Throughout the autumn, the walls of the new Iris BookCafé (1331 Main St., Over-the-Rhine), have been graced with black-and-white photographs by William Messer and Marc B. Suda. Selections from Suda’s Botanica Noveau series are assertive and austere in the midst of the elegance and quirkiness that is the café. The larger set of works by Messer roams through Claude Monet’s famous gardens in Giverny.

You might think theater critics are just people with bad dispositions who dream up nasty things to say about actors trying their level best to entertain people. But you’d be wrong. Many critics are big fans who love theater — some of them even have legitimate artistic skills and contribute to the world of performance. A good example is local freelance writer Mark Sterner, an occasional critic of theater in CityBeat. As it happens, he’s also a costume designer and you have the chance to see some of his work on display at Sitwell’s Coffee House this month. His eclectic show, Critic As Practitioner: Costume Designs by Mark Sterner, includes designs for an African version of Oedipus Rex, a space opera interpretation of Stravinsky’s The Firebird, and designs for actors performing in works by Anton Chekhov, Thornton Wilder and George Bernard Shaw. Through Dec. 31.

The Cyclones have already lost as many games this season as they did all of last year, but they did win the whole league and the Kelly Cup playoffs last year. And when you’re that good of a minor league hockey team, it is inevitable that your better players will move up to your affiliate clubs in the AHL and NHL. At 14-12-5, this year’s ‘Clones are right in the middle of their division, with much hockey to play this season. Cheap tickets, ample seating and draught beer that comes in very big cups are all enticing reasons to head to U.S. Bank Arena for some minor league hockey action on a Tuesday evening.

Fountain Square is fun even in winter because if they can’t have live music, dancing and beer, they have ice skating, which is nostalgic, cuddly childhood kind of fun. The 7,000-square-foot rink (roughly the size of the rink at Rockefeller Center) is right in the center of the square with a view of the fountain and some buildings. Don’t worry about bringing your own skates; you can rent skates there. There are also lockers for your shoes, benches to sit on while you lace up your skates/watch other people skate and a heated tent with vending machines for drinks and snacks.

For the Contemporary Printmaking exhibit, Manifest's Creative Research Gallery's call for submissions brought in nearly 400 works by 160 artists for this juried show. Curator Jason Franz made the final cut to 22 works by 13 artists from seven states and the United Kingdom. The multitude of means for printmaking allow for effects not possible from any other discipline. Manifest’s stated aim with this show is “to explore the range of methods and results currently being achieved within the bounds of such processes.” Tuesday-Saturday. Through Jan. 9.

In her brand-new exhibition, Supplemental Ornament, at the Weston Art Gallery in downtown’s Aronoff Center for the Arts, Murphy-Price presents sculptures and prints that simultaneously focus and exaggerate the relationship between our internal identities and the selected accoutrements that extend our personalities into an array of surrounding decorative objects. All the work on display has been made since she earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in 2005. She now resides in Bloomington, Ind. Simultaneous with her show the Weston also is displaying, through Jan. 10, sculpture by Dietrich Wagner of Erie, Pa., and Pixel paintings by Cincinnati’s Jimi Jones. Tuesday-Sunday.

"China Design Now" is a comprehensive exhibition of hundreds of objects elaborates on the booming innovations presently taking place in the fields of design, fashion, and architecture throughout China. The exhibition is split into three sections, corresponding one of those design areas with an eastern coastal city: Shenzhen, Shanghai and Beijing. The exhibition continues through Jan. 11, 2009. $8 for adults; $6 for seniors/college students; $4 for children ages 6-17; free for members and children under age 6.

Jimi Jones, a longtime active member of the Cincinnati arts scene, discovered he could incorporate pixels — the building blocks of computer graphics — into his paintings. Results of that breakthrough can be seen in the vibrant works at the Weston Art Gallery. Jones’ paintings are big, stridently colorful and speak to you immediately ... they need your close attention. Tuesday-Sunday. Through Jan. 10.

Ryan McGinness' exhibition of new paintings creates an optical second reality in the Vance-Waddell Gallery at the Cincinnati Art Museum. Lights are turned off; heavy, dark curtains hang in the doorway; black lights shine onto the wood panels and bring everything painted there to life. It's a little disconcerting, looking into a painting and feeling as though you might trip into some "Alice in Wonderland" alternative universe. Tuesday-Sunday through Feb. 15, 2009.