October 2018

Performing Masks: Gillian Wearing at Cincinnati Art Museum

October 28th, 2018  |  by  |  published in *, October 2018

Performing Masks: Gillian Wearing at Cincinnati Art Museum

Masks serve multiple metaphorical and social functions in the world. In ancient Rome, wax masks were cast directly from the faces of the dead, preserving the countenance beyond the life of the body. Ritual societies often employ masks spiritually, transforming the wearer into a being from the spirit world as part of a rite of […]

Preservation Par Excellence: Union Terminal Restored For Posterity

October 28th, 2018  |  by  |  published in *, October 2018

Preservation Par Excellence: Union Terminal Restored For Posterity

One of America’s most architecturally significant buildings will be reopening in November after a substantial $230 million restoration by GBBN Architects: Cincinnati’s Union Terminal.   Completed in 1933 at the height of the Great Depression, this Art Deco palatial masterpiece was dedicated to passenger railroad transportation and travel at a scale in size and exquisiteness, with […]

Karon Davis' "Muddy Water" Immerses Gallery Visitors in Flood Victims' Distress

October 28th, 2018  |  by  |  published in October 2018

Karon Davis' "Muddy Water" Immerses Gallery Visitors in Flood Victims' Distress

Karon Davis’ sculpture installation at Wilding Cran Gallery transports you into an eerie dreamlike flooded world where time has been suspended and all that remains is a melancholy sense of emptiness tinged with despair. This show’s simple evocative atmosphere poignantly distills disaster victims’ sorrows and black Americans’ larger struggles. A recent evacuee from devastating California […]

TK TK

October 28th, 2018  |  by  |  published in October 2018

TK TK

Maren Hassinger’s “Interlock” sculpture looks like a coiled stretch of rope hanging on the wall, its frayed ends a tangle of strands. As first encountered when entering the galleries for The Spirit of Things, her compact career retrospective at the Baltimore Museum of Art, it looks like something you might be able to lift off […]

Riffing on Picasso Caza Sikes Gallery, Cincinnati’s invitational exhibit Channeling Picasso

October 28th, 2018  |  by  |  published in October 2018

Riffing on Picasso Caza Sikes Gallery, Cincinnati’s invitational exhibit Channeling Picasso

Picasso’s genius as an artist hovers over the cultural landscape like a giant zeppelin. Not just in the 20th century but into our 21st   century as well, as the exhibit Channeling Picasso at Caza Sikes Gallery reveals. Any quick search of the top artists in the world for all times has Picasso as one of […]

GUITAR: The Instrument That Rocked The World

October 28th, 2018  |  by  |  published in October 2018

GUITAR: The Instrument That Rocked The World

Cincinnati Museum Center is the current host of The National Guitar Museum’s traveling exhibit designed as an ‘all ages’  display and interactive experience.  With a dual focus on the science as well as the culture of fretted instrument evolution, visitors can touch family friendly displays of the physics of string vibration as well as magnetic […]

Hubbs Review

October 28th, 2018  |  by  |  published in October 2018

Hubbs Review

As a genre, portraiture is fraught territory. The intertwining of concerns, recognition and identification, or representation in its social and cultural complexities, is always going to make for a rough ground to tread upon—to summon Wittgenstein. As old as the genre of portraiture is, and as carefully considered its forms have been, the difficulty, the […]

New World Refugees and Immigrants Photograph the Experience of a New Life in America

October 28th, 2018  |  by  |  published in October 2018

New World Refugees and Immigrants Photograph the Experience of a New Life in America

University of Cincinnati Clermont College Park National Bank Art Gallery September 4 – October 31, 2018 Park National Bank Art Gallery September 4 – October 31, 2018 Artists: Luke Kellett, Sadiq Onanuga, Bhim Rai, Bhimla Rai, and Lourdes Santos Curator: Kent Krugh nor·mal /ˈnôrməl/ adjective:  conforming to a standard; usual, typical, or expected. Upon stepping […]

