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 […]
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 […]
Review of Cody Gunningham at Richard Butz Gallery
Cody Gunningham has had a show of new paintings up at the Richard Butz Gallery on Main Street in Over the Rhine for the last month. The show continues until October 26. Cody is a recent Art Academy graduate who transitioned from work in illustration to work in painting. Despite his young age, Cody’s work […]
Hybridity: The New Frontier
A new frontier has been created at Cincinnati’s 21c Museum Hotel. In both the lobby level and second floor galleries, contemporary artists have represented a world in which nature has both run amok and made perfect, symbiotic, evolutionary sense of our post-post-modern, trans-everything world. In this mesmerizing exhibition curated by 21c curator Alice Gray Stites, […]
Look Who’s Talking: “Conversations around American Gothic” at Cincinnati Art Museum
The painting at the center of “Conversations around American Gothic,” the new exhibit at Cincinnati Art Museum (up through November 16, 2014), is a classic, yet has a whispered, cautious meanness that allows it to be both poetically absurd and ironically iconic. There’s a Norman-Rockwell plasticity that is about to melt here; a force inside […]
This is the Worst Prints, Drawings, Collage and Installations by Jack Arthur Wood, Jr. August 22 – September 13, 2014
Far from warm fuzzy art, (no sunset fields here), Jack Arthur Wood, Jr. has hung a scary, shocking, and ferocious show called “This is the Worst” at Clay Street Gallery; the kind of scary that draws people to horror shows, and macabre stories. Add to this a whopping big dollop of fine art and you […]
OFF THE BEATEN TRACK IN NORTHERN KENTUCKY
Having gotten lost finding Ash Street to see a six person private exhibition curated by Mary Heider, I finally arrived at 506 Ash Street on this beautiful, sunny, cloudless Saturday afternoon in the seventies, just about everyone was saying how hard it was to find their way here—and what an unexpected pleasure it was once […]
Seeking to Make “Everyday Objects Shriek Aloud”
Why a new exhibition on Magritte? “René Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938,” is the Art Institute of Chicago’s season blockbuster. This stunning exhibition is the first that zeroes in on Magritte’s most inventive and experimental years, showing us his seminal experiments of 1926-27 on through 1938. I was bowled over. Among art lovers, […]
Christopher Le Brun’s New Paintings at Friedman Benda
Le Brun’s paintings have always treaded diverse stylistic ground. They’ve explored classical literature, Wagnerian music, poetry and history through quintessentially romantic “subjects” like, forests, knights, adventurers, horses and gallivants. Whatever the subject, with Le Brun’s work we find ourselves in that misty area where what is represented is not actually portrayed. A type of art, […]
LACMA
When I found out I would be traveling back to Los Angeles for the first time in 2 years I knew exactly where I wanted to go, and within an hour of landing at LAX I had arrived at my own personal mecca, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Without hesitation, I headed past […]