“Tell Me What’s Beyond the Levee”: “The Levee: A Photographer in the American South” at the Cincinnati Art Museum, October 5, 2019-February 2, 2020
Sohrab Hura is a young Indian photographer (b. 1981) who in 2016 came to the cities, towns, and countryside that stretch along the Mississippi River from Cairo, Illinois, down to the Gulf of Mexico, looking to understand a section of the United States that was profoundly unfamiliar to him. Along the way, he wanted to […]
Semiotic Overloads and Proxy Dimensions: Joomi Chung and John Humphries at the Weston Art Gallery
Changes of shape, new forms, are the theme which my spirit impels me now to recite. Inspire me, O gods, and spin me a thread from the world’s beginning… —Ovid, Prologue to Metamorphoses[1] In Joomi Chung’s Image Space/Memory Space, there are mountains and motorbikes, traffic cones and tree branches, satellites and skyscrapers, flocks of birds […]
Henry Lawrence Faulkner
The bohemian life and creative mission that drove Henry Lawrence Faulkner encompassed more than visual art, but it is perhaps his stylized and sometimes colorist work that most indelibly left an impression on the world. Extraordinarily prolific, Faulkner left behind more than 5,000 works. He was both a romantic and pragmatic, at times knowing that […]
Art of Ernest Blumenschein
The Dayton Art Institute continues its celebration of its Centennial year by highlighting the career of one of Dayton’s most successful 20th century artists: Ernest Blumenschein. This exhibition of 15 works examines his love of the spontaneous sketch, his stature as a fine oil painter and his remarkable contribution to his community in the American […]
Best Fiction of 2019
2019 was an exceptionally fine year for new fiction. My list of the best fiction of this year was difficult to make, as so many excellent choices are available. In reading other such lists (“The New York Times Book Review”; “The New Yorker”, NPR, Amazon, amongst others), I noted that these lists have few novels […]
Drifting and Digging: Birgit Jensen’s Flugblätter at Clay Street Press Gallery
In Birgit Jensen’s Flugblätter (Flying Letters), nothing settles comfortably into place. The purportedly autonomous artist ruptures into the collective. The collective expands and contracts like a breathing organism, dismissing its own consistency with Whitmanesque abandon. The radically distributed artist takes transformation as its topic, working paradoxically to make temporal processes concrete, all while inhabiting the […]
“DARK: Shadows, Nightscapes, and Darkness,” Manifest Gallery, through December 6, 2019
“Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness.” A single sentence from Anne Frank encapsulates Manifest Gallery’s “DARK: Shadows, Nightscapes, and Darkness” exhibition. From a pool of’ 359 works by 103 artists representing five countries, 30 states, and the District of Columbia, the blind jury selected 17 pieces by 15 […]
Robert and Chuck’s grand adventure: “Into the Wilderness” Eisele Gallery, Cincinnati
Leave your comfort zone and imagine trekking into the wilds of Wyoming with artists Chuck Marshall and Robert Hagberg. Descriptive plein air paintings, several of them executed in the wilds, are contemporary interpretations of Wyoming wilderness currently exhibited at Eisele Gallery. The concept that inspired the “Into the Wilderness” experience of Hagberg and Marshall, was […]
Castanets and Castas: “Treasures from the Hispanic Society Museum and Library” at the Cincinnati Art Museum, October 25, 2019-January 19, 2020
This is a big show with a big story to tell, one that both celebrates and critically examines what it means to be Hispanic. The show focuses on, but is not limited to, European Spain, which it follows through many of its incarnations: an ancient civilization, a Roman outpost, a Christian outpost, a center of […]
Paul Mpagi Sepuya at the Blaffer Art Museum
“Yes, I understand these,” I might have said to myself on my first encounter with Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s photographs at Houston’s Blaffer Art Museum. In the Los Angeles photographer’s first major museum survey, arriving from the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis, fragments of figures bend and tangle against cool walls and in dark rooms. […]