The act of looking is brave. Especially if you look at things you can’t handle. I think that most people do not look. If you’re really paying attention you could have your heart broken twelve times a day. Most of the time we aren’t looking...
Herb Ritts’ show “L. A. Style” at the Cincinnati Art Museum (up through December 30, 2012) has an etched-in-stone, funereal quality fused with a kinky soullessness. Ritts is one of those seminal photographers of an age, like Richard Avedon, Irving Penn and Edward Steichen (more on him a little later), whose lens captured the essence of a zeitgeist way beyond what is framed in his pictures.
It was a cold afternoon and sunny. The air was crisp and I soon found myself at the Notre Dame Academy · Frances Kathryn Carlisle Performing Arts Center and Gallery. The gallery was set off to a wing of the school that allowed for a quiet visit. Hardly anyone would have known I was there at all which, in my opinion, is the best way to review an art exhibit.
The dream-tinged images in Aperture, Phyllis Weston Gallery’s contribution to FotoFocus, come from distinctly individual bodies of work but share an other worldly quality. Jane Alden Stevens’ series, “Birth & Death,” is composed of large, labor-intensive mono-prints dating from the early to mid-1990s, “a time before digital tools could have made it much easier” she comments in her artist’s statement.
Naked, making money, laughing just as hydraulics hiss from the bus lifting itself back up to go – easy life for a wine rep. Dressed, no cigarette yet, relentless phone calls ringing like church bells – clients wanting their orders on time. Bathtub, backrub...
Anthony Luensman’s first major solo exhibition in five years, “Taint” at the Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery was supported by a $20,000 National Endowment for the Arts grant—one of only seventeen such grants chosen out of 1,624 eligible applications by arts organizations commissioning the creation of new works in the state of Ohio...
“Cincinnati Ballet at 50: Photographs by Peter Mueller” opened September 6 and runs through May 2014 (coinciding with the close of the company’s 50th Anniversary Season) at the Cincinnati Ballet Center, 1555 Central Parkway. Consisting of about twenty oversized photographs displayed on walls throughout the lobby of the Mickey Jarson Kaplan Performance Studio...
Those attuned to area art events cannot help but notice the current photo-mania, which is probably one of the best combined publicity efforts for the arts in recent local history. Most of the galleries and museums in the Cincinnati area have combined to present a deluge of photography-as-fine-art exhibits in all of its varied and seemingly endless forms...
When a great writer like Michael Chabon disappoints, the disappointment is that much greater, because our expectations are high about virtually anything he writes, and because contemporary American fiction has been so strikingly poor in 2012. The real Telegraph Avenue became infamous in the l960s as a street in Berkely, California, known for its head shops and other such paraphernalia...
