Historical Materialism and Survey: Malcolm Cochran’s History Lessons
The Weston Art Gallery in the Aronoff Center features three works by American installation artist Malcolm Cochran: History Lessons (2011), Requiem (2018), and Washing Feet (1996-97). History Lessons features a looming fixture – a colossal poplar, steel, and polished whitewash stainless steel mirror. The base of the mirrors’ bracket is reminiscent of a sleek vessel, […]
(Im)material Culture, Alienation Affect, and the Jeffrey Cortland Jones’ Curious Social Experiment
Traversing the Art Academy of Cincinnati’s galleries via the looming, metallic stairwell, Covergys Gallery is perhaps the easiest to miss between the larger Pearlman and Childlaw Galleries. A sweeping horizontal pocket within a wall, the second floor gallery is at once invitational and necessarily participatory – it simply can not be ignored, as it effectively […]
Kit-Bashing and Assembling Political Art: Glenn Kaino: A Shout within a Storm at The Contemporary Arts Center, November 17, 2017-April 22, 2018
One of the least sculptural of the wondrous works at the mid-career retrospective of sculptor Glenn Kaino’s work at the Contemporary Arts Center is a two-dimensional graphic that looks like an ancient map that has been housed in an archive with a leaky roof. Shapes and outlines are beautiful but discontinuous; areas that might represent […]
Review of Jens Jensen at Cincinnati Art Galleries
Cincinnati Art Galleries has managed to represent the estate of the late modernist painter Jens Jensen, and an exhibition of this artist’s work is currently on view at Cincinnati Art Galleries downtown. It’s difficult to describe the delight and joy at looking at an excellent modernist in today’s highly politicized and digitalized postmodern world: Jensen’s […]
Bridging Inter-Spaces and Navigating Contemporary Feminist Art
Planned prior to Trump’s presidency, the 21C Museum Hotel’s The Future is Female displays a myriad of international female artists – ranging in their modalities and sociopolitical concerns – whose works bridge third and fourth-wave feminist concerns. Built on the foreground of second-wave feminism’s civil rights advances, the third-wave occupies subjectivity and inclusive diversity, […]
Profile, Linda Schwartz
“I like artists and scientists,” Linda Schwartz told me. We were seated at the dining table in her art-filled house, with tea and a barely touched plate of cookies, talking about her career in art. The other two occupants of the house, a pair of small but stocky, very vocal black dogs, had been shushed […]
Men Looking: “Albrecht Durer: The Age of Reformation and Renaissance” Cincinnati Art Museum, November 17-February 11, 2018
The Reformation had its 500th anniversary this year. A movement that changed the ways Europeans read, worshipped, traded, and slaughtered each other, it also had the potential to change the nature of art. In part, this is because the various Protestant churches that sought to reform the Catholic hegemony tended, among other things, to take […]
Frank Herrmann, Slayer of Dragons Solo Exhibition, "New Works", Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery in the Aronoff Center for the Arts December 1, 2017 through January 28, 2018
Painter extraordinaire Frank Herrmann means what he says. In a 2016 interview, Herrmann stated: “Never wait for the great idea or wait for the perfect moment when the work has stalled. You have to work through those moments, that may be depressing but just keep working.”1 Herrmann takes his own advice; his vivid new exhibition […]
Étranger Résident: La Collection Marin Karmitz (Resident Alien: the Marin Karmitz Collection), La maison rouge, Paris, October 15, 2017 – January 21, 2018
Bittersweet is a term often used to describe simultaneous positive and negative feelings. What I felt recently upon leaving the exhibition Étranger Résident: La Collection Marin Karmitz at Paris’ La mason rouge requires a stronger term, something connoting being both energized and enervated, for quite different reasons. Since it opened ten years ago La mason rouge [lower […]
“A Sense of Home: New Quilts by Heather Jones,” Taft Museum of Art, through February 18, 2018.
“A Sense of Home: New Quilts by Heather Jones” complements the Taft Museum of Art’s “Elegant Geometry: British and American Mosaic Patchwork Quilts” exhibition. (See aeqai.com, November 2017.) Jones sees modern quilting as “look(ing) at traditional quilting and then do(ing) its own thing.” 1 For this quilt maker, “its own thing” marries tradition and contemporary abstract art in quilts […]