“About Faith:” nine women’s experiences with Judaism through art
“About Faith,” does not hide behind a clever name. It is, both on its surface and deep down, about showcasing its artists’ Jewish identities. According to a placard located immediately inside the first room of the exhibit, “About Faith” is curator Beth Goldstein’s attempt at completing the Hiddur Mitzvah, or “adornment of a commandment.” She […]
Public Art: Where It’s Headed, and Why It Matters to Cincinnati
Editor’s Note: Aeqai asked ArtWorks Executive Director Tamara Harkavy and Communications Director Christine Carli to let our readers know what ArtWorks’ plans for 2015 include, and their essay appears as the first piece in the Jan/Feb. aeqai. ArtWorks is an amazing phenomenon: Harkavy started it mainly as a jobs program for both inner city children […]
Word Image Image Word
“Writing’s just drawing in different apparel, and drawing is another way of writing.”—Jean Cocteau This Cocteau quote was the heart of a recent Word Image Image Word exhibition at the Art Academy. Curator Matt Hart, poet and chair of the Academy’s Liberal Arts Department, invited nationally and internationally known writers to participate by providing them […]
Based on a True Story
The term “based on a true story” gives promise of an almost reality, while lending full disclosure that what’s before you is not teeming with truth; and herein lies the most humbling preface for an exhibition about history. Artists Frohawk Two Feathers and Duke Riley navigate the world of the omitted, the imagined, and the […]
Max Unterhaslberger at Phyllis Weston Gallery
One senses a materiality trying to escape from these paintings. In some of them Unterhaslberger traps the work behind a clear acrylic screen by applying the paint, sometimes thickly, to the back of the acrylic leaving us to view a perfectly flat surface. Guessing at the dimension that lies beneath is joyful rather than mysterious. […]
Profile of Annie Bolling
If Annie Bolling and Beverley Lamb reach their highest aspiration for their 1,800-square-foot art gallery on Woodburn Avenue, the art they make will fill the entire 1.96 square miles of East Walnut Hills and Walnut Hills combined. And the greatest artwork produced by The Gallery Project they operate will be a combination of the art […]
Profile of Dennis Harrington
Dennis Harrington hasn’t used his artistic training to create much of his own art lately. He instead makes it his mission to optimize the artistic visions of others. The longtime director of The Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery is widely thought to curate some of the region’s finest shows. In 2015 the […]
Bukang Kim: The Completed Journey
All of the arts have been refreshed by waves of painters, writers, musicians and dancers, who fled their countries of origin between approximately 1933 and the present. Often called exile artists, writers from Nabokov to Kiran Desai, and painters from Max Ernst to Man Ray, from de Kooning and Mondrian to Gorky and Hans Hofmann, […]
Put a Bird on It: “Contemporary Narrative” at Clifton Cultural Arts Center
“Contemporary Narrative” is up through January 10, 2014 at the Clifton Cultural Arts Center, and it’s worth a look just to wander through the big space and appreciate some easy-on-the-eye drawings, paintings, ceramics, and other pieces that really don’t seem to narrate a contemporary story as much as convey whimsical little vignettes across a rainbow […]
Looking Where the Focus Isn’t: A Profile of Brian Sholis
Brian Sholis, the new Associate Curator of Photography at the Cincinnati Art Museum, says from the start that he has no training—“none at all”—in Art History. He sees himself as “a contemporary art person who zeroed in on photography,” as he explained in an interview with Aeqai earlier this year. His undergraduate degree was in […]