Author’s Note: Valinkat (aka Kathy Valin) is a blog I created in the summer of 2010. I am currently a freelance writing and editing professional enjoying life in the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood of Cincinnati, Ohio, when I’m not traveling all over the world with my husband. On Valinkat I regularly post a mix of urban diary, dance, pets, food, and some stuff that just feeds my crazy sense of humor...
Editor’s Note: ÆQAI has invited contemporary dance critic and still occasional dancer/teacher Kathy Valin to write for us in an interdisciplinary fashion. Look for ÆQAI to do more of this kind of crossover writing. Maria Seda-Reeder’s review of the Nick Cave installation on all three floors of the Cincinnati Art Museum is featured in this issue and Kathy Valin reviews the actual performance that Cave did on the first two...
In London, on the day I went to both exhibitions, it seemed that everyone who wasn’t at the National Gallery’s stunning Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan had come to the Royal Academy for David Hockney’s knock-your-eye-out responses to the English landscape. Each show was at controlled maximum attendance but the crowds were mannerly and pretty clearly caught up in what they were seeing.
Featuring one of you college professors’ art in your own successful gallery long after graduation must be one of those daydreams of the undergrad, particularly when you have succeeded as an artist in your own right. Thus, the very happy combination of Jim Williams, U.C professor, and Mark Patsfall, erstwhile student. Patsfall’s Clay Street Press Gallery seems to have been made for such surprising art. Small, as galleries...
Carl Solway Gallery’s John Cage: A Centennial with Friends celebrates Cage’s 100th birthday by presenting a comprehensive portrait of John Cage, the 20th Century composer, writer, visual artist, and teacher. Clippings, composition scores, diary entries, notes on mycology, and seldom seen visual art stuff an entire room of the gallery showcasing not only how incredibly prolific Cage was, but the wealth of material Solway...
“A Retelling,” the curatorial work of Katie Rentzke, at Covington’s Artisan Enterprise Center, exhibits three related bodies of work by Brian Harmon, Billy Renkl and McCrystle Wood. Through photographic installation, collage and computer generated prints, each of the artists poised in his or her respective medium, ambiguously addresses the idea of “retelling,” individually and collectively. There are no clear indications...
Romantic and cinematic, the prints and collages in the retrospective “Impressions and Improvisations: The Prints of Romare Bearden,” (on display at the Taft Museum of Art through April 29, 2012) have a home-brewed flair matched with an aesthete’s precision. In each piece, Bearden seems to devote all his time and attention to grasping at the tenderness beneath the wear and tear of being alive.
Nick Cave lives up to his hype. The artist’s sprawling installation/intervention at the Cincinnati Art Museum, “Meet Me at the Center of the Earth” covers all three floors with some thirty-six of Cave’s iconic “Soundsuits,” ten oversized glossy color photos, nine videos, two tondos...
“Through the Windshield OTR: Recent Photographs by Jens Rosenkrantz, Jr.,” pretty much describes what’s on view at PAC Gallery, which is now open only by appointment.
Rosenkrantz has photographed the grotty Over the Rhine neighborhood in the rain through a car windshield. But instead of being gray and depressing, these photos are bright and upbeat.
Rosenkrantz says, “I look for the beauty of the everyday wherever I am...
