Anytime an exhibition promises The New –whether by title or press release- I hear alarm bells. My immediate thoughts conjure up images of artworks that question, examine, provoke, or reconsider some previously ill-considered idea; and above all else, I expect to have my expectations challenged. So when I received an invitation to attend the press preview for Creating the New Century: Contemporary Art from the Dicke Collection...

Now that we’re a decade deep into the new millennium, the impulse to slap “New Century” on just about anything out there is hard to resist. Meanwhile, a lot of what’s going on has 20th century roots. Case in point is Creating the New Century: Contemporary Art from the Dicke Collection at the Dayton Art Institute through July 10. Although it is indeed 21st century work, the bulk...

Bill Seitz has all the requisite credentials, but the direction he has gone has taken on a life of its own, and he describes his work as Gallery Director at The Carnegie Visual and Performing Arts Center, in Covington, KY for sixteen years as “the dream job.” The Carnegie has a fascinating history, and the reconstruction that joined two buildings and restored a once-lovely theatre modeled after a 19th-century French Opera...

Quite a lot is going on in the engrossing exhibition of Melvin Grier’s photographs at Kennedy Heights Arts Center.. One narrative line is this city, reflected in a daily newspaper over a period of more than thirty years. Another has to do with the photographer himself, a black man recording the affairs of a city that never lost sight of itself as white. The show’s title, White People: A Retrospective, comes from Grier’s...

Late Modernism, the last and least worthy phase of a wonderfully creative 150-year movement, petered out before the births of most of the painters in this show. In its wake, the art world, then mostly western in emphasis, embraced a new pluralism that has since come to include a vast international range of stylistic choices. These artists, raised in that environment, made...

Although the exhibition at the Thomas J. Funké Gallery is named “2 Artists/2 Perspectives: Jeff Shapiro and Don Reitz,” the “perspectives” of these two ceramic artists seem more aligned than not.
Visually Reitz’s and Shapiro’s work shares a roughness that borders on crude. It rudely slaps the refinement of much of traditional ceramics in the face. Their vessels...

With his usual reticence to tout his own achievements – “I don’t profess to have any particular insight other than doing it for a long time,” Barry Andersen succinctly distilled the major challenges facing the role of art education and art making in contemporary society over chili the other day. Professor Barry Andersen, head of the photography department in the College of Arts and Sciences at...

Is he a misogynist or is he not? That is the question most art critics and historians quickly come to when discussing Willem de Kooning and his 1950’s Women Series.
Let’s consider: It’s the middle of the 20th Century and painting is so alive and kicking! Who is the artist that dominates that world? Picasso. What defines the...

Rob Anderson’s 24 small (3.5×5″) paintings (2009-present) of mostly male faces form a file along the south wall of the Rieveschl Gallery at the Carnegie. Anderson’s skill with his medium is evident. He precisely renders diverse hues, in defiance of the small dimensions of the board. The background is graphically reduced to large swathes of one or two colors...