There is a little “back room” at Manifest Art Gallery where twice, now, I’ve discovered unexpected excellence. It portends even more visits working back to front in this unusual art venue. This latest surprise was a show of large hand printed portrait etchings on chine colle by Dennis Olsen.
Gary Gaffney, born in New Orleans, LA, is now Professor Emeritus at the Art Academy of Cincinnati after a teaching career of more than 30 years. He has worked in a wide range of visual and literary media. His text-based images are a small effort to subvert the polluting influence of commercial advertising.
Far from being out of town, where these “letters from” are supposed to be, Mt. Adams is as close to town as one can be in Cincinnati. And yet for us, it was our way of leaving Cincinnati without leaving Cincinnati.
“Continuity and Change” is a big and ambitious show, curated by Daniel Brown, the Editor of Aeqai who has written about art, been an art dealer, and an independent curator for several decades.
The conversation about “outsider art/ists” has been constantly changing and evolving for years. These changes are not ones without conflict – from continuing debate on terminology, qualification, to the many issues faced at the intersection of art and disability advocacy.
Two new exhibits examine perspectives on domestic living spaces in site-specific collaborations about American Life. On this old fashion road trip, I discovered the dichotomy of Living and Consuming; A concept that is as American as apple pie, not just in American Life, but also in American Art.
John Sullivan, president of the Art Academy of Cincinnati since 2012, looks for teachable moments when dealing with his student body of 200. He offers a supportive comment or a suggestion as he walks the halls of the 150,000 square foot building which moved from its Eden Park location adjacent to the Cincinnati Art Museum in 2005.
Work by seven members of Queen City Glass Art is currently on view at the 5th Street Gallery, a co-op gallery in the Netherland at the corner of Fifth and Race. The organization is a nonprofit dedicated to educating and uplifting the community through hot glass arts. They work at the hot shop, glassblowing studio, at Brazee Street Studios.
Terrie Hancock Mangat is quite clear about what she’s making when she stitches together cloth and adds all manner of embellishment from buttons to beads, appliqués to embroidery. She is making art quilts.
Art and technology, innovation and entrepreneurship unite in DISRUPTORS, on display through May 24 at the Artisan Enterprise Center in Covington, Kentucky. The exhibit sets out to explore “the challenge of maintaining relevancy in art and technology and the role of the artist-innovator,” notes Curator Morgan Cobb.
A photo essay by Louis Zoellar Bickett from his ongoing project The Archive: twenty-two photographs of Lexington, Kentucky, from Gratz Park in spring and the Old Georgetown Street house to the Northend Wal-Mart Shopping Center.
The invitation is to meet the artist, Donna Talerico, whose show opens that very evening, in the shoe department on the first floor of Saks Fifth Avenue. In Cincinnati Saks is on Fifth Street rather than Fifth Avenue, at the corner of Race.
The May issue is a few days late, so that all the aeqai writers could have a breather after the benefit party that The Carnegie hosted for us on Thursday, May l6. We want to thank Katie Brass, Carnegie’s Director, for providing the space and the hospitality for aeqai, and are happy to report that our attendance was near l75 people, and that our revenue from the evening is nearly three times greater than last year’s.
In a recently released pop film on the much touted French painter, a gnarly Renoir, grappling with the problems of posing the girl before him, recalls being queried by another artist of his time: “why can’t one just paint apples?” His hissed reply reflects the fascination felt by artists in every epoch: “It is living, breathing skin…”
Known primarily as the author of the mythic painting The Rose, Jay DeFeo (1929-1989) was an enigmatic artist whose fierce devotion to a single work became her claim to fame. It also damaged her career, and in doing so delayed exposure of her work to a wider public. This damage is only now being undone by the first retrospective of her work, on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art until June 2.
In 2011 the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition Savage Beauty, celebrating the work of fashion designer Alexander McQueen, became a sensation attracting over 650,000 visitors. I had the privilege of seeing the show sans the crowds as a colleague at the Costume Institute escorted me in before the galleries were open to the public.
In a New York Magazine article about the recent opening of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute’s exhibit “Punk: Chaos to Couture,” Nitsuh Abebe writes: “In music, punk remains what the critic Frank Kogan calls a ‘Superword,’ a term whose main purpose is for people to fight over what it should mean, using it as a ‘flag in a bloody game of Capture the Flag.’ It’s a concept like ‘freedom’ or ‘the one true Church...
One Indian summer day we dressed in our favorite things, me in my beatnik sandals and ragged scarves, and Robert with his love beads and sheepskin vest. We took the subway to West Fourth Street and spent the afternoon in Washington Square. We shared coffee from a thermos, watching the stream of tourists, stoners, and folksingers. Agitated revolutionaries distributed antiwar leaflets. Chess players drew a crowd of their own.
“Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.” – Albert Einstein
Visually Sound—the group show at LOT Louisville is curated by the artist and independent curator Aaron Michael Skolnick. For his show he chose five artists from the roster of the renowned RARE Gallery, NYC.
I’ve always believed that trees have a spiritual energy that surrounds them. Trees, in a way, remind me of people, outreaching arms eternally striving for heaven. Some trees are silent and still, while others dance to the music of strong winds. During the winter months they lie fallow, while during the springtime they come to life during a process of rebirth, as nature around them thaws.
“Look at this new book of cow paintings. Full of bucolics, no? It’s a genre I like to call ‘coffee-tablers’— when you have guests, these things work like enablers do, trying to get you to accept their alcoholics.”
Editor’s note: Aeqai freqently receives art announcements from galleries, non-profits, museums and individual artists from all parts of the globe. Some galleries, like Martha Otero in Los Angeles, seem to show only the most elegant work, conceptually strong, beautifully crafted, and the vision of the gallery comes from its owner, Martha Otero.
Santa Fe, New Mexico. To the creative mind the name alone is sufficiently inspiring. It has to be one of the most stimulating places to visit, that is, if hand-made Native American jewelry, superior woven blankets, historical art museums and hundreds of art galleries are your thing.
The Woman Upstairs, by Claire Messud, is important and refreshing on a number of levels. Messud, whose first novel The Emperor’s Children chronicles the lives of Milleniums and their very achieving parents, mainly in New York City, does such a good job at highlighting the lives of these Helicopter Parents and their wildly overindulged children, that I began to detest her characters and occasionally their overliberal,...
Three new poems by Maxwell Redder: “Dandelion,” about a circle of friends brewing beer and talking film and photography; “Saw,” on the hunger of a power saw’s hundred teeth; and “Worn Leather Brown,” on the eyes of a soft-spoken beggar.
