In the film “Wall Street,” Michael Douglas misguidedly observed “greed is good” with dire results. However, if greed also means grasping every opportunity to create a world-class photography collection at the Cincinnati Art Museum James Crump is committing no aesthetic trespass. “I was asked to kick start a relatively dormant program in terms of audience development, annual exhibitions, special programming and collecting said...

Yvonne van Eijden is a painter, but as a poet she marvels at language as a social construct—recognizing its power and its limitations. In her paintings she creates a visual language centered around space, moments in time, and memory. In her poem, “Open Spaces are There,” she writes: the universe like a dream a dream like the universe no boundaries no where how can we talk in words words are limited (9-12) This is the world...

Tough Pictures is a collection of photographs exhibited in the small section devoted to new acquisitions just behind the main lobby of the Cincinnati Art Museum. This interesting concept for a photography show which is neither explained nor demonstrated by the images and accompanying wall text adjacent to the installation. Although failing to deliver on its suggestive title, Tough Pictures represents a hopeful sign that the...

Unlike many artists in academia who spend more time teaching than making art, Kim Krause, chair of the Fine Arts department at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, found enough studio time in 2010 to create the seven large (up to 80″ x 72″) paintings and six mixed media on multimedia artboard® [nb: registered] Studies , culled from a much bigger body of work, for his one-person show at PAC Gallery. And these are not slapdash...

Feminine Tropes & Fairytale Myths To equate photography, still or moving, with the objects which are portrayed by the artificial eye of the lens is as silly as believing that everyone sees (e.g., comprehends what he sees) just alike. Vision is a psychological as well as a mechanical process. Even the most “objectively” made documentary is a psychologically prejudiced form of vision, automatically persuading one to see as it...

If you hadn’t been paying close attention you might have missed it. There is a moment in Christopher Backs’ new solo exhibition Firmament (with Sass) where, underneath one of the hard, heavy folds of his stuffed “clouds” the surface erupts into the pure malerisch. Just beyond this exuberant mass of pigment and binder, on a separate piece within eye shot of the viewer...

How might a contemporary artist respond to an art space that is rich in historical allusions such as the Taft Museum? Only the second “Emerging Artist” invited to exhibit her work, Kristine Donnelly found that an appealing question when she visited the museum’s inaugural Keystone Contemporary Series show last year for Emil Robinson’s exhibition, Axis Mundi. Compared to Robinson’s Contemporary Realist studio paintings however, Donnelly’s post-studio sculptures are more inconspicuous in their connection...

“A young Californian has come out of the west. . .to take over the curator’s post in the Print Department of the Cincinnati Art Museum” reported the art columnist for the Cincinnati Post, September 24, 1971. The new curator was Kristin Spangenberg, this month marking her thirty-ninth year at the Museum, and I was the art columnist.

Traditional Approaches to Radical Art Mark Harris is an artist, critic, curator, and the current Director of the School of Art at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Art, Architecture, and Planning. His diverse range of works include mixed media, sound installation, cut paper, artist books, and paintings. For his recent exhibition at Country Club Gallery, Harris created five graphite-on-paper drawings and five...