All the Usual Suspects at Thompson House Shooting Gallery

By: Karen S. Chambers The Thompson House Shooting Gallery’s exhibition — “All the Usual Suspects” — is oddly titled since it suggests artists who are well known or familiar. But the participants are emerging and unfamiliar to most people although co-curators and gallery directors Jennifer Edwards and Jennifer Feld know them well. This is the […]

The Art of Sound: Four Centuries of Musical Instruments

By Larry Watson Cincinnati Art Museum June 16-September 12, 2012 When viewing works that have a function, one wonders  whether  there is a critical distinction between art and craft; between creativity and structural formulas; between innovation and “form follows function?” The exhibit at the CAM gathers musical instruments from around the globe and across the […]

My First Residency

  By: Kate Kern The windows and skylight of my temporary studio faced east. Opening the door in the morning I was greeted by light flooding in across the work table and onto the floor. By the beginning of my second week at the Virginia Center for Creative  Arts, I came closer to a working rhythm […]

Purple Trees

By: Susan Mahan When my mother was 90 years old, I took her for her first visit to the Cincinnati Art Museum. She was a self-trained painter who worked from photographs taken from Ideals magazines. My mother was quite skilled in the art of copying photos. Drawing came easily to her and she could match […]

Dying like Everything

  By: Maxwell Redder Photographs taken by: Mark Patsfall Rarely does an artist have the opportunity to express so vividly an equal passion for music and visual art.  Jon Langford’s solo exhibit which came down July 14, 2012, at Clay St. Press was able to achieve that dichotomy.  In fact, he has lived on both sides […]

Book Review: The Lower River, By: Paul Theroux

Book Review By: Daniel Brown Paul Theroux may best be known as America’s most engaging travel writer; the books that first brought him to my attention were The Great Railway Bizarre and The Old Patagonian Express, which he wrote almost four decades ago.  Like Joan Didion, Theroux’s career includes writing both non-fiction and fiction, and […]

Review for Nicholas Pfarr Exhibit, William Schickel Gallery

Most galleries I visit are very professional. By this I mean that great attention has been paid to everything from the lighting and framing and placement to the carpet and the color of the walls. The art viewed in these places has been created to compete in a world in which the quality of the […]

Color Pencil Society of America

By: Marlene Steele The Color Pencil Society’s 20th Anniversary International Exhibition is an extensive show filling the main gallery and 4 galleries on the second floor of the Carnegie Art Center. This organization, founded by Vera Curnow of Rising Sun, Indiana, seeks to lend stature to the medium of color pencil as a fine art […]

All Around Us

As hard as it is to imagine, not many years ago the word “environment” was seldom used at all in ordinary conversation, and even less in conjunction with art. Now it’s almost a standard inclusion in everything, including paper towel commercials. One of the best, and most interesting, forays into the field is on display […]