Lady Liberty returns. Not the Neoclassical colossus on Liberty Island. It is the shrieking girl with the liberty spikes on the S.O.S. ART posters plastered all over downtown. S.O.S. ART is a rally cry for peace and justice, which began in March of 2003 just as the U.S. invaded Iraq. As President George W. Bush called up...

Walking into the interior of Saad Ghosn’s house near The Cincinnati Zoo carries an almost physical impact, shifting from the bright leafy world of his front walk to shady rooms replete with colorful and exuberant art, some of it his own. This is the ninth year Ghosn has published his self-funded For a Better World, Poems and Drawings on Peace and Justice. Annual exhibits that have shown...

If you go to the Cincinnati Art Museum this summer you will see artwork from the contemporary art collection of Hollywood producer Douglas S. Cramer in two separate exhibition areas: one just upon passing the entrance foyer, where the Museum often houses small-scale teasers for future or current exhibitions; and the other in the First Floor changing exhibition hall, just across from the Terrace Café. Although the two are very...

Æqai is asking a variety of area artists to select one work of art from the permanent collection of either the Cincinnati Art Museum or the Taft Museum of Art, and tell our readers why it is important to him or her. Cole Carothers, a well known, and well respected Cincinnati painter, begins our series with his analysis of the Cincinnati Art Museum’s Gerhard Richter’s Abstract Painting. We...

(The following interview took place Sunday, June 14, 2011 in U-turn’s gallery in Brighton. Attending were the five organizers of U-turn, in alphabetical order: Molly Donnermeyer, Matt Morris, Patricia Murphy, Zach Rawe and Eric Ruschman. All are graduates of the Art Academy of Cincinnati. For the sake of brevity, this article offers excerpts from the conversation. )

“All things resist being written down,” Franz Kafka writes in an October 13, 1913 diary entry. Joey Versoza’s 2011artworks survey that resistance – objects refusing to go along with meaning, and meaning finding its way out of the experience of seeing. It’s hermeneutics in reverse: what’s in the gallery space is a visual language divorced from imagery, and imagery trying very...

Carl Fudge is a sly fellow. Just as you think you’ve caught the drift for one of his series works, either paintings or prints – ah yes, you think, look how this cluster balances that – he changes the color scheme for another version and all relationships shift gear. New game entirely.
Carl Solway Gallery is showing a selection of the work of British-born Fudge, who now lives...

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...