“Kimono: Refashioning Contemporary Style,” Cincinnati Art Museum, through September 15, 2019
As I whipped through “Kimono: Refashioning Contemporary Style” 1 at the Cincinnati Art Museum, several things struck me. First was the aptness of it title, which quite succinctly sums up its basic thesis that the kimono has inspired Western clothing design through its form and surface decoration beginning in the 1870s and continuing to the present. The […]
Britni Bicknaver Channels Access and Atmosphere in Cinema of Memory
Britni Bicknaver has had a very busy year. The Cincinnati native has exhibited new works in group shows at the Weston Art Gallery (Cincinnati, OH) and The Carnegie (Covington, KY) through the spring and summer of 2019, before opening her solo show Cinema of Memory at Reverb Art + Design (Cincinnati, OH) on August 7. […]
Kevin White Retrospective
Nestled in the niche neighborhood of Northside, Visionaries + Voices (V+V) is home to Kevin White, a contemporary and founding artist of the ability-forward hub. A solo-show of his work to date, Kevin White Retrospective catalogs the oeuvre of the prolific and present-day artist. Installations, paintings, and live-art comprise the show, as well as photographs […]
Liminal Water: Weightless at the Miller Gallery
Weightless by Christy Lee Rogers Through September 7 The Miller Gallery 2715 Erie Ave Cincinnati, OH 45208 “What lifts you up?” asks the prompt for Christy Lee Rogers photography exhibit Weightless, which appears at Cincinnati’s Miller Gallery. It’s a question that met my curiosity with an initial skepticism, as it’s a question that could’ve have […]
“Moon Museum”: Celebrating Artistic Contributions to the Space Program
The moon, Earth’s singular satellite, has fascinated the earthbound human mind for thousands of years. The 50th anniversary of the successful 240,000 mile journey of American astronauts to the moon occurred in mid-July, 2019. Especially noted for the first steps on the lunar surface are native Ohioans Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. Their historic journey […]
Posthuman Design: Creatures: When Species Meet at the Contemporary Arts Center
Creatures: When Species Meet locates creative processes less in the imagination of singular artists than in the encounter between living things, their negotiation of each other’s habits and desires through media both traditional and emergent. As the show catalogs those processes, it disrupts humanist views of nonhuman animals, defending against their reduction to symbols within […]
Does Size Matter?: “Magnitude Seven: 15th Annual Exhibition of Small Works” at Manifest Gallery, May 31-June 28, 2019
“Magnitude Seven” is neither the oldest nor the smallest show of small things in town, a distinction that probably goes to the Art Academy’s “Minumental” show every fall, which has run for over thirty years, and requires that each work be no larger than two inches in any direction. Jason Franz, Founding Executive Director and […]
“L’ Affichomania: The Passion for French Posters,” Taft Museum of Art, through September 14, 2019
Sometimes it takes time for the aesthetic worth of something to be recognized. This most definitely was not the case with French advertising handbills AKA posters from its Golden Age, from 1880 to the late 1890s. They immediately attracted a passionate bunch of collectors, earning them the sobriquet affichomaniaques–poster maniacs. “L’ Affichomania: The Passion for French […]
Hilna Af Klint at The Guggenheim: Metaphysics as it Patrols Mortality’s Borders
The Guggenheim’s spring retrospective of the seminal Swedish painter, Hilma Af Klint, has, naturally, evoked a multitude of art critics and visual culture scholars who laud her radical abstraction which, at the beginning of the 20th century, preceded Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian. Yet, where much attention has been given to the symbology and motifs riddling Klint’s […]
From the Mythic Nile to the Mighty Ohio
“Egypt: The Time of the Pharaohs” Cincinnati Museum Center, 1301 Western Avenue Cincinnati, OH Through August 18, 2019 Step into a time when civilization grew along the Nile, pyramids dotted the skyline and people believed gods walked among us…… From the mythic Nile to the mighty Ohio, “Egypt: The Time of Pharaohs” made its U.S. […]