Public Art: Mural Month and FotoFocus
October has been a month full of activities in the visual arts. FotoFocus, the biennial celebration of photography and lens-based art, is still in swing, and it brought an exceptionally high level of exhibitions, lectures, and other adjunct programming to Greater Cincinnati. Mayor Cranley also declared October to be Mural Month, in order to bring […]
One-Eyed Thief
Intellect and wit are a potent pair, and Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs have both. An exquisite composite of their work, The One-Eyed Thief, showcases the vast expanse of photography as a medium. Onorato and Krebs weigh our value system as a culture through our relationship to imagery. They reckon with a medium that has […]
MK Guth – Making Memories into More
Museums tend to be places where the public congregates to ruminate over the reminders of past people, places, and objects. Somewhere between holy awe at the importance of the items around you and an unspoken fear that with a single misstep you may knock over one of these priceless pieces, there is a certain feeling […]
“BINDU – THE FIRST CIRLE: RADHA LAKSHMI,” gallery One One, Brazee Street Studios, through Oct. 9, 2014
Born in India and now living and working in Cincinnati, Radha Lakshmi is the first artist-in-residence at gallery One One and Brazee Street Studios. Founder and Director Sandy Gross and Leah Busch, creative director and gallery coordinator, had long discussed instituting an artist-in-residence program. It would include a solo exhibition to showcase the results of […]
BURNHAM REDUX
The spirit of Daniel Burnham hovers over Fourth Street in Downtown Cincinnati. The famous Chicago architect and his associates created four commercial office buildings in Cincinnati’s financial district in the early twentieth century. And with the recent conversion of the shuttered Bartlett Building into a Marriott Renaissance hotel, the Burnham name is the buzzword for […]
The Messy Democracy of Photography: An Interview with FotoFocus’s Kevin Moore and Mary Ellen Goeke
1989 was a watershed year for the art of photography in Cincinnati. Kristin Spangenberg published her catalogue Photographic Treasures from the Cincinnati Art Museum, which recorded the results of her having been given funding to purchase one hundred photographs to give the Museum’s existing but scattershot photographic holdings some shape and a sure anchor in […]
Temporary Utopia: “431 Gallery: Art and Impact” at Indiana State Museum
Almost 25 years ago, Bill Ross and I had our first two-person art show in Indianapolis, Indiana at 431 Gallery. We were both 24 years old. The title was “The Fifteen Dollar Museum” and was a manifesto of sorts, an accidental action plan for the rest of our lives. 431 Gallery was a cooperative, artist-run, […]
Letter from Lebanon
I returned from a visit to Lebanon in March 2014 with my head, eyes and emotions all over board, triggered in all directions, confused but at the same time fulfilled and satisfied. Lebanon was a chaotic whirlwind of energy, creativity, contrasts, contradictions, peaceful and agitated moments, fears of violence, restful encounters. It was the occasion […]
Letter From London
In London, this time, we went to the source. The art-shows-open-to-the-public source, that is. The source itself is unlikely. It’s The Foundling Hospital, established two hundred and seventy-five years ago to care for unwanted babies but not long after also becoming England’s first public art gallery. William Hogarth, that caustic observer of the kind of […]
Letter from Thessaloniki
In April and May of this year, during my second art research trip to Greece, I had many long discussions about art and politics with my good friend, fellow artist and professor Xenis Sachinis. When he told me of the special circumstances of his poignant print series, Traces and Memory, and that he donated one of them to Aristotle University for the commemoration of […]