The Taft Museum of Art celebrated its 80th anniversary on November 29, 2012. To commemorate the occasion, museum staff mined the archives for documents that could illustrate the history of the museum in a way never before seen by the public. I was honored to be asked to winnow down the many items into a small exhibition for the Taft’s Sinton Gallery.
Biology Osmosis: A process by which molecules of a solvent tend to pass through a semipermeable membrane from a less concentrated solution into a more concentrated one, thus equalizing the concentrations on each side of the membrane. Physics The Pauli Exclusion Principle: The quantum mechanical principle that no two identical electrons may occupy the same quantum state simultaneously.
“New Magic & Costume Shoppe” is the title of the show at Thunder-Sky, Inc., featuring David Earl Johnson’s masks, Yohana Junker’s paintings, and Raymond Thunder-Sky’s clown costumes and drawings. Bill Ross, curator of the exhibition and co-founder of Thunder-Sky, Inc., suggests that what ties these three artists’ work together is a shared interest in expressing spirituality through their art.
“Art For A Better World” is a new column that will regularly feature Greater Cincinnati Artists who use their art for a message and for a change. Each column, divided into two sections titled respectively “Images for a Better World” and “Words for a Better World”, will give the stage to a local visual artist and a local literary artist.
Paper had its beginnings sometime around AD 105 in China and has become a staple in many facets of our lives. But if you can’t look beyond paper’s basic uses such as a writing surface, advertisement materials, product packaging, or books, then you’re blinding yourself to the beauty of paper as an artistic medium.
In the freakishly astute situation comedy Enlightened (Sunday nights at 9:30 pm on HBO), tall and stately Laura Dern plays Amy Jellicoe, a great big loser beyond compare. Amy’s whole life has gone into a black hole she seems hell-bent on reinventing as a “transition,” but she can’t get anything right, except the eagerness to do something “positive.”
Early in the new year, a young novelist’s new , or sometimes first, book is published and surprises me with its quality; last year, it was Nell Freudenberger’s The Newlyweds, a splendid look at an American man and a Bangladeshi woman who meet over the internet and eventually marry; Freudenberger’s narrator, the Bangladeshi, is an astute adaptor to her new life and culture and marriage, but when she goes...
Few artists in Cincinnati have emerged so quickly and ubiquitously as Cedric Michael Cox. A 1999 Bachelor of Fine Arts graduate from the University of Cincinnati’s Design, Architecture, Art and Planning Program, he has in the last four years landed four solo exhibits at top exhibition venues in the city: The Carnegie Visual and Performing Arts Center, Contemporary Arts Center, The Weston Gallery, and most recently PAC Gallery.
Lifting the large rock, smooth with a few dimples like my grandfather's face, I found positivity living in the mud under it: Worm-wiggle squirms, needle-toothed beetles, and karma-dowsed larva mingling in harmony.
