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.
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.
Elizabeth Hawes closes August 2 in Cincinnati, showing 50 garments and original sketches by a radical American designer.
Rites of Passage spotlights nine emerging artists at Manifest, opening July 10 with student work from eight U.S. states.
Manifest Gallery opens VELVET, an international exhibition exploring black through painting, sculpture, and mixed media.
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...
It might seem flip to start a review of “Treeline,” Kent Krugh’s (American, 1955- ) rather magnificent exhibition of 22 black-and-white photographs* of the Angel Tree, the largest tree east of the Mississippi, with the old chestnut that “you can’t the see the forest for the trees.” But in this case, the Quercus virginiana, an evergreen oak tree AKA southern live...
In Cincinnati painting circles two names, from a recent past, keep their magic. The late Paul Chidlaw and the late Jack Meanwell, both of whom painted with a flashing style raised from the canvas in waves of impasto excitement. Both artists’ works are available at Mary Ran Gallery, but it’s Jack Meanwell who’s currently in the gallery spotlight. Thousands of pieces of Meanwell’s arework on hand...
Emerging Artists Exposed presents Dustin Pike reflecting on art as a means of personal growth, social awareness, and positive change. In this video interview, Pike discusses how creative practice can move beyond the gallery wall and become a way of shaping one’s environment, relationships, and sense of purpose.
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.
Twenty-six former Meta employees filed a lawsuit accusing the company of using AI-powered software that disproportionately selected workers with disabilities or medical leave histories for mass layoffs, Reuters reported on July 14th. The complaint says the system analyzed personnel data and helped identify people for termination in ways that punished health conditions protected by employment law. Meta has denied wrongdoing and said its layoff process complied with the law. The case remains an allegation, but its object is precise enough to be disturbing: a workplace decision system reading bodies through absences, accommodations, diagnoses, and leave records.
The medical layoff turns the employee file into a second body. A person may appear in the office through performance reviews, logins, project notes, benefits records, manager comments, and medical exceptions. When those fragments enter a selection tool, illness can become a pattern before it becomes a legal category. The worker may never see the model, the weights, the proxy variables, or the spreadsheet where vulnerability was translated into risk. Corporate restructuring already hides violence behind percentages and business units. AI adds another layer of distance. The badge stops working, and the explanation arrives later as policy, efficiency, or an allegedly neutral score that learned too much from the private cost of staying employed.
Wall Street banks are giving digital assistants the shape of office workers. Reuters reported on July 13th that Morgan Stanley plans to test client-facing assistants with human oversight, while BNY has assigned some digital employees login IDs, nicknames, daily tasks, and human managers responsible for training and review. UBS says its agents send thousands of alerts to financial advisors and can gather information from meetings, accounts, and email communications before a human approves a transaction. A June KPMG survey found that 51% of banks were piloting AI agents.
The strange detail is the personnel file. Once an agent receives a login, a nickname, a manager, and a performance review, automation stops looking like a tool and starts occupying a place in the hierarchy. Banks are not simply buying software for analysts to use; they are inventing a supervised class of nonhuman colleagues with access to internal systems and a duty to produce measurable returns. The office absorbs the machine by giving it bureaucracy. That gesture makes the risk easier to manage and harder to see. A client may still hear from a human advisor, but the reminder, the portfolio suggestion, the compliance trail, and the transfer may already have passed through a worker who exists as an account, a policy, and a daily task list.
Tata Consultancy Services is building a team of up to 8,900 forward-deployed engineers to help clients put AI systems into use, Reuters reported on July 12th. The Indian software services company is also looking at acquisitions in AI, data security, and cybersecurity. The move comes as investors worry that AI will reduce the need for large outsourcing teams, shorten projects, and push clients to demand lower prices. TCS argues that companies still need people who know customer environments deeply enough to connect models with existing systems, data flows, and business routines.
The deployed worker is the less glamorous figure inside the AI boom. Models arrive with public demonstrations, benchmark scores, and executive promises, but the workday is full of old databases, permission rules, compliance meetings, broken integrations, and departments that use the same word for different things. Someone has to carry the model through those rooms. The forward-deployed engineer becomes translator, installer, negotiator, and witness to corporate friction. That role complicates the fantasy of instant automation. AI may compress some work, but it also produces another labor market around adaptation. The machine does not simply enter the company. It is escorted in by workers who know which server still matters, which spreadsheet cannot disappear, and which manager owns the bottleneck.
