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.

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.

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.