“Jewish Cincinnati: A Photographic History” J. Miles Wolf’s Exhibit at The Skirball Museum Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion

October 28th, 2018  |  by  |  published in October 2018

“Jewish Cincinnati:  A Photographic History” J. Miles Wolf’s Exhibit at The Skirball Museum Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion

Local photographer J. Miles Wolf delivered several unique facets in his exhibit “Jewish Cincinnati:  A Photographic History” at Cincinnati Skirball Museum on the campus of Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion, running from October 11, 2018 to January 6, 2019. Early days of Jewish congregational life in Cincinnati are depicted in a style […]

Profile of Robert Flischel

October 28th, 2018  |  by  |  published in October 2018

Profile of Robert Flischel

Robert Flischel is someone who can’t get enough of looking.  He speaks of seeing abstraction in porches, in tool heads, in 300-year-old pavement – “all the lines” – and says he learned long ago that “the body is an abstract composition.”  He talks of “the series of lines that work underneath the picture’s composition within […]

Jens Rosenkrantz illustrates the road-tripper’s world-view in “Small Towns and Long Views”

October 28th, 2018  |  by  |  published in October 2018

Jens Rosenkrantz illustrates the road-tripper’s world-view in “Small Towns and Long Views”

Road trips: an integral part of the ethos of modern man. If you haven’t taken a character-building, eye-opening road trip yourself, you’ve surely travelled — at least in spirit — with Jack Kerouac, Christopher McCandless, or Chevy Chase on their misadventures on the open road. There is a reason this story is played out over […]

Fotofolio – Audra J. Shields

October 28th, 2018  |  by  |  published in October 2018

Fotofolio - Audra J. Shields

“These are my words, essay 1” Audra’s statement: I am very comfortable in solitude and silence and have always been drawn to the more unfrequented, quiet places. My photographs are captured during the solitary moments at diverse set of places. Isolation can happen anywhere, on the prairies, in a cemetery or even a city street. […]

A Touching Tribute

October 28th, 2018  |  by  |  published in October 2018

A Touching Tribute

When people pass away, there’s always a reverent sense of loss, thinking about how the world will never be the same without them in it. When a fashion designer dies, especially suddenly and seemingly out of nowhere, many often think about the art that would have been created … what could have been. We saw […]

Film Review: "Gunshi Kanbei," A Saga of Power and Betrayal in Feudal Japan

October 28th, 2018  |  by  |  published in October 2018

Film Review: "Gunshi Kanbei," A Saga of Power and Betrayal in Feudal Japan

You likely haven’t heard of taiga dramas, and even more likely, have never watched one. Let me employ my first contribution as AEQAI’s film critic towards attempting to remedy that, for these classic yearlong Japanese television programs deserve far more attention than they receive in the U.S. Taiga dramas: a brief introduction Not to be […]

Daniel Mason’s “The Winter Soldier”

October 28th, 2018  |  by  |  published in October 2018

World War I continues to inspire many a novelist, partly because both the social and political structures of Europe died in the trenches of that war, ushering in the modern era, the 20th century, the most barbaric recorded in human history.  Daniel Mason’s “The Winter Soldier” is a superb addition to such literature.  Reading either […]

Stephen Markley’s “Ohio”

October 28th, 2018  |  by  |  published in October 2018

The novelist Stephen Markley, author of the new book “Ohio”, is new to me.  “Ohio” describes life in a small town in Northeastern Ohio, where all the industries have left, drugs are rampant and no one has much to do. Markley’s novel revolves around the lives of  a number of high school students, mainly juniors […]

Barbara Kingsolver’s “The Unsheltered”

October 28th, 2018  |  by  |  published in October 2018

A new novel by Barbara Kingsolver, one of America’s finest writers, is a real literary event, so I ordered  “The Unsheltered” the day it was released.  (Her last two novels were first on my “best fiction of the year lists). “Unsheltered”, however, disappoints, more so because Kinsolver’s writing about some very important, topical themes.  Things […]