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.
Student awards exhibition at Art Academy of Cincinnati opens Feb 6, honoring regional Scholastic winners program 2026 US
Major exhibition opening Feb 6 explores Pahari painting traditions from northern India across three centuries.
Hands-on family art workshop invites all ages to create together on February 7 in Cincinnati.
Taft Museum opens major Rembrandt print exhibition in Cincinnati on February 7, 2026.
Public panel on how grief shapes emotional, creative, and physical life at KHAC Feb 7.
New ceramics studio opening event in Camp Washington, Cincinnati on Feb 7, 3–5 PM, free to attend.
Cincinnati Art Club opens its annual Sketch Group Exhibition on February 13, 2026.
Experimental dance exploring caregiving, memory, grief & joy on Feb 28 at Kennedy Heights Arts Center.
Photographer Matt Black speaks at Cincinnati Art Museum’s Spring 2026 lecture. Event free.
The Pattern & Decoration (P&D) movement, once dismissed for its embrace of "decorative" arts, is now celebrated for challenging traditional art hierarchies. Explore its legacy and modern-day echoes in Cincinnati, where creative hubs like the Freeport Row Art Alley are contributing to a thriving art scene, with a mural by Esteban Leyva at Liberty and Elm streets.
We have previously discussed how a photograph — or an image — can rearticulate the public perception of reality. How it can encapsulate experience, much like a verb does, rendering it transferable, exposable, and legible in a specific way.
Any story is a continuum, difficult to apprehend in its full extension and multidimensionality. In order to be understood and fixed as experience — and as argument — it must be reformulated through its most expressive qualities...
Watching the American Alex Honnold perched on the skyscraper tower in Taipei—508 meters high—immediately carried me to the image of King Kong. With one difference: the latter has an intellectual author, the filmmaker Merian C. Cooper, who directed the original 1933 film alongside Ernest B. Schoedsack for RKO Radio Pictures...
The Clark Art Institute is widely regarded as one of the most prestigious cultural institutions in the United States. Located in Williamstown, Massachusetts, it has been devoted to the study and exhibition of art since 1955. The Institute uniquely combines a museum of the highest caliber with a leading research center—the Research and Academic Program—positioning it as an international point of reference for art historians, curators, and scholars...
It is generally understood that national museums ought to be the natural custodians of their cultural memory.
Spaces where the history of national art is presented in an ordered and intelligible form. Where foundational images can still be contemplated. Yet, primarily for reasons of funding, an increasing number of state institutions...
Perhaps since the beginning of time, yet within the landscape of contemporary visual culture, polemic, interpellation, and reply operate as devices of symbolic production that act directly upon the processes of meaning and the circulation of images. These controversies, or provocations—beyond merely situating themselves within a context that already shapes the imago—become structuring agents that reconfigure spaces of reading, disarticulate iconographic hierarchies, and redefine interpretive frameworks.
There are cities that return the gaze: they do not yield docilely to the frame, but rather address those who contemplate them. They demand a way of seeing that does not reduce, that does not foreclose. Havana, in this Dossier conceived by the Cuban photographer Pedro Abascal, appears as an entity that observes, folds, and tenses; it refuses to become a mere stage or backdrop.
I have known Pedro since 2004, perhaps even earlier, from the time I began attending the exhibitions held in the dozens of galleries and institutions of Old Havana. I do not remember how we became friends; it seems we were so before we had properly met. Pedro is one of the great Cuban photographers of the past decades. Some of his photographs would make Cartier-Bresson raise an eyebrow.
