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. The Kamoinge Workshop emerged in1963 when a Harlem-based group of black photographers came together to share friendship and technical knowledge and, most importantly, a mutual philosophy that photography could […]
Icons of Nature and History, a legacy exhibition of David Driskell, Cincinnati Art Museum, Feb. 25–May 15, 2022.
David Driskell, an acclaimed African American artist and educator, was born in 1931 in Georgia during the beginning of the Depression – the worldwide economic downturn that began in 1929 and lasted ten years. It was the longest and most severe economic depression the world ever experienced. Imagine how this awful event influenced Driskell’s life […]
The Transforming Touch: “MARK: About the Artist’s Hand” at Manifest Gallery, March 4-April 1, 2022
Manifest Gallery is not shy about being ambitious in its prompts for exhibitions, and few shows that I have seen there are more ambitious than “MARK: About the Artist’s Hand.” The mark is very close to the molecule of art. Many of the questions and ideas raised by this show could readily be applied to […]
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 […]
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,” […]
The River and the Thread, Indian Hill Gallery
How do we define a grid? When does an artist find it desirable to exploit the grid’s rigid constraints? And when is it more interesting to modify or even reject them? This exhibit educates about forms and formats of fiber art. Immediately catching the gallery visitor’s eye are two black-and-white weavings that their makers call […]
Looking In and Looking Out: “Summerfair Select: An Exhibition of Winners” at the Weston Art Gallery, January 28-April 3, 2022
Summerfair began in 1968, more than fifty years ago, as something of a street fair that spilled over into all the available spaces in Mt. Adams. It became more professionalized (juries and the like) in its first move to Coney Island, and then in the 1970s it moved to the Riverfront area, which is where […]
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 […]