Among the most rewarding things about running an art gallery is the chance to meet extraordinary artists. In the past two months, for instance, I encountered for the first time the work of two important American photographers who share a great deal, Matt Herron and Jim Marshall.
Discarded objects become a tactile archive of kinship, girlhood, womanhood, and the memories we carry in Cincinnati, OH.
Thursday Art Play gives young children a hands-on CAC session tied to Homespun, with yoga and art making on July 9 2026.
Yayoi Kusama’s mirrored pumpkin room turns reflection, repetition and glowing color into an endless Cincinnati encounter
Ayana Ross presents seven figural paintings at the Taft Museum as the 2026 Duncanson Artist-in-Residence.
Rites of Passage spotlights nine emerging artists at Manifest, opening July 10 with student work from eight U.S. states.
Although I am an avowed admirer of her solo work and have known her for nearly twenty-five years, I do not remember ever having spoken in person with Liudmila Velasco. About her work, about the weather, about how unbearable this or that artist can become. When I left the island, Liudmila was already practically an institution within Cuban women’s photography...
When we first came across Tim Harrier’s Shaman Spirit Guides, we dismissed them without mercy as the product of artificial intelligence. The mud-covered faces, the animals emerging from the background, and an unbroken frontal force produced, almost at once, a malignant suspicion. Suspicion ran far ahead of the work. And we are right to suspect almost everything in life. This series, no...
Congratulations to Manifest Gallery for winning a prestigious national independent publishing award. The following is their press release:
The Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY) ceremony was held recently in New York City. Manifest’s 5th International Drawing Annual, a 184 page book (an ‘exhibit in print’) representing 114 works by 72 artists from 23 states and 10 countries including Australia, Canada...
Northern Kentucky University’s Ceramic and Sculpture Studio is brimming with teachers. They come from all corners of the U.S. to grind glass, cast bronze, and weave cotton cloth under the tutelage of master Ashanti artisans of Ghana, West Africa.
MaryCarol Hopkins, professor of Sociology, Anthropology, Philosophy at NKU, conceived the idea four years ago of a summer African Art Institute for teachers. She...
Lady Liberty returns. Not the Neoclassical colossus on Liberty Island. It is the shrieking girl with the liberty spikes on the S.O.S. ART posters plastered all over downtown. S.O.S. ART is a rally cry for peace and justice, which began in March of 2003 just as the U.S. invaded Iraq. As President George W. Bush called up...
There is a book. Before the exhibition, before the charcoal drawings spread across the galleries of the Contemporary Arts Center, before the viewer crosses the blue thresholds into the dreamworld of Freeman Little...
A few months ago I wondered in these pages what Macron was getting out of lending the Bayeux Tapestry to the English. Forty thousand French citizens signed a petition to block it, citing textile fragility and, I suspect, a touch of cross-Channel rancour as well. The other question remained: what would the British Museum get out of it.
Now and again, chance weaves a concurrence of circumstances that places us before a window opening onto the past. The opportunity to converse, undistracted, with the Austrian artist Stylianos Schicho was a privilege, since what most interests me in art are the sinews that bind it to whoever produces it.
Anthropic introduced Reflect, a dashboard inside Claude that lets users inspect their own AI habits, TechCrunch reported on July 9th. The feature shows topics, patterns, task categories, and broader usage behavior for people with memory turned on. It can also ask reflective questions, suggest quiet hours, and nudge users to take breaks from the chatbot. Anthropic says sensitive conversations appear only at a high level, health integrations are excluded, and the insight data is not used for other purposes. Later, Reflect is expected to show how much time a person has spent using Claude.
The dashboard turns a private exchange into a measured routine. A user who once treated chat as a blank box now receives a portrait made from prompts, requests, categories, and recurring needs. That portrait can feel helpful, even hygienic, because it asks what should remain human and when the user should pause. It also gives Claude a new way to make itself visible inside the workday. The assistant becomes an archive of dependence, then offers advice on managing that dependence from within the same product. The habit is no longer hidden in browser history or monthly billing. It returns as a chart, a prompt, a reminder, and a suggestion to use Claude better next time.
Meta launched Muse Image, a new AI image generator from Meta Superintelligence Labs, TechCrunch reported on July 7th. The tool is available through the Meta AI app, Instagram Stories, and WhatsApp. It can generate images from prompts, provide preset ideas, edit pictures, create ads, imagine furniture in a room, and power new effects for Stories. The feature drawing the sharpest reaction lets a user tag a public Instagram profile and use that person's images to create new AI pictures. Meta says users can disable this use in settings, but its policy also says people may create content with Instagram material through AI features and that the person whose content is used may receive no notification.
The tagged face changes the meaning of a public profile. A photograph posted for friends, fans, customers, or casual display becomes available as material for another person's scene. The old social network copied attention. This one can copy presence. A face can leave its original caption, place, lighting, and intention, then return inside a generated picture the subject never asked to enter. Opt-out controls move the burden onto the photographed person after the system has already defined public visibility as permission enough to begin. The platform calls it creation. The user sees a familiar face becoming an ingredient.
Discord acknowledged that a bug in its AI moderation system wrongly banned more than 8,000 users over two months, TechCrunch reported on July 7th. Harmless images were flagged as dangerous material, including spreadsheets, chessboards, game textures, and plain white or gray transparent backgrounds. The company said the system matches uploads against databases of known harmful content, with human review meant to stand between a flag and a punishment. A bug removed that interval. Another 200 users were banned over the weekend before Discord identified and fixed the problem, and affected accounts are being restored.
The false ban gives automated safety its most ordinary injury, the locked account. A grid pattern on a chessboard or a game texture becomes close enough to suspicion for the system to treat a user as guilty before a person looks. The punishment then reaches beyond one upload. Discord accounts hold work channels, gaming communities, friendships, servers, archives, and the small social infrastructure people build without naming it that way. Appeals arrive after the account is gone, after contacts vanish, after the user has to explain that a square was only a square. Moderation at scale asks machines to notice danger quickly. The user learns that speed first as removal.
