Judy Dominic, Cris Fee, Jennifer Zimmerman Garter, Kelli Gleiner, Pam Kravetz, Carla Lamb, Jacob Lynn, Karen Saunders, Barbara Stewart, Jenifer Sult, Jonpaul Smith, and Lindsay Whittle. When I walked into the show, it took […]

“Modern Living: Objects and Context” at The Carnegie was co-curated by Matt Distel and BLDG, a Covington-based design firm, and explores “the intersection and conflation of design and art objects,” according to The Carnegie’s Exhibitions Director Distel. To this end, the exhibition is divided into two parts. Objects are installed as art in the first-floor […]

Catherine Richards defines herself as an artist and architect.  A graduate of DAAP originally from Cleveland, she spent a year in NYC working for the renowned firm OMA (co-founded by Rem Koolhaas). She currently teaches at DAAP, lives in OTR, and works out of a gigantic studio in Newport filled with a mountain of fabric, […]

The exhibition “Selections from the Michael Lowe Collection” at the Art Academy of Cincinnati focused on the local collector and private dealer’s collection of Minimal, post-Minimal, and Conceptual art, with works dating from 1965 to 1987. The exhibition transported me back to my years in New York. After I finished my graduate work in art […]

It was a pretty perfect moment. For one evening and the whole day following, FotoFocus and the Contemporary Arts Center teamed up to sponsor and host three panel discussions and three keynote speakers to talk about the making of Mapplethorpe the artist, the making of the CAC’s 1990 show “The Perfect Moment” and subsequent trial, […]

First of all, forget the unicorn. Or at the very least, hold it in abeyance. X-ray analysis of the painting shows us that before there was a unicorn on this young woman’s lap, there used to be a dog. And before skilled restoration turned it back into a unicorn again in the early 20th century, […]

The Venice Biennale, which opened in May, is on view through Nov 22 with exhibitions in the Giardini and the Arsenale, featuring 136 artists, 89 participating countries, and 44 collateral events presented by non-profit organizations and exhibited in various locations across Venice. The city’s massive Arsenale (of Venice’s mighty past as controller of the Mediterranean) […]

It’s fair to wonder on what basis we can be sure that the wonderful series of recent paintings by Stewart Goldman, curated by Aaron Cowan, are landscapes. Many are horizontal—some even lusciously elongated—but not all. The artist has provided a number of keys to help us see the landscape elements that inspired these mostly non-representational […]

Denise Burge is an associate professor of art at UC’s DAAP College of Art. I visited her on a warm late summer day in her studio in Northside where I found her working on the beginnings of a new series. Burge is known for her work with quilts as well as more recent video and […]

Inaugurated in 1895 with the first international presentation in 1897, la Biennale di Venezia is the oldest and in my opinion, still the most prestigeous of the contemporary international exhibitions of visual art. Venice celebrates the 120th anniversary of the first Exhibition (1895).Venice is an erotic city, steeped in cultural, and military history and it […]

Jan Tilens and Hendrick van Balen’s “Expansive Mountain Valley Landscape with a Rainbow and the Hunt of Diana” is a classic example of a “Weltlandschaft,” or world landscape, the sort of picture that first drew Otto Christian Fassbender and his wife Renate to assemble their outstanding collection of 17th century paintings now on view at […]

As you ascend the stairs to the just opened Nancy and David Wolf Gallery in the Cincinnati Art Museum’s second-floor ambulatory, you’re confronted with four stained glass windows made by the Tiffany Studio for Avondale’s Grace Protestant Episcopal Church and two tall glass vases, also by Tiffany. These functional and decorative objects make a suitable […]

Doris Salcedo is a Colombian artist of international renown who has made sculpture for the past three decades. Her work, meticulously crafted in her Bogota studio with a team of assistants, memorializes those lost to political violence both in her home country and abroad. She uses simple, utilitarian, human-scale objects and materials in unorthodox configurations […]

Entering a new space is always an interesting experience.  Whether it is a friend’s home or public building, you are faced with the task of conjuring up conclusions about that person or place based off of the physical elements around you – the interior structure, the smell, the reverberation in the wood as you walk […]

If you had wanted an education in the transition from the 19th to the 20th centuries in American culture, the Taft Museum has been the place to be. In the past year and a half, the Taft has hosted the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art’s collection of American daguerreotypes, “Telling Tales” from the New-York Historical Society, […]

The term “based on a true story” gives promise of an almost reality, while lending full disclosure that what’s before you is not teeming with truth; and herein lies the most humbling preface for an exhibition about history.  Artists Frohawk Two Feathers and Duke Riley navigate the world of the omitted, the imagined, and the […]

Brian Sholis, the new Associate Curator of Photography at the Cincinnati Art Museum, says from the start that he has no training—“none at all”—in Art History. He sees himself as “a contemporary art person who zeroed in on photography,” as he explained in an interview with Aeqai earlier this year. His undergraduate degree was in […]

The art historical narratives of the history of photography and the advent of modernism are often intertwined, though in some of those narratives, photography helps facilitate modernism, and in others, modernism gives photography the nudge it needs to outgrow its 19th century roots. As the captions on one of the walls at the Taft note, […]

Cincinnati should be proud that it has produced some of the most important artists of the latter half of the 20th century: Tom Wesselmann (1931-2004), Jim Dine (b. 1935), and Marcus Ratliff (b. 1935). It may seem like hyperbole to include Ratliff because he was a commercial artist, a term that seems quaint today. But […]

How odd – not one of the artists whose works comprise The Urban Landscape: Six Artists – Six Views at the Clifton Cultural Arts Center  through December 5 indicates that people occupy the spaces they portray. This seems to be a curatorial decision, as the show’s defining statement says “Six contemporary painters explore the urban […]

Street photography was a movement initially made possible by cameras that were small, film that was fast, and hands that were steady. It refreshed photography as an art form by opening up an almost unlimited source of unscripted narrative. It required some skills of the photographer not unlike those needed by an undercover cop: you […]