Sarah Martin: Expectations at The McGrath Gallery at Bellarmine University
As a preface, I’m writing this piece whilst questioning my intent in writing it. This exhibition had some serious flaws. On one hand, Expectations was presented like a body of student work, t-pinned artist statements printed on printer paper and all; and the gallery wasn’t big enough for two collections of work, let alone two […]
Art in Bloom Shines at the Cincinnati Art Museum
The Cincinnati Art Museum offered Art in Bloom October 26 – 29. Over 5,000 visitors made the trip to see the pairing of artwork with floral arrangements. The celebration is in its ninth year and offered biennially. For four days, visitors could see significant works of art chosen by the curators from the museum’s permanent […]
Character Studies in Post-Cultural Revolution China: “Chinese Dreams” at MassArt
The final moments of the recording of Zhang Huan’s performance piece, “To Raise the Level of a Fish Pond,” make the piece as delightful as it is effectively critical of the economic conditions for low-wage laborers. It features 40 Chinese workers known as liudongrenkou, or “floating population,” who raise the water level by one meter […]
Gallery OTR Joins New Galleries in Greater Cincinnati
A new gallery opened in Over-the-Rhine at 1121 Walnut St. Gallery OTR, which opened on July 28, 2017, is owned and managed by Mark Byron, a professional photographer, and passionate advocate for the OTR neighborhood, where he both works and lives. Gallery OTR joins other galleries which have opened recently in Greater Cincinnati. Byron will […]
Maxwell’s Poetry Corner
Good Dang Lullabies in my head humming while by myself while you’re upstairs in your magic suit two sizes too big for you I know you’ll grow into it. All the busyness addressing us like we’re important something I’m still getting used to and you’re dang good at being cute, cause you’re […]
Jesmyn Ward’s “Sing, Unburied, Sing”
Jesmyn Ward, whose National Book Award winning novel “Savage the Bones”, took the literary world by storm, has returned with her equally powerful new novel “Sing, Unburied, Sing”. Centering almost entirely around one African-American family living nearly self-sufficiently in a tiny town in Mississippi–the author herself lives in such a town–the novel rotates points of […]
Alice McDermott’s “The Ninth Hour”
A new novel by Alice McDermott is always a major literary event in America. The territory that she covers in most of her novels, Catholic America, mainly on the East Coast, from the twenties and thirties to the present, is what she mainly writes about, and she does that as well as anyone alive in […]
Celeste Ng’s “Little Fires Everywhere”
Celeste Ng’s new novel, Little Fires Everywhere, is the worst, most offensive novel I’ve read in a very, very long time. Much praised for her earlier novels, Ng, one would have hoped, continue to show her growing promise as a writer, but Little Fires Everywhere is little more than a revenge fantasy novel on the […]
Jennifer Egan’s “Manhattan Beach”
Jennifer Egan’s back with her eminently readable, if flawed, new novel “Manhattan Beach”. She’s one of America’s absolutely finest younger writers, along with Rachel Cusk, Rachel Kushner, Nathan Englander (some might include Celeste Ng in this group). What all these writers have in common is an uncanny ability to imagine and to write; their prose […]