July 2022


Aeqai: July 2022 – Editor’s comments
Editor’s Comments. June 2022. The summer season is visiting upon us both the glories of nature and its furies. In these turbulent times of war, rumors of war, disasters and upheaval, one might enjoy a reasonable respite in the columns posted here that invoke the timelessness of nature’s seasonal cycles.


Michael Scott: Preternatural
What’s in a number? We learn to count. But beyond counting begins an associative relationship with this abstract process. There is 1, 2 sides, trinity, 4 corners, five fingers (counting the thumb), 6 swans-a-swimming, seven days to the week, figure eight’s, “number 9… number 9” and then, we add a zero – 10.


Contemporary Art Center: Creativity center and UnMuseum
Contemporary Arts Center Opens Creativity Center. By Laura A. Hobson. A new horizon opens at the Contemporary Arts Center, 44 E. Sixth Street, on Oct. 8 after seven years of planning. Begun in 2021, construction for a new Creativity Center will be finished in late August. During September, staff will install nine works of art.


Visualizing the world of Octavia Butler
By Josh Beckelhimer. Shaper of God is on display through October 4, 2022. CalArts’ REDCAT gallery displays a small but notable exhibition called Shaper of God by American Artist. Artist, who legally changed their name in 2013, aptly de-centers what might be their own artistic style.


Van Gogh and European Landscape
Van Gogh and European Landscapes is what the museum calls a “Focus Exhibition”: a small, intimate affair designed to encourage us to look more carefully. It’s a nice strategy and allows curators to use just a few borrowed works as the basis for a program.


Toshie Japanese Woodblock Prints
Hiroshige. Kuniyoshi. Hokusai. These are a few of the revered masters of Japan’s most celebrated era of woodblock printmaking. Active in the 19th century, these artists’ works –featuring landscape views and the “pleasures of the floating world”–were collected avidly not only in their home country, but abroad.


Saad Ghosn: Scream and Beyond
A Call for Change.
Can art be a form of activism or is its power limited to the purely aesthetic realm? While artists and aestheticians continue to debate this, artist Saad Ghosn firmly believes that art has the ability to create a better world.
June 2022


Art in the Garden Highlights Many Media in Augusta, Kentucky
“Art enables us to find ourselves and love ourselves at the same time,” said Thomas Merton, American Trappist monk, writer, theologian, poet and scholar (1915 – 1968). His words ring true with many art events and institutions in the Tri-State.


Laura Hill Chapman: a Memorial
Laura Hill Chapman: a Memorial
By Marlene Steele, gently edited by Mark Schlachter
Born April 24, 1935, in Miami, Florida, a resident of Cincinnati since 1970, passed away at her residence on August 17, 2021


Art in Bloom
Spring and flowers go hand-in-hand, but flowers in art are nearly as closely linked. Today of course, the subject tends to make art lovers think first of the Impressionists: everyone knows about Monet’s marvelous gardens in Giverny and his seductively beautiful waterlily paintings. But flowers have enchanted painters since at least Roman times. We have Vesuvius to thank for preserving some very early murals featuring the gardens of Pompeii and Herculaneum.


Vital Cotton: Kevin Beasley’s On Site
Vital Cotton: Kevin Beasley’s On SiteBy Josh Beckelhimer As I walked the sidewalk toward the Regen Projects gallery building off busy SantaMonica Boulevard, I heard


Cherished: Visionaries & Voices
Pictures hung (centered) at 57 inches
Audience kept at a distance
Important art in glass cases
Keep everything quiet
Lights must be blinding
This is the manifesto I imagine persisting through museums across forever. It creates the very felt culture that leaves gallery goers wondering how to engage with art when such measures have been taken to protect it from them.


Space Considered: A Review of Remembrancer at Indian Hill Gallery
Described as one who both reminds of something and is also a reminder itself, Remembrancer is the title of the current exhibition at the Indian Hill Gallery. It places the work of Lisa Merida-Paytes, Robert Pulley, and Patrice Trauth in a manner that allows consideration of scale, space, light, materiality, and the self.


Breaking Water: Exploring approaches to the subject of water, liquidity, and feminism
Breaking Water: Exploring approaches to the subject of water, liquidity, and feminism
Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Ohio
On view through August 14th 2022


“Todd Hido: The Poetry of Darkness” & “Francisco de Goya: Los Disparates”
The University of Kentucky’s Art Museum is a two story jewelbox of a home for art. It is small, well-lit, and was—when I visited—unusually concerned with encouraging visitors to see behind the curtains of what an art museum, of whatever size, did and why. There was a small exhibit about the sorts of questions a museum asked about the objects it collected and a larger show about how the museum contextualized its new acquisitions in terms of the objects it already owned.


Aeqai: April/ May 2022 – Editor’s comments
We have several exciting reviews for you to enjoy in our Spring double posting!
Jon Kamholtz brings us two exhibits from the University of Kentucky Art Museum: Goya’s enigmatic series of etchings Los Disparates from the museum’s permanent collection and the titillating allure of Tom Hido: The Poetry of Darkness.
March 2022


Kennedy Heights Arts Center: New Exhibits and New Programs
Kennedy Heights Arts Center offers new exhibits and programs continuing its outreach and diversity mission, according to Executive Director Ellen Muse-Lindeman. For example, Juneteenth Cincinnati


Against the Received View of Art History: Curatorship as Genealogical Meaning-Making
Shin Gallery’s newest exhibition, Amalgamation: Celebrating 10 Years of Shin Gallery, on view until April 23, 2022, is perhaps one of the most unique gallery shows I have seen. This is due to both the exhibition’s a-chronological curatorship and the opportunity to view old masters and so-called “blue chip” art historical bastions alongside “outsider artists,” enterprising young artists, and rediscovered artists alike. A


A Thought Is a River at the Carnegie
The group exhibition, A Thought Is a River at the Carnegie (Covington, KY) gathers and places both sculpture and painting in collective relationships to one another. Some works appear to be excavated from deep within the earth, while others are industrial and integrate artificial structuring. Collectively, the work undulates the passage of time; their materials reference an array of seemingly found or discarded objects, against smooth, gleaming forms that peer into the future. The exhibition’s play between these works contrasts one another through the possibilities of utopia and dystopia, diverging paths through their approach to material and its construction.


The Transforming Touch: “MARK: About the Artist’s Hand” at Manifest Gallery, March 4-April 1, 2022
The Cincinnati Art Museum is featuring a traveling exhibition of the work of a Black photography collective formed in New York City in the early 60’s.


March Issue of Aeqai Online
The Cincinnati Art Museum features two wonderful groundbreaking exhibitions.


Icons of Nature and History, a legacy exhibition of David Driskell, Cincinnati Art Museum, Feb. 25–May 15, 2022.
The Cincinnati Art Museum is featuring a traveling exhibition of the work of a Black photography collective formed in New York City in the early 60’s.


Working Together: The Photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop
The Cincinnati Art Museum is featuring a traveling exhibition of the work of a Black photography collective formed in New York City in the early 60’s.