January/February 2018

(Im)material Culture, Alienation Affect, and the Jeffrey Cortland Jones’ Curious Social Experiment

February 19th, 2018  |  by  |  published in *, January/February 2018

(Im)material Culture, Alienation Affect, and the Jeffrey Cortland Jones’ Curious Social Experiment

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 […]

Review of Jens Jensen at Cincinnati Art Galleries

February 19th, 2018  |  by  |  published in *, January/February 2018

Review of Jens Jensen at Cincinnati Art Galleries

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 […]

Bridging Inter-Spaces and Navigating Contemporary Feminist Art

February 19th, 2018  |  by  |  published in *, January/February 2018

Bridging Inter-Spaces and Navigating Contemporary Feminist Art

  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, […]

Interview with Eric Avner of The Haile Foundation

February 19th, 2018  |  by  |  published in January/February 2018

Interview with Eric Avner of The Haile Foundation

I sat down with Eric Avner of The Haile Foundation in early December, at their People’s Liberty office in OTR, to get a sense of the man, what he does at Haile, and the like. We weren’t doing a formal interview; we had a very mutually participatory conversation about the state of the arts and […]

“Interwoven/Contemporary Textiles,” Marta Hewett Gallery, through March 9, 2018

February 19th, 2018  |  by  |  published in January/February 2018

“Interwoven/Contemporary Textiles,” Marta Hewett Gallery, through March 9, 2018

The aim of “Interwoven/Contemporary Textiles” at the Marta Hewett Gallery is to explore “traditional and alternative textile materials.” Despite the diversity of what’s on view, the exhibition can be divided into artists who use traditional techniques and materials, and others who use alternative materials but still work with basically traditional techniques. In the first category, […]

Rethinking Cincinnati’s Fountain Place

February 19th, 2018  |  by  |  published in January/February 2018

Rethinking Cincinnati’s Fountain Place

One of America’s most important potential development properties is the current Downtown Macy’s Department Store’s and Tiffany & Co.’s site called Fountain Place {formerly Fountain Square West}, situated from Race to Vine Streets along Fifth Street. Located on the western edge of Fountain Square, it is in the heart of our city and across the […]

Review of Jim Condron and Timothy Horjus at Goucher University

February 19th, 2018  |  by  |  published in January/February 2018

Review of Jim Condron and Timothy Horjus at Goucher University

A broken-down 1940s tractor sits in Goucher University’s Silber Gallery in Baltimore, Md., like an escaped relic from a history museum. Its large knobby tires are cracked with age, the plow hitched to it is rusted beyond use, and there’s a large chest wound in the engine block where a motor used to cough this […]

First Nations Art Preserved and Celebrated at the Audain Museum Whistler, B.C., Canada

February 19th, 2018  |  by  |  published in January/February 2018

First Nations Art Preserved and Celebrated at the Audain Museum Whistler, B.C., Canada

The masks of the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast are powerful objects that assist us in defining our place in the cosmos. In a world of endless change and complexity, masks offer a continuum for Native people to acknowledge our connection to the universe.     -Chief Robert Joseph (Down from the Shimmering Sky, 1998) […]

Fitton Center for Creative Arts:  An Emphasis on Community

February 19th, 2018  |  by  |  published in January/February 2018

Fitton Center for Creative Arts:  An Emphasis on Community

Fitton Center for Creative Arts in Hamilton, Ohio focuses on community engagement.  It has served as part of the community as a nonprofit arts organization for over twenty years. The center offers four rotating exhibits annually; live performances in a black box theater; a luncheon series; a wide variety of visual and performing arts classes, […]

Nick Cave: FEAT. // The Frist Center for Visual Art // Nashville, Tennesse

February 19th, 2018  |  by  |  published in January/February 2018

Nick Cave: FEAT. // The Frist Center for Visual Art // Nashville, Tennesse

My visit to Nashville in December brought me to the Frist Center for the Visual Arts for the first time since its opening in April of 2001. If you’re unfamiliar, the Frist Center inhabits one of Nashville’s historic landmarks,  the former main post office built in the early 1930’s. The building is a quite striking […]

Elysium

February 19th, 2018  |  by  |  published in January/February 2018

Elysium

“Every flower is a soul blossoming in nature.” – Guo Pei Elysium, originally a word not commonly used in our modern vernacular, has become a part of the zeitgeist of fashion and pop culture. What is Elysium? It’s a yearly artistic installation that captures the attention of Hollywood celebrities and fashion elite in Los Angeles […]

An Interview With Jessica Cannon about FAR X WIDE a New Initiative in Fundraising Fueled by Contemporary Art

February 19th, 2018  |  by  |  published in January/February 2018

An Interview With Jessica Cannon about FAR X WIDE a New Initiative in Fundraising Fueled by Contemporary Art

  I have known Jessica Cannon now for nearly two and a half years.  We met through instagram, which is the lightning rod for image based culture and the social community that revolves around it. I loved the way Jes painted landscapes, untethered as if everything might turn into snow, or as if mutated by […]

