Jimmy Baker makes difficult art, and makes it extremely well. His solo show at Contemporary Arts Center, Remote Viewing, is only ten paintings but they are quite enough for the long, thin gallery that stretches along the south side of the CAC’s second floor. The works hang at a distance from one another, as they should. Any closer would invite visual chaos.

“Tony Dotson: Shock and Awe” (up through April 9, 2011 at PAC Gallery in Walnut Hills) pushes Dotson’s smart-alecky yet innocently streamlined aesthetic into newer and fiercer territories. The show comes off like Philip Guston took all of his gritty/funky oeuvre through a car-wash and arranged each piece in a parking lot for an impromptu flea market...

Entering Jun Kaneko’s solo exhibition at the Carl Solway Gallery, I was smacked in the face by his Nagoya Wall – Tile Wall, 1987, even though the ceramic work is installed on a freestanding wall at the back of the corridor gallery. It did more than draw me into the space, it compelled me to enter, passing by—or bypassing—the artist’s wall works...

When I walked into “Going Dutch: Contemporary Design from Local Collections” at the Cincinnati Art Museum, I was overwhelmed—by the volume of words covering all four walls of the diminutive gallery—and under-whelmed by the number of objects on view—19. Given that ratio, I thought the words better be good. The exhibition showcases products from the Dutch design collective...

What instincts guide us when we first meet other people? Is it our reading of gestural clues, a tilt of the head or an expression? Or, is it something more basic that leads one to know that Jymi Bolden is a warm, intelligent man ready for a hug?
Bolden presides over Art Beyond Boundaries...