January 2016

Off the Wall: “The Other Window: Emil Robinson and Matthew Yaeger” at Wave Pool

January 23rd, 2016  |  by  |  published in *, January 2016

Off the Wall:  “The Other Window:  Emil Robinson and Matthew Yaeger” at Wave Pool

One of those shows that hits you over the head in a good way, “The Other Window” features lush, rainbow-bright paintings both stationed on walls and on pedestals and the floor.  It’s a funhouse sort of gig, but beautifully, self-consciously serious too. Emil Robinson has taken care of the wall portion with handsome, studious but […]

Authentic Narratives: Ohio’s Regionalists, 1915-1950

January 23rd, 2016  |  by  |  published in *, January 2016

Authentic Narratives: Ohio's Regionalists, 1915-1950

Looking back historically, one sees that Post World War II critics and curators endorsing the trends of expressive experimentation emanating from New York as the mechanism of modernism in the visual arts, eschewed figurative and narrative representations and the artists who employed these elements as outdated and behind the times. Regardless of the critics’ blessing, […]

Altered Piece Conservation on View: Zaragoza’s Retablo of St. Peter January 26 – April 24, 2016 The Cincinnati Art Museum, Gallery 124

January 23rd, 2016  |  by  |  published in *, January 2016

Altered Piece Conservation on View: Zaragoza’s Retablo of St. Peter January 26 – April 24, 2016 The Cincinnati Art Museum, Gallery 124

The large panels of wood had been joined and the soft pine coated with a mixture of animal skin glue and resin. The painter would have preferred to use a wood with a finer grain for this retablo, or altarpiece, an oak or linden, but no such material was available in this area of Spain.  […]

A Walk Through The Garden of Restoration

January 23rd, 2016  |  by  |  published in January 2016

A Walk Through The Garden of Restoration

For years Raymond Thunder-Sky could be spotted around Cincinnati construction sites, wearing a hard hat and clown collar. Few people knew that he was drawing the buildings as they were demolished and built anew, imagining fantastical venues like the “Electricians Amusement Parks” and “Carnival Costume Shop.” Thunder-Sky, who was mentally challenged, began meeting with Bill […]

Profile, Thomas Towhey

January 23rd, 2016  |  by  |  published in January 2016

Profile, Thomas Towhey

The artist Thomas Hieronymous Towhey, born in Cincinnati in the mid-20th century and resident here most of the time since, gave himself his middle name. Towhey is an admirer of that early Netherlandish painter, Hieronymous Bosch, who in fact played around with his own nomenclature. The Dutchman’s original surname referred to the place his family […]

Lizzy Duquette: Collaborative Interdisciplinary Artist

January 23rd, 2016  |  by  |  published in January 2016

Lizzy Duquette: Collaborative Interdisciplinary Artist

If you have the chance to meet Lizzy Duquette, take the opportunity to sit with her for a moment. She is quiet and shy. She might hesitate to speak first. With the right prompting however, within seconds you will see that she has the mind of an artist — teeming with big ideas and in […]

Matthew Zory

January 23rd, 2016  |  by  |  published in January 2016

Matthew Zory

  “The Other Side of Music Hall” “As a symphony musician my time is spent in the opulent settings of a historic 19th century concert hall amidst “the remnants of a great city” as an urban renewal expert once said about the Other the Rhine area of Cincinnati. This dichotomy of haves and have-nots always […]

Western

January 23rd, 2016  |  by  |  published in January 2016

    Winter has officially arrived in Cincinnati and so too have an array of new men’s fashion collections for the Fall 2016 season. As in women’s apparel, some collections were classic in color and style, while others took a more avant-garde approach to dressing men. Italian designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, known for […]

Daphne Minkoff and Tim Cross, Linda Hodges Gallery, Jan. 7-30, 2016

January 23rd, 2016  |  by  |  published in January 2016

Daphne Minkoff and Tim Cross, Linda Hodges Gallery, Jan. 7-30, 2016

A “drive-thru” restaurant. Aging wood-frame houses. Desolate T-docks. In her latest show at Linda Hodges Gallery in Seattle’s Pioneer Square neighborhood, Daphne Minkoff portrays forgotten pockets of the urban landscape through collage and oil paints. No figures populate these ordinary spaces, yet the signs of human activity remain, in the graffiti and old advertisements that […]

Art’s Power to Overcome Adversity Resounds in “Watts”

January 23rd, 2016  |  by  |  published in January 2016

Art’s Power to Overcome Adversity Resounds in “Watts”

In the summer of 1965, a young black man was pulled over by a white police officer for suspicion of driving while under the influence. The incident occurred on August 11 on the outskirts of Watts and brought with it an unsettling exchange. What initially began as a roadside argument quickly escalated into a fight, […]

Film Review: “The Big Short”

January 23rd, 2016  |  by  |  published in January 2016

Film Review: "The Big Short"

Hollywood’s cliff notes version of the 2008 credit crisis is entertaining, cautionary and for those not intricately aware of money management, difficult to digest. Thick subtext abounds. You don’t have to be a financial prodigy though to understand the main principals of the financial crisis. Economy collapse + Government bail out = Rich got $$$. […]

Poem By Louis Zoellar Bickett

January 23rd, 2016  |  by  |  published in January 2016

MOTHER WHISPERED   Mother, leaning over me, her palm placed securely to check my temperature whispered with a gentle breath that tickled my ear “You are my little prince, I will always love you.”   January 22, 2016

Maxwell’s Poetry Corner

January 23rd, 2016  |  by  |  published in January 2016

A Good Animal Day   Ladybugs popped out of his ears as he emerged from the hollow log.   She snapped one and they scooted to the dam, did yoga, then ignoring   the downward facing sign,  they raced to the water.  He won, but, she thought   to splash him – truly taking the […]

Garth Risk Hallberg’s City on Fire

January 23rd, 2016  |  by  |  published in January 2016

In 2013, the announcement that Garth Risk Hallberg, a debut novelist, was to receive an advance of nearly two million dollars, set the literary world atwitter.  A New York Times article stated that the book drew a two-day bidding war, prompting ten publishers to offer more than a million dollars.  Knopf, the eventual winner, pursued […]

Patti Smith’s M Train

January 23rd, 2016  |  by  |  published in January 2016

The multi-talented Patti Smith continues her third career as an essayist/memoirist with her superb , slim new book M Train.  Having taken the literary world by surprise and storm with her achingly lovely Just Kids, her memoir of her early days in New York with the equally young Robert Mapplethorpe, which won The National Book […]

Elizabeth Strout’s My Name Is Lucy Barton

January 23rd, 2016  |  by  |  published in January 2016

Elizabeth Strout, whose magnificent novel Olive Kitteridge won the Pulitzer Prize for literature a couple of years ago–and who seemed to appear out of nowhere–returns with another flawless novel, My Name Is Lucy Barton.  Strout is known for her feisty characters, and, in Lucy  Barton, she’s created another unique narrator, not so much feisty, as […]

Mary Gaitskill’s The Mare

January 23rd, 2016  |  by  |  published in January 2016

The brilliantly gifted novelist Mary Gaitskill, whose novel Veronica was a finalist for The National Book Award some years ago, and which showcased the greed and narcissism of the 1980s through the character of a high fashion New York model, has returned with her equally impressive The Mare.  The Mare’s a long novel, centered around […]