Place is the ostensible subject of Rosson Crow painted dreamscapes, and out of the seven canvases in her exhibition, Myth of the American Motorcycle, at the Contemporary Arts Center, only two are outdoor scenes. In all, the artist depiction of space is loose and layered, barely hinting at architectural detail or expansive depth of sky to provide the viewer with visceral position. This obfuscation of place is a result of Crow...

Francisco José de Goya was 53 years old, seriously deaf but acutely visual, when he published the extraordinary series of eighty images called Los Caprichos now on view at the Taft Museum of Art. Caprichos—the word means “whims” or “fancies”—in this artist’s hands become the thoughtless, often cruel, frequently selfish extravagances of a society in which the verities are up for question and political and economic...

Ivan Fortushniak returns to Manifest Gallery this month with a solo exhibition of 15 modest sized works that range from the prosaic to the superb. A god in his own way, Fortushniak fashions painted worlds that resonate with ambiguity and unease. In his universe figures from the past stare obliquely into contemporary landscapes, are compelled skyward by invisible forces, and take part in tense, sometimes dangerous,...

Appropriately titled, UN related: A Giant Cap Gun and White Discs on view at Museum Gallery Gallery Museum features the work of Australia native Waseem Touma and the Lexington, Kentucky based pseudonymous corporate organization Dronex Inc. In addition to being formally and materially dissimilar, the works of Waseem Touma and Dronex Inc. are conceptually miles apart.

Roy Johnston is not schizophrenic, but his solo show at the Weston Art Gallery sometimes seems to be a two-person exhibition. Like a group (two is a very small group) show, the paintings, drawings, and prints on view are related, but in this case it’s just Johnston pursuing simultaneously two strains of aesthetic exploration. One strain is nonobjective, but the other has “some sense of object relationship to things associated...

Although Cincinnati can’t truly be considered a hot bed of glass art activity, another Ohio city—Toledo—played a seminal role in the development of what is known as the Studio Glass Movement.
Studio glass describes glasswork created by an artist working directly with the material, often alone, and with the intent of making art. Until 1962 only artisans worked with glass. They were guided by designers who, metaphorically,...

The contemporary art world has embraced quilts: Amish quilts with their color-blocked abstraction and the equally striking quilts from Gee’s Bend, which are perhaps less known. For six generations the women of Gee’s Bend, a rural community founded by freed slaves on an island in the Alabama River, isolated from the mainland by an unreliable ferry and an unpaved road with a roundabout approach, have made quilts with an abstract boldness and lively folk-art aesthetic...

There are twin—fraternal twin--shows at Cincinnati Art Galleries: Leslie Shiels: Lost Dogs Found and Kevin T. Kelly: Embracing the Yin. Shiels provides the hunting hounds, and Kelly the countryside they might roam.
Shiels has returned to a subject that she has explored, with great success, in the past, but a wall label explains that she “pushes the concept into the ‘now’ with an enlivened palette and a greater complexity of surface...

Here’s the bad news first: You are too late, Michael Scheurer’s exquisite solo show at Clay Street Press closed this weekend (October 16th, 2010). The summation of nearly two years worth of effort, The Tabloid Series and other Works presents over 40 collages and a series of six intaglio and full color lithographs (made in conjunction with artist and printer Mark Patsfall) that abound with curiosity and meticulous detail.