Transformed
The title of the Cincinnati Art Museum’s new exhibition showcasing the work of Dutch fashion designer Iris Van Herpen is very aptly named Transforming Fashion. Van Herpen’s creations have changed the face of fashion design while redefining what it means to be a fashion designer in the 21st century. The exhibit itself has left this […]
Report from the 2017 Contemporary Art Grand Tour: Venice, Münster, Kassel
Summer 2017 may very well be one of the most important art seasons in recent memory. In the wake of political turmoil and the record sale of a Basquiat for $110.5 million at auction, the art fairs of Europe aligned to create a Grand Tour for contemporary art devotees around the world at a moment […]
Crackling Surfaces: Anthony Luensman’s "New Works"
A slow-burning ambiguity inhabits the title of Anthony Luensman’s New Works, which now hang at the Clay Street Press Gallery in Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine district. Most plainly, the pieces are new in the sense of making their first public appearance, of being still fresh in an era when things age at breakneck pace. The offspring of […]
Painting is All Fun and Games, Joseph Winterhalter at DAAP’s Philip Meyers Jr. Memorial Gallery
Joseph Winterhalter: Painting consists of a suite of thirteen new works by this Cincinnati artist; five paintings and eight works on paper dated 2016 and 2017. For this show, Winterhalter focuses his conceptual gaze on the life and ideas of Guy Debord and Joe Strummer, men of successive generations who were both influential political […]
The Artist as Cultural Producer, a Defense of New Media, and Re-Shaping Public Attitudes about Contemporary Art
On September 12, 1940 four French boys stumbled into a complex network of caves in southwestern France. Their discovery of innumerable Paleolithic cave paintings dating to 17-15,000 BCE (Figure 1) soon led to excavations of the Lascaux cave system and in turn significantly altered scholars’ conceptions of human development.1 As evidenced by the wall paintings […]
The Pushcart of Ideas: A Conversation with Danny Brown
Aeqai’s Editor-in-Chief, Daniel Brown, recently received a Lifetime Achievement award from Marquis Who’s Who, which has been recognizing American accomplishments in a variety of fields since 1899. I sat down with Danny earlier this month and we talked informally about his perspective on the art world and some of the various roles he has had […]
When Landscape was Real Estate: “A Shared Legacy: Folk Art in America,” Cincinnati Art Museum June 10-September 3, 2017
A careful visitor to the Cincinnati Art Museum’s very substantial exhibition of paintings, sculptures, furniture, documents, implements, and advertisements of many sorts might well leave with no clearer idea about what constitutes “folk art” than when he or she came in. What, exactly, are we looking at? We’re not even sure what to call […]
“Other Wordly,” YWCA Women’s Art Gallery, through September 21, 2017
Mounting the stairs at the YWCA Women’s Art Gallery to see “Other Wordly,” the word that came to mind was “charming” as I encountered the paintings of one of three artists in the exhibition: Laine Bachman. Her hyper-realistic paintings have a fairytale quality, enchanting and entrancing. In her In the Undergrowth, (2011, acrylic on canvas, 46” […]
Angela Teng’s “To Have and to Hold” at Equinox Gallery, Vancouver, BC
Angela Teng’s To Have and to Hold opened on the 13th of May at Equinox Gallery, Vancouver, BC, and closed on the 17th of June. Teng’s monolithic crocheted paintings are composed of literal strands of acrylic paint, effectively colliding materiality and paint in the substrate of work that historically, and in many contemporary contexts too, […]
Sleeping Clowns, Screaming Color, and Transcendent Stairwells: Ugo Rondinone at the Contemporary Arts Center
Ugo Rondinone, born and based in Switzerland, is known for sculptures and installations with alternately an absence or an overabundance of color. Referred to by the artist quite literally as “night” and “day,” one oeuvre contains mostly greys, browns, and earth tones while the other—what’s on view now at the CAC—a vibrant spectrum of bright, […]