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Clifton Cultural Arts Center names Siekman 2026 'New Woman' Fellow

Midwest

Clifton Cultural Arts Center names Siekman 2026 'New Woman' Fellow

March 24th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

Clifton Cultural Arts Center has named visual artist Gabrielle Siekman its 2026 New Woman fellow.
The announcement happened earlier this month during the opening reception for “New Woman,” the arts center’s biennial exhibition highlighting emerging women artists in the Greater Cincinnati region.

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LATEST

The Unease That Light Provokes

Art News

The Unease That Light Provokes

March 23rd, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

Persistently, and since the most remote antiquity, the moon has acted as a trigger for the human imagination. It has agitated artists and writers, the deranged of every kind, poets, philosophers, spiritual beings, night wanderers—but above all, lovers. Perhaps because it casts that faint light which outlines the features of the desired body: the point of light, the delicate glimmer that ignites along the maiden’s lower lip...

Remains, Trace, and Living Matter in the Poetics of Aaron Kent

Art News

Remains, Trace, and Living Matter in the Poetics of Aaron Kent

March 23rd, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

There are artists whose work is born of skill; others, of obsession; others still, of a wound. In Aaron Kent, all three converge. His practice resists reduction to any single discipline or stable technique. Although it may be inscribed, under a taxonomic logic, within the territories of ceramics, printmaking, or sculpture, the truth is that his work moves through far more uncertain zones.

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Index and Chiromancy

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Index and Chiromancy

March 17th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

On my way home, on one of the trains at Miami Airport, I took this photograph. A passenger had left a sticker on one of the metal poles inside the carriage. Whoever it was—judging by the code—came from Guayaquil and carried it on their suitcase. The author, it would seem, now lives on these shores.

Midwest

The Landscape as Gratitude in the Work of M. Katherine Hurley

March 7th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

Everyone in Cincinnati’s artistic community knows Katherine Hurley. They have for a long time. In my own case, for just under ten years. And we all know her solid career and her exceptional body of work, delicate and subtle as few others.
I have always found it difficult to comment on the genre of landscape. Not because I do not like it, but because, when it reproduces what nature itself has taken millennia of patient execution to achieve...

Michelangelo and the Weight of Containment

Art News

Michelangelo and the Weight of Containment

February 21st, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

Human genius can be observed in many of its works. Nowhere is it more detectable than in the arts: music, literature, and the visual arts. As a species, seen from above, we are all fairly clever. But some are—or were—truly exceptional. What did they require to rise above the rest? What made them singular, beyond the reasoning most of us share?

Damien Hirst, the body, and tormented naïveté

Art News

Damien Hirst, the body, and tormented naïveté

February 19th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

I have not the faintest idea why The Times, in its February 16 edition, informs us—by a delay so un-British—that Damien Hirst’s Saint Bartholomew, Exquisite Pain has been installed in the Camellia House at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Not only that work: The Watchtower, by Auke de Vries, and Muamba Posy, by Vanessa da Silva, both outdoors in the Country Park.

https://www.fineartsceramiccenter.org/author/ferrer-ivonne

Art News

The Disconsolate Life of the Shabti

February 19th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

The Petrie Museum of Egyptian and Sudanese Archaeology, part of University College London (UCL), houses one of the most important collections of Egyptian artefacts in the world. It preserves more than 80,000 objects recovered from excavations conducted between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Among them are hundreds of shabti, small funerary figures that formed part of the ritual equipment of tombs in ancient Egypt...

Scholastic Art and Writing Awards 2026 ay AAC

Art News

Scholastic Art and Writing Awards 2026 ay AAC

February 15th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

Last Friday, February 6, I attended the opening of the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards 2026 at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. Given the temperature outside, one would have expected a thin crowd, a hush, the kind of dispersal that comes with an icy wind. The opposite happened. It was a celebration. All six floors of the institution were packed with children, teenagers, and adults—an enthusiasm the visual arts rarely manage to elicit. Everyone celebrating emerging talent.