“Hello, my name is Benedict Leca, and I am the curator of this show. Would you like me to give you a tour?” Leca visits the gallery that houses the Cincinnati Art Museum’s internationally acclaimed show Thomas Gainsborough and the Modern Woman (through January 2, 2011) two or three times a day. Several people look up, at first surprised and then with anticipation, as Leca launches into a provocativ...

Todd Reynolds’ oils’ and watercolors’ most salient contemporary features depict an America in which chronic violence is implied, hope is in abeyance. His quasi-narrative, usually large scale paintings rip the niceties and pieties off of middle class life, portraying, instead, a near-Surreal world of low-life characters, drug-induced or -inspired people in scenarios of dead-end near apocalypse.

Appropriately titled, UN related: A Giant Cap Gun and White Discs on view at Museum Gallery Gallery Museum features the work of Australia native Waseem Touma and the Lexington, Kentucky based pseudonymous corporate organization Dronex Inc. In addition to being formally and materially dissimilar, the works of Waseem Touma and Dronex Inc. are conceptually miles apart.

Roy Johnston is not schizophrenic, but his solo show at the Weston Art Gallery sometimes seems to be a two-person exhibition. Like a group (two is a very small group) show, the paintings, drawings, and prints on view are related, but in this case it’s just Johnston pursuing simultaneously two strains of aesthetic exploration. One strain is nonobjective, but the other has “some sense of object relationship to things associated...

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...

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...

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.