I have sometimes thought about what, for once, I might call “the oneiric substance,” if only to steer the question into less sinister territory: do dreams arise from experiences not fully processed, or are they autonomous energetic structures, detached from various material or temporal sources, that pass through the mind in search of the lost warmth of emotions? The question has its beauty.

Whenever I take part—as a curator or a viewer—in an exhibition bringing together several artists, seven women in this case, any number of men or any combination of the two sexes, I try to imagine the reasons, the implicit mystique that such a combination requires.

Beyond I.T.I.N.E.R.A.T.I.O.N.S., at The Annex Gallery, The Most Merciful Thing in the World, by renowned American artist Trevor Paglen, was the first exhibition I visited in the current FotoFocus Biennial at its main venue. Open since October 1, it held its official reception only yesterday, on the 3rd, following a performance-lecture by Paglen. This carefully conceived exhibition has been curated by Kevin Moore, Ph.D., Artistic Director and Curator of FotoFocus.

In the Middle of the Endless Water, a solo exhibition by Julia Orquera Bianco curated by Carolina Cuervo at the Philip M. Meyers Jr. Memorial Gallery at the University of Cincinnati, brings together more than a decade of work by an artist whose practice has gradually moved from the personal experience of migration toward an inquiry into territory, memory, ecology, and alternative forms of knowledge.

Since Wednesday, August 12, Annex Gallery has been presenting Tiger Lily: Collective Impressions. Tiger Lily Press is a cooperative printmaking workshop founded in Cincinnati in 1979, conceived as an open space for practice, teaching, and the preservation of artistic printing techniques. Over several decades, it has brought together printmakers from different generations, providing access to presses, tools, workshops, and shared technical knowledge, while establishing itself as one of the...

When we first came across Tim Harrier’s Shaman Spirit Guides, we dismissed them without mercy as the product of artificial intelligence. The mud-covered faces, the animals emerging from the background, and an unbroken frontal force produced, almost at once, a malignant suspicion. Suspicion ran far ahead of the work. And we are right to suspect almost everything in life. This series, no...

The solo exhibition Amazonia, opening on May 22, brings together a body of work produced by Julia out of her sustained engagement with the Shipibo Indigenous community of the Peruvian Amazon. The show is structured around four groups of pieces and combines watercolor and ink on paper, embroidered textile work, installation, and cyanotype. Together, the pieces operate as a series of visual reflections on the use of medicinal plants, the experience of the Amazonian "dieta," the artist's family inheritance, and her condition as a migrant.

Art historiography in the American Midwest often relies on preservation institutions that consolidate particular versions of the past. This year, the Taft Museum of Art subjects its founding narrative to review through the integration of “domestic” aesthetics into the historical texture that defines it.

According to multiple sources, Art Attack Cincinnati emerges in the early 2020s, within a broader moment of cultural reactivation following the pandemic. It can be understood as a punctual exhibition format that enables the direct sale of artworks. It has no fixed venue and unfolds across informal sites in the city, with recurring presence in places such as Braxton Brewing Co. Cincinnati.

Pineapple on pizza is not to my taste. That does not affect the assessment of this new mural. On March 12, 2026, Pineapple on Pizza was unveiled in Covington, a large-scale intervention executed on the building of The Gruff as part of the national Spray It Forward program, led by the brand Rust-Oleum. The project was selected as one of seven developments nationwide, positioning the city within a network of initiatives that use public art as a tool for visibility and urban activation.

Clifton Cultural Arts Center has named visual artist Gabrielle Siekman its 2026 New Woman fellow.
The announcement happened earlier this month during the opening reception for “New Woman,” the arts center’s biennial exhibition highlighting emerging women artists in the Greater Cincinnati region.

There are artists whose work is born of skill; others, of obsession; others still, of a wound. In Aaron Kent, all three converge. His practice resists reduction to any single discipline or stable technique. Although it may be inscribed, under a taxonomic logic, within the territories of ceramics, printmaking, or sculpture, the truth is that his work moves through far more uncertain zones.

Everyone in Cincinnati’s artistic community knows Katherine Hurley. They have for a long time. In my own case, for just under ten years. And we all know her solid career and her exceptional body of work, delicate and subtle as few others.
I have always found it difficult to comment on the genre of landscape. Not because I do not like it, but because, when it reproduces what nature itself has taken millennia of patient execution to achieve...

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...

In mid-August, in Louisville, Kentucky, I attended a conversation with Cuban artists presenting their work at Louisville Visual Art. My compatriots, the familiar. In a country where everything seems to flow through rigid channels, surprise is rare. I speak of migrant artists, many of them newly arrived. Some pieces were more compelling than others, and the stories carried nuances best considered one by one. As in cooking, the flavor of each ingredient, tasted alone, can prove more intense and memorable than the mixture in which it dissolves.

I have spoken at length with Juan-Sí. Twice in person, once by phone. About a month ago we shared a coffee, standing in my kitchen—the first guest to step into my still chairless apartment. Each time our dialogue drew to a close, after the inevitable farewell, I was left with the impression that I had merely touched the widening circle of water at the surface of a well whose depths few have known. That expanding ripple produced by such a fleeting contact is what I now attempt to turn into memory.

I hold vivid the memory of the spring of 2020, when the pandemic, near-total isolation, and the severe quarantines imposed by the government left me trapped in a suffocating mental standstill. My partner at the time managed to stay in my apartment on weekends. Among the few sources of solace that reached us within that suspended atmosphere created by the city’s restrictions were the videos of the Chinese YouTuber Li Ziqi (李子柒)...

This past weekend, Annex Gallery carried out a working visit to Louisville, Kentucky, with the purpose of attending a talk offered by several Cuban artists on the challenging process of sustaining their creative practice within an economic, social, political, and even climatic context radically different from the one they had once known. The conversation took place at noon in the main hall of Louisville Visual Art and extended for nearly two hours. Four Cuban artists from the group engaged the local audience in dialogue about their experiences as emigrants while also delving into specific aspects of their work.

For those arriving from South Florida—particularly from cities like Miami—Michael Coppage’s exhibition at the Annex Gallery may resonate differently than it would for a viewer from the Midwest. This is not to suggest a hierarchy of readings, but rather to acknowledge that the lived experience of Caribbean and Latin American diasporas, especially those who have made a life in Miami, offers a particular lens through which to approach this work.

Throughout my life, I have felt a peculiar pleasure whenever I’ve had the chance to witness a birth. These beginnings—first steps, embryonic shapes of future realities—emerge every minute, every second. They are part of the unending dynamic of existence in the physical realm. Most will go unnoticed, for only God can foresee the majestic tree that may rise from a given blade of grass.

When Harry Belafonte released his famous Day-O (The Banana Boat Song) in 1956, he did not intend to celebrate tropical joy or offer a festive anthem to liven up Caribbean cocktail parties in white suburban America. The song—based on a traditional Jamaican work chant sung by night-shift dock workers loading bananas while waiting for the tally man to count their labor at dawn—is, in truth, a weary prayer, a rhythmic lament. Its upbeat tone masks an exhausting, underpaid routine marked by waiting and invisibility.

Leyva is a Cuban artist whose life and work are deeply marked by persistence, reinvention, and resilience. What is truly singular is that, even through transformation, his voice remains intact.