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, have made quilts with an abstract boldness and lively folk-art aesthetic...

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, but a wall label explains that she “pushes the concept into the ‘now’ with an enlivened palette and a greater complexity of surface...

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.

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. Even the most “objectively” made documentary is a psychologically prejudiced form of vision, automatically persuading one to see as it...

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...

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. Although failing to deliver on its suggestive title, Tough Pictures represents a hopeful sign that the...

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...

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...

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. Despite the forcefulness implied by the visible splashes of paint, the composition communicates the artist’s reverence for...