Divinity Affirmations – Light, Luminescence, and Liminal Spaces with Tom Bacher
Tom Bacher’s Per-40ming Trans-4-ming Phos-4-s-cent Paintings, which is showing at the Weston Art Gallery until June 10, 2018, displays a continuation of Bacher’s hyperrealist quotidian aesthetic re: luminescent paintings that find subjects in object studies, portraiture, and documentation processes. As the two-channel corridor video “Painting with Light” (2018) by YellowHaus Productions elucidates, Bacher’s exhibition […]
Ragnar Kjartansson’s “The Visitors” (2012) at Cincinnati Art Museum
Contemporary art has a number of interpretive frameworks, attempts to historicize the present moment that both distinguish it from what came before and draw genealogical lines from established art historical concepts. One branch of this diverse range of concepts is the return to romanticism in what some critics have referred to as New Sincerity, Post-postmodernism, […]
What Makes a Life – Virtual Circulation and Digital Storytelling
Filmmaker and video/conceptual artist C. Jacqueline Wood’s show What Makes a Life at the Weston Art Gallery from May 4 – June 10, 2018 explores how virtual archeology and intermedia modes allot for new narratives of storytelling, proffering from a series of interconnected installations that concern themselves with information networks. The five multi-component installations, […]
Hats, Heels, and Hieroglyphs: “Saul Steinberg’s ‘Mural of Cincinnati’ and “Saul Steinberg’s Prints, 1948-1996” Cincinnati Art Museum, February 16 on, and Solway Gallery, April 20-July 15, 2018
Up, then down. Up, then down. And now, up again. Saul Steinberg’s “Mural of Cincinnati,” having adorned the walls of the Terrace Plaza Hotel’s Skyline Restaurant (better known as The Gourmet Room) from 1948 until it was sold, and then the walls of the Cincinnati Art Museum until it was walled in to mount the […]
“Terracotta Army: Legacy of the First Emperor of China,” Cincinnati Art Museum. Open through August 12, 2018
In the West, Asian art is given short shrift in intro to art history texts. H. W. Janson’s History of Artconsigned the arts of the East to a seven-page Postscript: “The Meeting of East and West,” omitting Indian Asian, Japanese, and Chinese art as well as pre-Columbian “because their indigenous artistic traditions are no […]
Fotofolio – Zhao Rong-Sheng
I met Zhao in Houston this past March at FotoFest. Here are selected photos from his Swan Series and Works of the King. Zhao’s resume: China Photographers Association member, Luoyang Photographers Association vice president, successively in “China photography”, “Photographic World”, “Chinese photographer”, “National Geographic”, “People’s Photography”, “Nikon Exploration”, “Chinese Photographic Art yearbook”. Published several papers […]
Holding hands with strangers, a review of In Many Hands by Kate McIntosh
I am sitting at the center of a banquet table facing a black wall. The white cloth in front of me is clean and crisp and extends in either direction down the long skinny table. When I look in my peripherals I see the profiles of the people lined up next to me, their […]
“Women Artists in the Age of Impressionism” at the JB Speed Museum
The Speed Museum exhibition” Women Artists in the Age of Impressionism” brings together over 80 paintings by 37 different female artists. Their achievement becomes more remarkable as it was accomplished in the historical context of denial of academic access in a world dominated by men. European study and salon success was the prescribed path for […]
Found and Unfound Pre-Existing Conditions
Social workers Keith Banner and Bill Ross created Visionaries + Voices for the artists Paul Rowland, Richard Brown, Antonio Adams, and Raymond Thunder-Sky. Bill and Keith arduously worked for county boards serving individuals with disabilities and had met these artists in the course of their work. Subsequently, the pair created more opportunities for artists to […]
Sexodus XXX Machina: “More Sweetly Play the Dance” by William Kentridge (A Seven Channel Panoramic Video/ Audio Installation). Cincinnati Art Museum April 26, 2017 – May 20, 2018
A Video Tableau Vivant. (On the I’mpossibility of I’mmortality) “I’m interested in a political art, that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures and uncertain ending – an art (and a politics) in which optimism is kept in check, and nihilism at bay.” ―William Kentridge The practicality of Art has always […]