University of Cincinnati graduate Sol Kjok's Solo show, A Red Song in the Night, is on display at Galleri Ramfjord located in Oslo, Norway. The opening reception is Saturday September 7, Noon-2 p.m. The exhibit is September 7-29. For more information you can visit Galleri Ramfjord's website for more details.

ArtsWave announces the retirement of CEO Mary McCullough-Hudson in August of 2014. Alecia Kintner is set to be promoted to President & COO during the October Annual Meeting.

The echo Art Fair features the artwork of more than 100 artists from Western New York and beyond and a dozen temporary site-specific installation pieces, with themes and materials revolving around books and reading.

The Beads of Courage® Bead Challenge brings together local glass artists for a marathon bead-making session at Brazee Street Studios. The beads created that day are given to Children’s Hospital patients as a way to recognize milestones in their treatment journey and to honor and acknowledge their courage.

“Season’s Change: perceptions in time, from moments to infinity” is Saturday, September 14, 6-10 at Passages Gallery, 1731 Goodman Ave., North College Hill.

The Cincinnati Ballet Center celebrates its 50th Anniversary and announces The Kaplan New Works Series September 12- 22. You can purchase tickets.

The Baker Hunt & Cultural Center in Covington, Ky will be offering a class this October for those who would like to learn more about post production software.

Comic book artist and writer David Mack will create multiple drawings from the live model. Mack is best known for his work in watercolor and collage, however this demonstration will highlight his ink and brush practice recently featured in an exhibition including works by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele at Century Guild in Los Angeles and Chicago.

The Los Angeles Center for Digital Art is hosting a juried competition for digital art and photography. Entrants submit three JPEG files of original work. All styles of artwork and photography where digital processes of any kind were integral to the creation of the images are acceptable.

Ten High School students from the Cincinnati Arts & Technology Center made a trip to Yellowstone last week. The students are high school juniors who participate in programs at the Cincinnati Arts & Technology Center, which uses the arts and other programs to help at-risk students stay in school, graduate and launch careers.

Landscape: It’s much more than a pretty picture, a view through a window, a morning sunrise, or a forested hillside. Today landscape has come full circle to encompass humanity despite our attempts to subdue, reform, resist, and conquer it.

The Duncanson Society of the Taft Museum of Art has selected storyteller and educator Diane Macklin as the 2013 Duncanson Artist-in-Residence. Macklin’s style of storytelling combines theatre, rhythm, language, and movement to create a unique experience.

“Ten years in the making” is not hyperbole when applied to the “Wounded Home” exhibition at the Lloyd Library and Museum. It’s just a fact.

A “wise man” once said, “Ogres are like onions.” Although this quote is from the Disney animated feature Shrek, I think it makes a valid point. Shrek’s basically saying, “Hey, onions have layers. I have layers. Dig it?” In the newest exhibit, dig, on display at the Fitton Center for Creative Arts in Hamilton, Ohio, three artists dig deep to explore themselves via sculptural and ceramic pieces, drawings, mixed-media, and mixed-media prints.

Artists need to think their way up. Great huge works don’t simply happen. They follow many little ideas which one day culminate in a masterpiece…. sometimes. Often the public doesn’t get a glimpse of this visible path to art, but “Motif, Mantra and Mystery” at Marta Hewett takes two of her finest artists, Frank Herrmann and Kim Krause, and showcases their thought processes as seen in small, even tiny, working sketches.

Mr. Sousaphone, the main character in Jay Bolotin’s remarkable 22-minute video “Kharmen,” makes it back home after a long and dangerous and partly hallucinatory urban trek. He puts an old vinyl—or possible even shellac—version of Carmen on his turntable.

Hot! Hot! Hot! with art to match the climate at the downtown YWCA gallery. Big, juicy masses of color fan the flames of energy in nearly every one of the works by Barb Ahlbrand and Jackie Frey.

Covington’s Artisan Enterprise Center currently is chock-a-block with art, with ideas, with good reasons to spend time looking at the two linked exhibitions on view there as The Human Face: A Revelation. You may spend more time than you expected – there’s a lot to see.

One of the first non-commercial alternative art spaces in New York City, 112 Greene Street was an epicenter of artistic experimentation for much of the 1970s. The six-story industrial building in then-blighted Soho was a place where collaborations among young artists resulted in innovative cross-pollination between disciplines.

With Kentucky positioned at the confluence of its seven neighboring states, The 7 Borders exhibition at the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft ambitiously seeks to interpret and expand the mission of the institution by widening the scope of artists it considers and justifying that choice through thoughtful reinterpretations of what it means to identify with Kentucky’s geography, aesthetics and craft traditions.

