Past Perfect: “Mapplethorpe + 25: A Symposium to Commemorate the 25th Anniversary of The Perfect Moment” at the Contemporary Arts Center, October 23-24, 2015
It was a pretty perfect moment. For one evening and the whole day following, FotoFocus and the Contemporary Arts Center teamed up to sponsor and host three panel discussions and three keynote speakers to talk about the making of Mapplethorpe the artist, the making of the CAC’s 1990 show “The Perfect Moment” and subsequent trial, […]
The History of the World: Jacob Lawrence at the Taft Museum of Art
In the 41 tempera vignettes that make up “Heroism in Paint: a Master Series by Jacob Lawrence” (currently on display at the Taft Museum of Art through January 17, 2016), Jacob Lawrence dramatizes the life of Toussaint Louverture, revered as the founding father of Haiti who led Haitians in their fight against slavery in the […]
A Thousand Invisible Threads | Mapping the Rhizome
A Thousand Invisible Threads | Mapping the Rhizome at the Herndon Gallery at Antioch College, finds its influence from Deleuze’s and Guttarai’s postmodern classic, A Thousand Plateaus. A theme is the rhizome, a biological term for a type of root structure, used as a metaphor for philosophy, social structures, or ways of thinking that are […]
The Dog, the Unicorn, and the Wheel: “Sublime Beauty: Raphael’s ‘Portrait of a Lady with a Unicorn’” at the Cincinnati Art Museum, October 3, 2015-January 3, 2016
First of all, forget the unicorn. Or at the very least, hold it in abeyance. X-ray analysis of the painting shows us that before there was a unicorn on this young woman’s lap, there used to be a dog. And before skilled restoration turned it back into a unicorn again in the early 20th century, […]
Erasing the American Pastoral in Elena Dorfman’s Sublime: The L.A. River
“See how willingly Nature poses herself upon photographers’ plates. No earthly chemicals are so sensitive as those of the human soul.” — John Muir Elena Dorfman spent two years photographing the Los Angeles River for her series Sublime: The L.A. River, now being exhibited in the Weston Gallery. The river, paved in 1938 after a […]
City on the Rise: Public Art in Covington, Kentucky.
Our walls are changing for the better. Propelled by the global phenomenon of street art and sustained by an embrace of community-sanctioned murals, public art is back in a big way. In Cincinnati, when it comes to public art, the name ArtWorks is ubiquitous. With a hundred murals in thirty-six neighborhoods, formerly drab walls are […]
la Biennale di Venezia: Part Two: Americans in Venice
The Venice Biennale, which opened in May, is on view through Nov 22 with exhibitions in the Giardini and the Arsenale, featuring 136 artists, 89 participating countries, and 44 collateral events presented by non-profit organizations and exhibited in various locations across Venice. The city’s massive Arsenale (of Venice’s mighty past as controller of the Mediterranean) […]
The Nothing that is There: “Stewart Goldman: Nuances” at the Philip M. Meyers, Jr., Memorial Gallery, DAAP, September 13-October 25, 2015
It’s fair to wonder on what basis we can be sure that the wonderful series of recent paintings by Stewart Goldman, curated by Aaron Cowan, are landscapes. Many are horizontal—some even lusciously elongated—but not all. The artist has provided a number of keys to help us see the landscape elements that inspired these mostly non-representational […]
The Romance of Spaces: An Interview with Denise Burge
Denise Burge is an associate professor of art at UC’s DAAP College of Art. I visited her on a warm late summer day in her studio in Northside where I found her working on the beginnings of a new series. Burge is known for her work with quilts as well as more recent video and […]
Mothersbaugh Performance at Woodward
Walking into the Woodward Theater in OTR, the first person I noticed was Quinn. We had never met before, but judging by the swiftness of his steps and his frequent motion of hand to chin during the warm up I could tell that he had a lot to say. As it turned out, Quinn had […]