Jeff Casto’s shadowboxes and assemblages in “Future Tense,” his current exhibit at 1305 Gallery ending July 15, 2011, conjure Joseph Cornell’s Utopia Parkway workshop, as well as Pee Wee Herman’s Playhouse, extracting wistfulness from detritus, seriousness from folly. The toys, junk and other materials used in Casto’s art have the allure of Saturday...

In Garfield Place, the two bronze statues by Charles Henry Nihaus of former Ohio-born US presidents James A. Garfield and William Henry Harrison have been yarn bombed.
Yarn bombing, for the uninitiated, is a form of street art that uses knit/crochet objects illegally placed in prominent public space. The term “bombing” arises from graffiti tagging lingo. Unlike graffiti spray paint, yarn bombing does not deface...

Steve Kemple’s exhibition at Semantics, The World is Everything That it Isn’t, accomplishes what many exhibitions strive to do: approach difficult ideas, both in the arts, and in general, in a digestible and playful way. Kemple touches on subjects of organizational systems, simulation, function, etc. with art objects such as a houseplant, an old map, and a telescope among...

In this Art Scene interview, Brad McCombs discusses his interest in creating experiences around the ways people encounter artwork. Speaking from the context of Northern Kentucky University’s visual arts program, he describes new media as a field that brings video, performance, film, interactivity and digital technologies into conversation with contemporary artistic practice...

Thornton Dial, Courttney Cooper, and other “Hard Truths”. In an essay in the catalog for “Hard Truths,” Thornton Dial’s brilliant retrospective at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (up until September 15, 2011), Greg Tate takes on the “hard truths” involved in trying to figure out how to locate Dial on an art-world map: “For far too much time, Dial’s work has been tethered...

“Maidens of the Cosmic Body Running: Majr Gazr” is a collective exhibition featuring the work of area artists Denise Burge, Lisa Siders, and Jenny Ustick at the Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art. The installation is an intensely immersive experience in which the group employs color, video, geometric abstraction, wall-drawings, fiber art, and various other media to create a kind of psychological space...

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...