THE

ANNEX

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I don’t like it, but it stands

Midwest

I don’t like it, but it stands

March 30th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

Pineapple on pizza is not to my taste. That does not affect the assessment of this new mural. On March 12, 2026, Pineapple on Pizza was unveiled in Covington, a large-scale intervention executed on the building of The Gruff as part of the national Spray It Forward program, led by the brand Rust-Oleum. The project was selected as one of seven developments nationwide, positioning the city within a network of initiatives that use public art as a tool for visibility and urban activation.

THE

LATEST

Lines and Crosses

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Lines and Crosses

March 30th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

It takes only a glance at my MSN (Microsoft Start) homepage to think that every day someone discovers something that forces us to rewrite the history of humanity. I imagine historians exasperated, stalled again and again on the first page.
One of those stories—always amusing—claims that 'a set of geometric markings engraved between 34,000 and 45,000 years ago on small sculptures and tools is forcing a revision of the history of human communication.'

The Habit Makes the Nun

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The Habit Makes the Nun

March 27th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

I had the opportunity to read, in the latest issue of The Critic, an article on Sancta, the most recent work by Austrian choreographer and director Florentina Holzinger, one of the most radical figures in the contemporary European scene. It takes as its point of departure Sancta Susanna (1921–22) by Paul Hindemith—already scandalous in its time—and expands it into a hybrid scene somewhere between opera, performance, concert, and a ritual of quasi-satanic affiliation.

RECENT

ARTICLES

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.

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

Midwest

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.

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?