Thunder-sky, Inc. Gallery is one of Cincinnati’s most unusual. The current exhibit, INNCE/EXPCE, running through Aug. 10, 2013, is inspired by a collection of poems / prints written by the great 18th & 19th Century English poet, painter, print maker, William Blake.

In 1930, Beatrice Warde gave a speech entitled “Printing Should Be Invisible.” Later printed under the name “The Crystal Goblet,” she explores concepts that graphic designers will invariably encounter at some point during their careers. Warde begins by asking whether you would rather be served your favorite vino in a solid gold vessel or a crystal clear goblet.

It would be hard to argue that downtown Cincinnati was not in need of a hip boutique hotel. 21C does much more than just fill this void: it adds a refreshing approach to exhibiting contemporary art in a welcoming setting in the heart of our “arts district”. A third top notch venue for art, the 21C, is now working the block, bookended by the CAC and the Weston Art Gallery on Walnut between 6th and 7th Streets.

Growing up in Cincinnati, Kip Eagen at age twelve was transported to a different time and place by the mummies at the Cincinnati Art Museum. It was his introduction to the world of art, which he never left. Now, he is nationally recognized as an arts administrator, public art consultant, curator and museum professional.

Polyphonic Playground: Paintings & Drawings, a solo exhibition of recent paintings and drawings by Cedric Michael Cox at FiveMyles, Brooklyn, New York, on view July 13–27, 2013. These photographs document the installed show.

Transatlantic, by Colum McCann, is a contemporary literary masterpiece. In a year where most fiction has been ordinary, his accomplishment seems that much greater.

It is a hot, late summer, Saturday morning. Mother is sitting at the kitchen table overlooking the back yard. She is wrapped in her pink satin robe as if a chill had enveloped her in winter. She is having her morning coffee.

Many of us were shocked and horrified to learn of David Johnson’s tragic and untimely death last week. David was our colleague, a superb teacher, curator, educator, who enriched the visual arts with his knowledge, hard work and frequent wit.

Photographs from The Archive Louis Zoellar Bickett documenting Aaron Skolnick’s days in New York, June 24–27, 2013: his party at the Lafayette House, the opening of his exhibition “Wayward Bound” at Rare Gallery, and his studio in his absence on July 2.

“He’s SO beautiful,” Andy Warhol swoons in quoted text next to his Day-Glo portrait of O.J. Simpson in “Andy Warhol: Athletes,” a show of commissioned pieces Warhol did in 1977 installed on aqua walls at the Dayton Art Institute.

Since Einstein on the Beach premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in 1976, composer Philip Glass has dedicated much of his time to writing both large-scale works and smaller chamber operas, many of them as prestigious commissions from major opera companies here and abroad.

It wasn’t easy to find the Lenbachhaus Galerie in Munich last summer. We crossed the street and consulted a street map several times but ultimately discovered that the gallery was actually underground and attached to the Subway.

I am Critick, hear me roar, in dudgeon too high to ignore, and I know too much to go back to East Bend.

Land of Tomorrow (LOT) Louisville is known to exhibit some of the most intriguing contemporary art in the area. Works that make you scratch your head and make you want to pull out your camera phone to take a pic. The 18,000 square foot gallery also isn’t afraid of exhibiting as many artists as the capacious building can hold.

The volunteer in the art world is a vanishing breed thanks to the institutions they serve. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) had 3000 volunteers when Michael Govan became director in 2006. Today it is questionable whether the museum volunteer will continue to exist at LACMA at all.

This is my thirteenth article pertaining to the design field and its relationship with science and philosophy. In order to understand design language at its core, the viewer must understand the acoustics of perception on multiple levels simultaneously. This writing serves as my attempt to demonstrate how all art-forms, regardless of the source, are but the many reflections of one whole ‘Idea’ of nature.

Billy Simms, artist and educator, was born and raised outside of Washington, DC. He moved to the Tri-state area in 2004. Simms has a Bachelor of Art degree from the University of Maryland Baltimore County in theatrical scenic and lighting design and a Master’s degree of Science from The Johns Hopkins University in Special Education. He works in printmaking, sculpture, collage, and photography.

The pulse of the city was vibrant. Chicago, the Windy City, breezed with music and art downtown at the Art Institute’s exhibit of Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity as well as the three-day music festival called Lollapalooza, which attracted over 270,000 people from August 2 – 4.

Now parked, I saw the firefly ascending from my truck bed. His fluorescent tube acted as a gentle jetpack, a hovercraft, an audacious escape.

The summer issue of aeqai combines the months of July and August. and is now available to our readers. We assure you that many of the shows recently opened are some of the best of the year: once upon a time, in the fifties, for example, most visual arts programming was virtually dead in the summer, as it was presumed that the rich, the sole audience for the arts, were away for the summer.