2015 was an odd year for fiction, unsettled, lacking greatness in general, but heartening to see so many younger writers from around the world taking to fiction, to writing novels, in spite of all the technological changes and the failing assumption that the physical book, the object, will soon be a thing of the past.
It’s hidden away so carefully behind the current exhibit “High Style” from the Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection, that I could only find it with the help of the Cincinnati Art Museum’s security staff. Ah, but it was truly worth it. Maybe the effort required to locate the display is simply a foil to impress visitors with its importance. If so, it’s working.
Phyllis Weston’s recent death, after a very long and singularly fruitful career in the arts in Greater Cincinnati, certainly represents the end of an era, and I think that the era which she helped to define and in which she dominated, may have been a gentler one, certainly one in which the force of a personality like hers was able to supersede all the marketing and branding campaigns, all the MBA-ese, of our current era.
As the holidays are among us, aeqai’s fashion retrospective moves back a few weeks to early December with Italian fashion house Valentino. The brand was founded in 1959 by world-renowned fashion designer Valentino Garavani and is currently under the creative direction of Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pier Paolo Piccioli.
In the words of 1970’s hardcore punk band, Black Flag, Gimmie Gimmie Gimme is “a loaded gun.” Dealing with everything from civil rights to Watergate, from feminist to schizophrenics, the exhibition narrates the human experience on many (many) levels. With such weighty topics, the gallery makes an even bolder move in toying with the structure of the exhibition itself.
“Stars Under the Sky” is the title of the latest exhibit curated by Melissa Sammarco at the three room gallery over the Greenwich Jazz Club in Walnut Hills.
The December issue of Aeqai has just posted. As before, it’s usually a smaller issue, as we note that more exhibition spaces hold off putting up new shows until around the middle of January , as various holiday pop-up shows in studios across the region occur. Since this time of year tends to be frenzied, institutions and galleries hope that people will come view their current offerings, some holiday-oriented, some not.
It’s with great excitement that I write to you today. The last weeks were wrought with emotional highs, lows and a little bit of everything in between. We were knee deep in preparation for Modern Living: Objects and Context, an exhibition in the works for nine months which BLDG co-curated with Matt Distel at The Carnegie.
Catherine Richards defines herself as an artist and architect. A graduate of DAAP originally from Cleveland, she spent a year in NYC working for the renowned firm OMA (co-founded by Rem Koolhaas). She currently teaches at DAAP, lives in OTR, and works out of a gigantic studio in Newport filled with a mountain of fabric, as well as paintings, sculptures, and jewelry in progress.
Los Angeles-based artist Dani Dodge has paid witness to more than her share of devastation. A former journalist and war correspondent, Dodge was embedded with the 1st Marine Expeditionary Unit during the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. While the experience earned her team accolades for their coverage of the war, the anguish and agony that she witnessed left her grappling for answers.
That’s not a quote from artist Anila Quayyam Agha, although it appropriately describes “Intersections,” her installation that was featured at Rice Gallery this fall. This line belongs to Saba Husain’s poem, “The Keeper,” and opened this fall’s Words & Art reading. “Intersections” hung in the center of the room, casting intricate shadows over the audience and Saba as she read.
“Modern Living: Objects and Context” at The Carnegie was co-curated by Matt Distel and BLDG, a Covington-based design firm, and explores “the intersection and conflation of design and art objects,” according to The Carnegie’s Exhibitions Director Distel. To this end, the exhibition is divided into two parts.
Retired art teacher Susan Mahan has found a second career in making art. She taught all forms of artfrom drawing to jewelry design at Mariemont High School from 1981 to 2006. She also coached varsity gymnastics, cheerleading and served as scenic art designer for the plays.
A sensuous, bare-shouldered woman with a broad, red smile. An homage to an artistic influence in the form of a framed Roy Lichtenstein print hanging on the wall. An arrangement of everyday household products on a table, visible beyond the (very yellow) curve of the woman’s arm.
An artist, says artist Cole Carothers, must be patient and inquisitive. Carothers has been a working artist since the 1970s so speaks from experience. For his own paintings and prints, he says it’s a matter of simplifying, simplifying, pushing toward “a reduction of elements, simplicity of masses, trees becoming shapes.”
Located in the Incline District of East Price Hill, The Flats Art Gallery sits in a renovated apartment building across the street from BLOC Coffee Company, and only a few minute’s walk from the immensely popular Incline Public House. On an overcast day, in an unseasonably warm December, the neon OPEN signs behind the gallery’s plate glass windows shone like twin beacons above a relatively sleepy street.
Rachel Girard Reisert is an artist and educator working in Cincinnati, OH. Her work combines historic and digital photographic processes to address the complexities of perception and the intersection where personal experience is both unique and universal. Reisert has exhibited nationally and internationally including, Canada, Italy and Hungary.
