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...
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...
Walking into the interior of Saad Ghosn’s house near The Cincinnati Zoo carries an almost physical impact, shifting from the bright leafy world of his front walk to shady rooms replete with colorful and exuberant art, some of it his own. This is the ninth year Ghosn has published his self-funded For a Better World, Poems and Drawings on Peace and Justice. Annual exhibits that have shown...
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.
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.
Utah has allowed residents to renew prescriptions through an AI chatbot called Doctronic, the Associated Press reported on July 6th. The program launched under a state regulatory sandbox, which can waive rules for promising AI companies. Users confirm their identity, answer questions about prescriptions and medical history, and the system checks a pharmacy database before sending eligible refills to a local pharmacy. Human doctors review orders during the initial phase, but the company expects to move toward fully automated refills. Utah's medical licensing board learned of the program after its January launch and later asked the state to halt it.
The refill sounds routine until the old meaning of a prescription is inspected. A renewal is a small medical judgment disguised as repetition. The dose may be familiar, but the body may have changed, another drug may have entered the cabinet, bleeding risk may have appeared, or a symptom may have become relevant only because a physician noticed it in conversation. Doctronic's defenders see a path through overloaded care. Critics see a license being simulated before the standards have been built. The argument will not stay in Utah. Texas, Wyoming, Iowa, and Idaho are already testing or debating similar openings. The first prescription written by software may arrive as convenience, then ask medicine to explain why a doctor had to be there.
Amazon will close Mechanical Turk to new customers on July 30th, TechCrunch reported, leaving existing users inside a service that AWS says will receive security and availability work but no new features. The crowdsourcing marketplace opened in 2005 as a place where people performed small tasks that software could not yet handle, including labeling images, reading sentiment, passing CAPTCHA challenges, and checking scraps of data for a few cents at a time. Later it was folded into the training economy as a source of annotation for neural networks. Its name was already a confession. The eighteenth-century Mechanical Turk pretended to be a chess-playing machine while a human being hid inside the cabinet.
The closure has the shape of a quiet labor obituary. For years, the platform helped companies sell automation while paying dispersed workers to supply the missing perception, judgment, and patience. Then the loop bent back on itself. Studies found that some workers used large language models to complete tasks meant to produce human-labeled data, turning the crowd into another surface for machine output. The old bargain became harder to defend. If the human is paid too little to be trusted, and the model is used to imitate the human, the dataset loses its last modest claim to being grounded in labor. Amazon is keeping the lights on for current customers. The cabinet door is closing for everyone else.
