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.

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 century so far? Cubism? Dada? Surrealism? Oh, and don’t forget Expressionism!

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...

The current show at Prairie Gallery, Little Kings, features documentary-style photography by Chris Bucher, who followed a group of youth boxers as they trained for the Ringside World Championships held in Kansas City, Missouri in 2008. Bucher worked with boxers who were training at a gym in Indianapolis called Jireh Sports Ministry. The kids he photographed spent five to six days a week...

Water Garden, a new exhibition of paintings by area artist Susan Schuler opened this past weekend (April 29, 2011) at the Malton Gallery. Schuler has gained a reputation for her brash palette and a gestural approach to painting that echo’s what critic Clement Greenberg once referred to as “the tenth street touch”. As a devotee of mid-century abstraction, the painter wears her influences well.

Conserving the pioneering work of artist Nam June Paik was the subject of this past weekend’s symposium at The University of Cincinnati. Made possible by a grant from the Getty Foundation, artists, curators, and academics from across the nation and as far away as Rome, descended on Cincinnati in an effort to develop practices and consider...