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...

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.

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...

It is a big deal when an internationally-recognized artist comes to town—particularly one who has local roots like Ann Hamilton. Her current exhibition, reading at Carl Solway is not the kind of large-scale, multi-sensory, immersive installation that one might expect from the artist.
Instead, the curated exhibition consists mainly of text-heavy prints that have informed and supported past projects.

Despite the suggestion to the contrary, A Vanguard of Six is a conventional exhibition of six contemporary artists whose divergent interests make for a cerebral show that at times feels remote and disembodied. Considering the charged subject matter that many of these artists are dealing with, the inaccessibility and perceptual tedium of many of the works is perplexing...

Exhibitions can be flat-out beautiful and they can bristle with ideas. When they are both you might want to send up a rocket in celebration, but perhaps the best thing is simply to go back and look at the show again.
The Cincinnati Art Museum’s extraordinary gathering of paintings in Thomas Gainsborough and the Modern Woman invites second visits.

In a recent Interview Magazine article, one prominent artist has this to say concerning collectors: “There are awful ones and great ones. There are a few I absolutely love, like Andy Stillpass in Cincinnati. He’s one of the greatest collectors in the world because his relationship to the art is alive. He lives with it. He commissions all of his pieces. He doesn’t have tons of money, but he’s really smart.” So, what made Andy...

Standing before Morning Calm (see image, right), the eye moves from the image of the window, to the feeling of the home from which one views it, to a subtle leap in perspective: one in which the window, house, etc. disappear into the balanced dissidence of boldly placed color and calm atmospheric haze. Despite the forcefulness implied by the visible splashes of paint, the composition communicates the artist’s reverence for...