On Tuesday, November 4, at 6:30 p.m., the Liberal Arts Studio at the Art Academy of Cincinnati will host poet, teacher, editor, and independent publisher Anselm Berrigan for a free public reading. The session will be opened by student Nyla Davies (junior), and after the featured reader there will be a brief open mic for anyone who would like to share their work. The proposal is straightforward: listen to poems, read them aloud, and sustain a simple exchange, with coffee and light refreshments.

The Art Academy of Cincinnati opens its doors to a territory where, more often than not, images speak before words. From November 14 to December 12, 2025, under the title Story Art, the Pearlman and McClure Galleries will gather finished works and process materials by a remarkable group of Midwestern book illustrators. It is far more than a deftly mounted selection of framed pieces. Pages, sketches, color studies—each an artifact of decision-making—trace the paths that lead a volume toward accomplishment...

One of the fundamental aims of The Annex Updated is to project Cincinnati’s artistic scene toward new communities, extending its echo to other cities across the United States and Europe. That task—necessarily patient and persistent—allows local experiences to find resonance in places where the creative pulse of the Midwest has seldom been perceived. At that intersection between the intimate and the expansive, the 2025 edition of the annual exhibition The Golden Ticket, organized by the Clifton Cultural Arts Center (CCAC)...

The last time I was at the CAC was in late 2017, for Caledonia Curry’s exhibition—better known as Swoon—titled The Canyon: 1999–2017. It was her first museum retrospective. I don’t recall every detail with clarity, but I do retain the certainty that it was a profoundly inspiring experience. Eight years later I return to the CAC for the public opening of What a Revolutionary Must Know, by the Iranian American artist Sheida Soleimani (b. 1990, Indianapolis).

Perhaps it was possible, even then, to sense that Jesus of Western Avenue, inaugurated on October 16, 2021, at the Cleve Carney Museum of Art (College of DuPage, Glen Ellyn, Illinois), would become Tony Fitzpatrick’s final solo exhibition in his lifetime. The show gathered more than sixty recent works, reaffirming his—almost proverbial—fascination with Chicago’s urban nature and environment, expressed through his unmistakably personal graphic language.

One of the people I love most in the world—among other reasons, for something like this—cried for several minutes upon realizing that the book which had occupied her for a brief stretch of time had come to an end. To close it and return it to the shelf meant abandoning a world she already considered her own: one where good and evil were distinguished in every conceivable way. Beyond its beauty, that universe offered purpose, a sanctioned form of contemplation, and a steadfast commitment to the benevolence of the spirit.

To speak of Kina Matahari is to confront the politics of disguise. Her work unfolds where visibility becomes dangerous and the body itself turns into a medium of camouflage. Between the myth of the colonial dancer and the lived reality of the contemporary artist, Skin as Camouflage traces a lineage of women who have negotiated power through performance, artifice, and survival. What begins as an act of concealment becomes, in her hands, a language of emancipation.

Perhaps I am a member of The Grief Club. For several weeks now, a small print has rested on my desk granting me that privilege — dark cobalt green, number 137 in an edition of 200, signed by Sarah Stolar. It is not a relic, nor even a reminder of mortality. It is evidence that artistic experience, when born of pain, orients us toward an identitarian core that endures even through fracture. In the act of retracing what has been lived, we might find reconciliation, perhaps even peace.

Creative anxieties: “Anxiety limits my ability to travel, but don’t tell my mom” is the subtitle Juan-Sí González gives to his recent American Playgrounds series, from which a selection of 21 images is included in this catalog from his recent exhibition at the Cleveland Print Room in Cleveland, Ohio. For an immigrant, the alternative—moving with relative spontaneity around an unknown territory, at the mercy of an alien geography and culture...