On a rainy day in Over-the-Rhine I arrive at the school. It is an odd feeling pulling over on Central Parkway alongside parents dropping off children in front of this colossal feat of modern architecture. It is not the School for the Creative and Performing Arts I grew up in and I’m nervous entering.
“Whaam! Bratatat! Varoom! The Art Institute of Chicago explodes this summer with the energy of Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997) in the largest exhibition of the seminal Pop artist to date. More than 160 of Lichtenstein’s works, from the familiar to the completely unexpected, will be on view in the first of only two American venues for Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective.” 1 This retrospective is of such eminence, it travels...
Still life is the most problematic—and most abstract—of genres, as the paintings seem to lack the grandeur associated with landscapes or with figures that can assume allegorical or mythological-religious resonance. Because the objects depicted are taken from ordinary life, however, they intimately speak to our daily existence and to our interior lives...
The Bible tells the story of Adam and Eve (mankind) expelled from the Garden of Eden for picking fruit from the tree of knowledge. Katie St. Clairʼs, The Hierarchy of Living Things gives us little comfort in whatever knowledge we have gleaned from that singular fruit. Here, naked as the day she was born, a young woman crawls and feeds in a flower bed like some voracious beast...
In the exhibition “Ohio to the White House,” appropriately at the Taft Museum of Art, Matthew Albritton has documented the birthplaces and boyhood homes of the seven Ohio-born presidents. Their terms account for half of presidential service between 1869 and 1923. During that time only three presidents hailed from outside the Buckeye state.
Layered Abstractions at AEC April 13 thru May 11 Abstract they are; some more than others. Yet sculpture by Robert Pulley, palette knife paintings by Trish Weeks, and painted comments on humanity by Paige Williams, were pulled together by the common, if tenuous, thread of nature. Robert Pulley has spent decades in sculpture.
“Dance?” asks one of a pair of figures in a collaborative painting by the two artists in Thunder-Sky Gallery’s current exhibition, Reverse Psychology. “Sorry, not my type,” answers the other. The two inhabit a dreamy, fragmented setting; the pop-star-like woman wears a beehive hairdo, a polka dot dress and a prosthetic arm and the man is a stiff, Lincoln-esque fellow. Recent suggestions about this president’s secret longings...
Cincinnatian Robert Off has been designing and fabricating miniature rooms,which he calls roomboxes, for over ten years, easily, but has begun to display them in gallery and museum settings to enormous audience and peer delight. Off begins each piece, an individual art unto itself, in his imagination; some of his ideas are spinoffs from conferences or conventions he has attended...
When I was first approached about writing this appreciation of a piece at the Cincinnati Art Museum, I was absolutely confident in my choice. As many times as I had entered through those majestic doors, I knew where I was first drawn. No matter what new exhibit had just opened, I had to make my way to their Classical collection of Greek, Roman, and Near Eastern sculpture. The portrait busts enticed me. How had that sculptor...
