At the Cincinnati Art Mu’seum, I alway’s breezed through the Schmidlapp Gallery with it’s antiquitie’s on my way ’somewhere el’se. Well, that will never happen again ’since the gallery ha’s been renovated to pre’sent “18 of the Art Mu’seum’’s mo’st iconic work’s of art,” according to the wall text.* That declaration i’s unnece’s’sary ’since the dramatic new in’stallation ’scream’s...
Here is Cincinnati, a medium-sized city in the southwest corner of Ohio, across from Kentucky’s smaller riverside towns of Newport and Covington and only an hour and a half’s drive from Indianapolis, Louisville, or Lexington; close enough, therefore, to form one center of a tri-state cultural area whose art networks sporadically intersect. Though Cincinnati may be the more cohesive and prosperous art center in the...
The Cincinnati Art Museum’s current show, “Art Deco: Fashion and Design in the Jazz Age” is an exhibition contextualizing evening dresses from the Betty Colker Collection with textiles, prints, jewelry, furniture, and sundry other art objects related to the Art Deco aesthetic. The exhibition is decidedly female centric, focusing on the material trappings and images of women from the 1920-30s, and is a testament...
Matt Distel, a lively compact young man, is a curator, gallery director and general man about art. Anything written about him only scratches the surface of his penetrating involvement in the art life of Cincinnati, from the DeLeia to the CAC, from Country Club to Publico to The Weston, Distel has had his hand in curating, organizing, and invariably being at the center of what is happening in art, both here and in other...
Under the cover of darkness the city twinkles with the light from countless windows, streetlamps and signs, wrapping us in an ambient neon coat. Nighttime is when our urban spaces truly come alive. In his luminous new show at Cincinnati Art Galleries, LLC, Tom Bacher pushes the envelope with glowing, phosphorescent cityscapes and landscapes. The 25 paintings included in Fos-4-s-cent Met-A-more-fik Paintings represent...
The wall text for Julião Sarmento’s exhibit (closing January 22, 2012) at the Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art promises an exhibit built on “the concept of the book as an aesthetic and visceral object.” It goes on to report that many of Sarmento’s drawings exemplify the “sensuous gesture of holding a book.” Like a carnival barker’s hyperbolic and unintentionally ironic script, that text hypes up a show...
When asked to write about a favorite painting at the art museum, I saw it as an invitation to reestablish my emotional connection to the art I see. Recently, I find it hard to have a gut reaction to works that I spend time in front of. This is especially true if I sense that there is much for me to learn from certain works. My approach is all-wrong. I don’t wait for paintings to grab me anymore; I accost them and analyze...
To quote Alan Watts, a much wiser man than I, “A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.” Walking through the hall of the new Canco Gallery space in Northside, I got the feeling I was entering someone’s intrapersonal mindscape, filled with its fair share of ecstasy and horror. That someone is Michael Scheurer. I haven’t met the man, but I can’t say that I didn’t feel his presence still lingering...
George Inness, as currently featured at the Taft Museum of Art through January 8, 2012, was not yet the master of a united nature concept when these early paintings were completed. Often noted as the most influential artist in the development of American Impressionism, that title would have been angrily denied by him, had he known of it. He heartily disapproved of Impressionism, with obvious loyalties, as evidenced in the...
