Margaret Rhein’s Papermaking Career
Hidden away in Westwood, a neighborhood in Cincinnati, is an eclectic house and bright studio of artist Margaret Rhein and her now-retired jeweler husband Stuart Golder. Her son Aaron, a graphic designer, lives on the same street; it’s a quiet, modest neighborhood. At the back of the house, amidst overhanging trees, one meets Rhein as […]
Kevin T. Kelly at Alan Avery Art Company
Kevin T. Kelly has created a new body of paintings for this exhibition at Alan Avery Art Company in Atlanta, and they are his most complex, his most biting, his most urgent in his long career as one of this country’s foremost painters. Long associated with a neo-Pop style, which he probably learned in his […]
Michael Mergen: Epilogue to Mars
Michael Mergen lives, works, and raises his family in Farmville, Virginia, though his catalog of photographs evokes the ethos of a wanderer, moving freely across the American landscape and calling it all home. That catalog features a determined layering of past and present, along with examination of the spaces where relationships happen and identities form. […]
donottellmewhereibelong: drawing and sculpture by Joan Tanner Curated by Julien Robson Cressman Center for Visual Arts / Hite Art Institute / Department of Fine Arts / University of Louisville
“A curiosity to engage contradiction…might be kindled from memories of listening to my father talk about the perils and challenges in practicing medicine…Disease. Malady. Disfigurement. Imperfection. Structural weakness. I probably did not realize then, but I was already hooked.” —Joan Tanner, Interview with In the Make: Interviews with West Coasts Artists, June 2014. Joan Tanner’s […]
“Replace With Fine Art” at the Art Academy of Cincinnati
What is God? A Westernized ideal, for one, in the monotheistic sense. But, God can also be interpreted as an energy or a sustaining force. God is universal truth, the unpredictability and breadth of the natural world, the ability of the cosmos to function — the cycles of life and death, themselves. China, like many […]
Ottessa Moshfegh’s “My Year of Rest and Relaxation”
Ottessa Moshfegh has burst upon the literary scene mostly in the past 18 months, with, first, a book of short stories, and, now, her novel “My Year of Rest and Relaxation”, although she’s written two other novels of which I was unaware. Brought to my attention by my reading friend Kevin Ott, who also recommended […]
Pat Barker’s “The Silence of The Girls”
Pat Barker, the English woman writer, is, at her best, one of the world’s greatest living novelists. She may be the finest novelist writing about men at war; her “Regeneration Trilogy”, one novel of which won the prestigious Booker Prize for Literature, is written about soldiers suffering from what was then first called “shell-shock” in […]
Gary Shteyngart’s “Lake Success”
Gary Shteyngart is usually one of the finest, most biting satirists in America. The Russian-born, US raised Shteyngart has both satirized the Russian Mafia in America, the life of the new immigrant here; he has a keen, fine eye for the absurd and for the hypocritical. His new novel, “Lake Success”, however, is big disappointment. […]
Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”
August is usually a slow month for me, and I’ve often read 19th century novels during the summers over the years, novels I didn’t read along the way or in school decades ago. This year’s big novel was “War and Peace”, by Leo Tolstoy (which, in Russian slang, means “fat lion”). I was amazed at […]