Weldon Butler’s at G. Gibson Gallery

February 19th, 2018  |  by  |  published in January/February 2018

Weldon Butler’s at G. Gibson Gallery

Weldon Butler’s show at G. Gibson Gallery reveals the hidden forces at work in Seattle. Although Weldon Butler’s artwork is in the collections of the Seattle Art Museum as well as numerous design and architectural firms, it is not well known locally and it should be. Here, he is finally brought to the foreground in […]

"HARD: Subversive Representation" at UMass Boston

February 19th, 2018  |  by  |  published in January/February 2018

"HARD: Subversive Representation" at UMass Boston

There is some danger in using the word “subversive” in the title of your show: it dares viewers to reveal prudish tendencies, risking loud proclamations that THAT isn’t so subversive, oh no, not in this day and age. In 2018, who even does a double take at a 51 ¾ x 84 inch close-up of […]

Fotofolio – Jerry Birchfield

February 19th, 2018  |  by  |  published in January/February 2018

Fotofolio - Jerry Birchfield

“Yes, They Were Made to Level” Jerry’s statement: The title, Yes, They Were Made to Level, comes from an answer to my question about the function of holes in the concrete driveway on which the exhibition was to be first installed. While concrete layers and homeowners might know perfectly well what holes in a driveway […]

Across Borders: Two Artists Respond to Nature Mystically Emily Carr at the Audain Museum, Whistler, B.C. and The Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, B.C. Charles Burchfield at The Burchfield Penney Art Center-SUNY at Buffalo State University, Buffalo, New York

February 19th, 2018  |  by  |  published in January/February 2018

Across Borders: Two Artists Respond to Nature Mystically Emily Carr at the Audain Museum, Whistler, B.C. and The Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, B.C.  Charles Burchfield at The Burchfield Penney Art Center-SUNY at Buffalo State University, Buffalo, New York

Emily Carr is one of those heroic early 20th century artists who should escape attention no more. It was her singular vision to document the magic of the British Columbian wilderness and to be the very first artist who recognized and painted the magnificence of First Nations’ peoples’ totems that existed throughout British Columbia and […]

A Brief Elaboration of a Tube: Letita Quesenberry and Aaron Rosenblum at Huff Gallery (Spalding University)

February 19th, 2018  |  by  |  published in January/February 2018

A Brief Elaboration of a Tube: Letita Quesenberry and Aaron Rosenblum at Huff Gallery (Spalding University)

A Brief Elaboration of a Tube is equal parts local soundscape fiction and monument to reflection and introspection. Huff Gallery is located in the basement of the library of Spalding University (Louisville, Kentucky); a suitable location for an installation as subversive and introspective as this. As the viewer enters the space from the main stairwell, […]

The Material Girls’ Exhibition XOXO at the Museum of Human Achievement

February 19th, 2018  |  by  |  published in January/February 2018

The Material Girls’ Exhibition XOXO at the Museum of Human Achievement

The Material Girls’ exhibition XOXO opened at the Museum of Human Achievement (MOHA) on the 19th of January and remained there until the 28th. I discovered the Material Girls through Gracelee Lawrence who is part of the collective and with whom I also attended Guilford College. Rather coincidentally we both ended up in Texas for […]

Notes on Today from Tomorrow

February 19th, 2018  |  by  |  published in January/February 2018

Notes on Today from Tomorrow

Questions of creative identity and displacement loom large for the show entitled, “Notes on Today from Tomorrow” curated by C. Miles Turner at IRL Gallery, which ran January 5th through 26th. featuring four artists of Greek identity. In Esmeralda Kosmatopoulos’ Oracle – Typing video of long-winded text messages, relying on random predictive text and garbled logic, gives way to […]

Tiger Lily Press: Working Artist Program, Brazee Art Gallery. Through February 23, 2018

February 19th, 2018  |  by  |  published in January/February 2018

Tiger Lily Press: Working Artist Program, Brazee Art Gallery.  Through February 23, 2018

In this world so chock full of the ‘printed image’ in one form or another–read: magazines, online avenues, etc..—one can easily  overlook a show of Prints at a local studio/gallery space.  “Prints” can be found everywhere, ubiquitous and constant.  But one must not confuse a mere printed image with the actual art of Printmaking.  In […]

Jenny Erpenbeck’s “Go, Went, Gone”

February 19th, 2018  |  by  |  published in January/February 2018

“Go, Went, Gone”, by German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, is one of the best novels to date about the subject of immigration/migrants/emigrants.  The title is particularly evocative, since the African migrants around whom this novel is written, are being taught the German language, simply because they have nothing else to do–they are not allowed to work–and the […]

Romain Gary’s “The Kites”

February 19th, 2018  |  by  |  published in January/February 2018

I’d never read anything by the multi-talented French writer Romain Gary before, and “The Kites” appears to be a sequel to other novels he wrote. “The Kites” is a powerful novel about The French Resistance in occupied Normandy just before and during the Nazi occupation there.  Gary himself, originally a Lithuanian Jew, left for France […]