Not Your Usual Art Opening
NOT YOUR USUAL ART OPENING Imagine an opening where people actually look at the art. An opening without cheese, crackers, or wine. And while you’re about it, an opening where everyone wears identical, almost snazzy, specially treated clear plastic glasses. Got it? You could have been at the opening earlier this month of Gravity of […]
Profile of Walt Burton
It’s probably inaccurate to call Walt Burton a gadfly, even though a run-down of his career might suggest that. He’s been a photographer, a dealer in historic photographs, a teacher, a guest lecturer, non prescription cialis from canada produced books (two of them autobiographical) and now, after two strokes and a heart attack, is making […]
"Reverse Psychology" at Thunder-Sky Gallery
“Dance?” asks one of a pair of figures in a collaborative painting by the two artists in Thunder-Sky Gallery’s current exhibition, Reverse Psychology. “Sorry, not my type,” answers the other. The two inhabit a dreamy, fragmented setting; the pop-star-like woman wears a beehive hairdo, a polka dot dress and a prosthetic arm and the man […]
Mark Daly at Cincinnati Art Galleries
Mark Daly’s engaging paintings line every wall at Cincinnati Art Galleries, treating of pleasurable aspects of life at the seaside, in New York City, on Nantucket, and points as far away as Venice. The show’s subtitle, “The Musician’s Paintbrush,” refers to Daly’s playing a mean mandolin, sometimes on Fountain Square, but overlooks his ongoing business […]
Review of “Monet in Giverny: Landscapes of Reflection” at Cincinnati Art Museum
Pleasing the crowd was not Monet’s aim in life, but after the Impressionists’ convention-flaunting beginnings had simmered into acceptance he had a following that allowed him to live a life style of his own choosing and to paint as he pleased. He had more or less always done the latter; the former had been chancy. […]
Sara Pearce's Expecting to Fly at 5th Street Gallery
A quick first take on Sara Pearce’s Expecting to Fly at 5th Street Gallery downtown shows her a words person as well as a visual artist. And no wonder; words were her trade during her Cincinnati Enquirer years, when she reported on restaurants, books, sometimes visual arts, and was a features editor. What collages require, […]
Letter From London
In London, on the day I went to both exhibitions, it seemed that everyone who wasn’t at the National Gallery’s stunning Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan had come to the Royal Academy for David Hockney’s knock-your-eye-out responses to the English landscape. Each show was at controlled maximum attendance but the crowds […]
Remembering Thom at Art Beyond Boundaries
In 1973 the art critic of the Cincinnati Post wrote that Thom Shaw “a young Cincinnatian, Art Academy trained, is possessed of a powerful line and sense of balance within his works.” An exhibition of Shaw’s black and white masonite block prints was at the Miller Gallery, then on Edwards Road. I was the art […]
Glass Ceiling? Guess Not
The paintings that mark a gradual return to across-the-board contemporary art at Marta Hewett Gallery, where glass objects have held the floor, are themselves almost glass-like. Jason Zickler’s labor-intensive works with their dense layers of clear, cured resin and paint gleam in a celebration of colorfor its own sake but hold in their depths delineations […]
Interview with Aaron Betsky on Schmidlapp Gallery Re-Installation
Tucked in the multi-page announcement of the Cincinnati Art Museum’s 2011-12 exhibition schedule is a portent of change beyond the new season. Re-installation of the Schmidlapp Gallery will be “the first step in the vision for a re-designed Cincinnati Art Museum.” To find out what’s going on, in the Schmidlapp gallery now and the rest […]