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 Annabel Osberg | published in October 2017
Are there any media that Eduardo Sarabia doesn’t employ? The Guadalajara-based, Los Angeles-born artist’s current show features ceramics, sculptures, drawings, paintings, murals, photos, performance documentation, and a video, which together add up to an engrossing installation addressing the fantasies, violence, and symbolism of narco-culture. Sarabia’s first hometown solo show in almost 10 years and part […]
October 29th, 2017 | by Amy Bogard | published in October 2017
woke – (adjective) \wōk\ : aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice). -Merriam Webster Dictionary (online) There is a lot of talk in the world lately of people finally awakening to the plight of their fellow human beings. With technological ease of instantly conveyed information […]
October 29th, 2017 | by Joelle Jameson | published in October 2017
This fall, two special exhibitions among the vast collections at Wellesley College’s Davis Museumare especially worth the 20-mile drive from Boston: Eddie Martinez’s “Ants at a Picknic” and “Life on Paper: Contemporary Prints from South Africa.” These shows are opposite in a few ways: one featured artist versus many, painting on a large scale versus […]
October 29th, 2017 | by Karen Chambers | published in October 2017
“There are three ports in the city of El Paso. They operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In 2011, more that 3.6 million passenger vehicles, 4.2 million pedestrians, and 300,000 commercial vehicles crossed into Ciudad Juárez through the three bridges. It was a slow day when I walked by.” Jens Rosenkrantz (Photo […]
October 29th, 2017 | by Megan Bickel | published in October 2017
Paul Mpagi Sepuya was born in San Bernardino, California in 1982. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles. Sepuya is known for his extensive photographs of domesticated scenes of friends, fellow artists, and lovers. His photographs vary anywhere from portraiture and figure studies to photographs of collaged elements from previous studies that have been […]
October 29th, 2017 | by Chelsea Borgman | published in October 2017
Tiago Rodrigues sits on a stool in the center of the stage. He has five chairs arranged on either side of him. Flipping through a book, he casually glances up as the audience shuffles in. They settle and he looks up at the staff to confirm it is time to start the show. He is […]
October 29th, 2017 | by Kent Krugh | published in October 2017
“Dramatis Personae” Tami’s statement: Dramatis Personae is an homage to the old masters: their brilliant use of light and the raw emotion of the characters portrayed. Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Vermeer… I grew up captivated by their stunning works, found hanging from museum walls but also in art books at home. I watched my father study each […]
October 29th, 2017 | by Susan Byrnes | published in October 2017
You may have heard of Anila Quayyum Agha from ArtPrize, the city-wide international art exhibition and competition held annually in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The exhibition, now approaching its 10th year, provides artists with an opportunity to win a cash prize of $200,000. Two prizes of this size are awarded – one by a jury of […]
October 29th, 2017 | by Stewart Maxwell | published in October 2017
Situated at the southwest corner of Elm and 12th Streets on the recently renovated Washington Park, the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company’s new Otto M. Budig Theater is another important cultural/performing arts addition to the renaissance of Over-the-Rhine. Across the street from the School for the Creative and Performing Arts (S.C.P.A.) and a few doors removed from […]
October 29th, 2017 | by Laura Hobson | published in October 2017
The Harriet Beecher Stowe house is located at 2950 Gilbert Ave. in Walnut Hills. The 5,000 square-foot house was completed in 1833. It is an historic house museum and cultural site focused on Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The house itself reveals a rich history of 185 years of social activism and African-American history. […]
October 29th, 2017 | by Cynthia Kukla | published in October 2017
Incredibly, the Takashi Murakami exhibition officially broke the David Bowie attendance record of 193,000, making it the all-time highest attended exhibition in the Museum of Contemporary Art-Chicago’s 50-year history. Numerous prints Murakami had available for the MCA Museum Store were sold out, including an $11,000 print in an edition of 100. So the popular and commercial successes of TM […]
October 29th, 2017 | by Jonathan Kamholtz | published in October 2017
Though the show is titled “Wild About Wildflowers,” the Lloyd’s current show is constrained in many ways. It is a truly small exhibit, taking up little more than a half dozen standing cases, though it is also an absorbing show: there was a guy who was there when I arrived still looking at things when […]
October 29th, 2017 | by Karen Chambers | published in October 2017
You enter a different world when you walk into the Marta Hewett Gallery. The exhibition is “Anima and Animus/Julia Oldham & Casey Riordan Millard.” To navigate it, I needed to understand what anima and animus meant, yet another example of my spotty education. Gallerist Marta Hewett helped me there. In an October 21, 2017, email, Hewett wrote: Carl Jung […]
October 29th, 2017 | by Jane Durrell | published in October 2017
In case you haven’t noticed, figurative painting is alive and well and the absorbing interest of any number of young artists. Two such artists are recipients of the 2017/18 Manifest Artist Residency award and are currently established in their respective studios at the Cincinnati gallery. We talked with each of them for this issue of […]
