Thomas Hieronymus Towhey: Breaking Out the Magic Monkey, a 40-Year Retrospective
Caza Sikes is currently presenting a 30-piece retrospective of works by prominent Cincinnati artist Tom Towhey. The show spans the last 40 years of his appealing and unique work. It is a vibrant show, filled with a broad range of new and older borrowed pieces, beginning with images for Gibson Greetings, Inc., a Cincinnati based […]
Kate Oh Gallery: The Korean Archetype
Kate Oh’s Gallery’s new exhibition, The Korean Archetype, on view from March 1 until March 11, 2022, introduces the stridently feminist work of Miky (Yoohyun) Kim to a wider audience. I characterize Kim’s work as “stridently feminist” even though Kim is not interested in veridical or representational indices that directly cull femininity nor straightforwardly espouse […]
City of Cinema: Paris 1850-1907 – Historicizing Visual Forms
Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s “City of Cinema: Paris 1850-1907” exhibition, places us squarely in the middle of the era. There are a handful of projections on the walls, mostly consisting of films by the famous Lumiere Brothers’ cinematographs. My favorite depicts Les Halles, the grand markets of a past Paris. Les Halles provided […]
SOS ART Youth Exhibition
Art is a potent vehicle of change for it affects both the maker and the viewer in a manner that no other medium can. SOS ART Cincinnati recognizes this and for the last 19 years has been using art as a tool for social change. One of the important activities of the organization is the […]
Taft Museum Celebrates 200 Years of its Historic House with a Renovation
Two hundred years have passed, and the historic house at the Taft Museum of Art still stands. In 1932 the Taft Museum of Art opened with the personal art collection of Anna Sinton Taft and Charles Phelps Taft. Now, the museum, located in this historic house is undergoing an extensive preservation project. The house was […]
January Issue of Aeqai Online
Greetings in 2022! A new beginning on many fronts.This month, Aeqai is offering several excellent reviews of regional shows for our readership to consider. The fierce poster design of Luba Lukova: Designing Justice, featured at the Freedom Center Skirball Gallery, is evaluated by William Messer. Internationally lauded, Lukova’s iconic images are in the forefront of […]
Articulating Ideas: the Poster Art of Luba Lukova (Luba Lukova: Designing Justice at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, Cincinnati, to March 22, 2022)
The history of poster art and/or the “art poster” is surprisingly short, beginning with French lithographers in the 1880s, often produced by artists trained as painters, yet created for commercial ends: advertising a product, place, service or event. From this point of view, not much has changed. But posters have also been used to express […]
Invitations to Emergence: “The Regional” at Contemporary Arts Center, December 10, 2021-March 20, 2022
I would say that in my experience, The Contemporary Arts Center has not been the sort of museum much interested in exploring the tastes and talents of Cincinnati, let alone the Midwest at large. To do that might require, for example, regular curated exhibits of the artists of the region, and they haven’t done that. […]
More Than a Starry Night: ‘Through Vincent’s Eyes: Van Gogh and His Sources’ Columbus Museum of Art, November 2021
Seeing ‘Through Vincent’s Eyes: Van Gogh and His Sources’ that opened in November 2021 at Columbus Museum of Art is stunning for its insights into Van Gogh’s world, literally. At a time when this beloved artist has been Disneyfied by the blockbuster Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience which is a 20,000 square foot light and […]
But the Box has 6
Manifest Gallery’s current exhibition The Five Themes Project is an expansive undertaking; not unlike re-inventing the Whole Earth Catalog. This time, however, it’s not about self-sufficiency and ecology but perceptions about the world and mankind’s relationship with it. The five themes – Wilderness→ Rural→ Suburban→ Urban→ Post-Urban – are installed as a somewhat chronological survey […]