Caroline Wells Chandler: Crocheting Utopia
This essay hopes to provide readers a theoretical analysis of the queer abstraction of Caroline Wells Chandler (b.1985), a contemporary New York painter. The methodology of the essay will operate from a queer feminist vantage point orienting Chandler’s work within the futurity of the late José Esteban Munõz (1967-2013) in Cruising Utopia, the then and […]
The Dappled Life: “Van Gogh: Into the Undergrowth” at the Cincinnati Art Museum, October 15, 2016-January 8, 2017
Okay, I’ll go first. In my decades of getting to know and love the Cincinnati Art Museum’s permanent collection, I had never really liked Van Gogh’s “Into the Undergrowth,” painted a month or so before he died in 1890 at the end of a whirlwind career that lasted no longer than ten years. “Into the […]
Two Shows at Wave Pool: “Everything Is Nothing with a Twist” and “Domus Candela”
December 3rd marked the opening of two new exhibitions at Wave Pool: the group show Everything Is Nothing with a Twist on the ground floor and a solo installation Domus Candela by Erin Taylor upstairs. The ground exhibition, all by artists inspired by minimalism, contained works that were bound by their physical form, whereas Domus […]
Human As Content: Alan Rath at Carl Solway
The windowless white rooms that comprise the Carl Solway Gallery provide an austere setting for the LCD screen-based, chrome-armatured show Alan Rath: New Sculpture. The main gallery feels almost sparse; each piece is given a generous amount of space. At first glance, the robotic, high-tech pieces set against or mounted on the mostly bare, flood-lit […]
Visionary Artists at the Carnegie Arts Center
E is for Edie, An Edith McKee Harper Retrospective Tony Dotson, An American Outsider Solo Exhibition Both exhibitions run from December 9, 2016 through February 11, 2017 Amanda Ackerman and Emily Frey are the curators for the brilliant retrospective of about three hundred works by Edith Harper, collaborator and wife to Cincinnati’s well-known and beloved […]
Best Fiction of 2016
2016 has been one of the best years for fiction in quite a number of years. The ongoing globalization of literature continues, with superb writers now emerging from all over the world. The range of subject matter and writing styles has rarely been as varied as this year’s, and, although I am limiting my list […]
Dissident Personae: Zanele Muholi at the Freedom Center
Cincinnati’s National Underground Railroad Freedom Center brings the history of US slavery into conversation with human rights abuses across varied national and cultural contexts. From October 1, 2016 to January 23, 2017, the museum hosts an exhibition of works by Zanele Muholi, a Johannesburg-based photographer who mounts stirring condemnations of violence against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, […]
When Photography Was New: Picturing the West: Masterworks of 19th-Century Landscape Photography Islands of the Blest Artist-Led Communities: Meatyard, Lyons, Siskind & Callahan
The Fotofocus Biennial 2016 features a marvelous array of photography exhibitions – eight exhibits curated by Kevin Moore for Fotofocus and about sixty additional ancillary exhibits of photography that various museums, galleries and libraries from Cincinnati to Columbus have prepared in support of the biennial endeavor. While the eight exhibitions specially selected by the curator […]
American Photography’s Lurch Toward the Conceptual
Two of the three FotoFocus 2016 exhibitions offered at the Art Academy of Cincinnati were curated by former AAC photography instructor, Will Knipscher. These included the historical body of work Evidence, created by Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan in the 1970s, plus two bodies of new work by Mandel with his new collaborator, wife Chantal Zakari, […]
Decentering the Art: “Kentucky Renaissance: The Lexington Camera Club and Its Community, 1954-1974” at the Cincinnati Art Museum, October 8, 2016-January 1, 2017
In an undated and untitled photograph by Robert C. May, we are standing at the edge of some unremarkable woods, separated by a paved road from more woods on the other side. The view is dominated by four scruffy trees, no two of which are standing at quite the same angle. The road is as […]