October 29th, 2017 | by Daniel Burr | published in October 2017
The three artists in this elegantly mounted show at the YWCA Women’s Art Gallery produce powerful effects on a small scale. The visual appeal of their work results from the details they apply to each piece with meticulous care. However, the natural, at times rough-hewn, manner in which they approach color, shape, and texture gives […]
October 29th, 2017 | by Martha Dunham | published in October 2017
The Museum of Northwest Art (MoNA) is showing a retrospective of Mel Katz’ work dating back to 1966. Concurrently at Russo Lee Gallery, more recent work by Katz is on display. The museum show includes a video and drawings that show traces of erasure, as well as more three-dimensional works, providing an avenue to understand […]
October 29th, 2017 | by Marlene Steele | published in October 2017
The extensive works of James R. Hopkins and Edna Boies Hopkins are featured in their respective exhibitions in the Galleries of the Springfield Museum of Art. This is a unique opportunity to acquaint yourself with a husband and wife whose individual expressive works reverently reveal life in the American heartland. “Faces of the Heartland” […]
October 29th, 2017 | by Regan Brown | published in October 2017
“It is a playful analogy to the artist community since it implies the inevitable incorporation of the avant garde into mainstream culture. We creatives are the Aequi.” ?from the Aeqai “about-us” page. “All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.” Guy Debord, ”The Society of the Spectacle” “your golden hair Margareta your ashen […]
October 29th, 2017 | by Will Newman | published in October 2017
David Gerena’s show, History Of Graffiti Pt 1, is displayed now at Cincinnati Art Underground in Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine neighborhood. It chronicles his early work in street art and graffiti through his current oil on canvas works in a style he terms figurative graffiti. Gerena, who grew up in the Bronx, is considered one of the pioneers […]
October 29th, 2017 | by Megan Bickel | published in October 2017
As a preface, I’m writing this piece whilst questioning my intent in writing it. This exhibition had some serious flaws. On one hand, Expectations was presented like a body of student work, t-pinned artist statements printed on printer paper and all; and the gallery wasn’t big enough for two collections of work, let alone two […]
October 29th, 2017 | by Laura Hobson | published in October 2017
The Cincinnati Art Museum offered Art in Bloom October 26 – 29. Over 5,000 visitors made the trip to see the pairing of artwork with floral arrangements. The celebration is in its ninth year and offered biennially. For four days, visitors could see significant works of art chosen by the curators from the museum’s permanent […]
October 29th, 2017 | by Joelle Jameson | published in October 2017
The final moments of the recording of Zhang Huan’s performance piece, “To Raise the Level of a Fish Pond,” make the piece as delightful as it is effectively critical of the economic conditions for low-wage laborers. It features 40 Chinese workers known as liudongrenkou, or “floating population,” who raise the water level by one meter […]
October 29th, 2017 | by Laura Hobson | published in October 2017
A new gallery opened in Over-the-Rhine at 1121 Walnut St. Gallery OTR, which opened on July 28, 2017, is owned and managed by Mark Byron, a professional photographer, and passionate advocate for the OTR neighborhood, where he both works and lives. Gallery OTR joins other galleries which have opened recently in Greater Cincinnati. Byron will […]
October 29th, 2017 | by Maxwell Redder | published in October 2017
Good Dang Lullabies in my head humming while by myself while you’re upstairs in your magic suit two sizes too big for you I know you’ll grow into it. All the busyness addressing us like we’re important something I’m still getting used to and you’re dang good at being cute, cause you’re […]
October 29th, 2017 | by Daniel Brown | published in October 2017
Jesmyn Ward, whose National Book Award winning novel “Savage the Bones”, took the literary world by storm, has returned with her equally powerful new novel “Sing, Unburied, Sing”. Centering almost entirely around one African-American family living nearly self-sufficiently in a tiny town in Mississippi–the author herself lives in such a town–the novel rotates points of […]
October 29th, 2017 | by Daniel Brown | published in October 2017
A new novel by Alice McDermott is always a major literary event in America. The territory that she covers in most of her novels, Catholic America, mainly on the East Coast, from the twenties and thirties to the present, is what she mainly writes about, and she does that as well as anyone alive in […]
October 29th, 2017 | by Daniel Brown | published in October 2017
Celeste Ng’s new novel, Little Fires Everywhere, is the worst, most offensive novel I’ve read in a very, very long time. Much praised for her earlier novels, Ng, one would have hoped, continue to show her growing promise as a writer, but Little Fires Everywhere is little more than a revenge fantasy novel on the […]
October 29th, 2017 | by Daniel Brown | published in October 2017
Jennifer Egan’s back with her eminently readable, if flawed, new novel “Manhattan Beach”. She’s one of America’s absolutely finest younger writers, along with Rachel Cusk, Rachel Kushner, Nathan Englander (some might include Celeste Ng in this group). What all these writers have in common is an uncanny ability to imagine and to write; their prose […]
