But rather than dwell on those issues, we’ve asked five contributors to CityBeat’s visual arts coverage (including myself) to choose favorite 2011 shows. They found the task easy (or maybe hard) because the choices were plentiful.
Meaningful Fashion
Art Deco: Fashion and Design in the Jazz Age, still at the Cincinnati Art Museum
through New Year’s Day, places the elegant couture of a particular time
in the context of the world that produced it, thus going beyond the
pretty dresses (and are they ever pretty!) to suggest the social
implications of clothing that freed women from their previously
corseted, swaddled way of dress. Curator Cynthia Amneus understands
perfectly that fashion is a bellwether of how we think and what we
value. The show was created to welcome to the museum a gift of 1920s-era
French fashions from Cincinnati native Betty Colker, now a resident of
West Virginia. In Amneus’ hands, the show also became a heady transport
back to that era, a time when everything was changing fast, something we
can relate to today. (Jane Durrell)
A Concrete Concept
As part of the Factory Square Fine Arts Festival in Northside, Ledelle Moe’s monumental concrete sculptures constituted one of the most significant art displays of 2011. I thought they brought a serious, almost sacred quality to an otherwise playful event. Moe’s sculptures seemed to draw power from an imagined history. These were contemporary works traveling in the guise of something ancient. I felt privy to a major archeological discovery as I made my way around the massive supine figures, resting as they were, in open defiance of gravity. It was a shame that they were not more publicly accessible. Works of this level of ambition and quality are a rare occurrence both here and elsewhere. (Alan Pocaro)
Frayed Utopia
A charred, war-torn depiction of Utopia came in distress to the Weston Art Gallery last winter. The exhibit of Todd Reynolds’ oil paintings and watercolors arrived at the gallery on a 16-foot U-Haul. Some were painted on Masonite or thin plywood and were coming unglued from their scrap-material supports. They had been hiding, stacked against the walls of Reynolds’ home in Portsmouth, and they emerged on the clean walls of the gallery, like unruly children. Utopia was a dark satire for the modern day. It criticized corruption, frivolity and religious extremism with the same sharp wit as Francisco Goya’s work did. In one image, the gluttonous baker withholds his cake. In another, the porcine rube reclines like Venus or Bacchus. His paintings expose our excesses and grief, which is intensely personal for the artist but no stranger to all of us. At a time this year when a dreary winter blanket covered the city, and the Taft Museum exhibited Goya’s Los Caprichos bleak etchings, Cincinnati also needed to see Todd Reynolds. And it did. (Selena Reder)
A Different City View
Victory City, a show presented by UC’s DAAP Galleries during October and November, meticulously and artfully presented a major discovery — the beautifully intricate, mesmerizing architectural drawings, models and related archival/documentation materials of Cincinnati’s Orville Simpson II. Simpson was a self-taught visionary who imagined that our future would best be served by a new, self-sufficient city — built between Cincinnati and Dayton — that would house 262,000 residents in large towers. People would eat in communal “circle-serve” cafeterias, with food delivered via Ferris-wheel-like contraptions, and there would be dental-hygiene stations to reduce cavities. Simpson, now 89, has been working on his plans since the 1930s. UC’s College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning recently took possession of his archives and it’s a major acquisition for the school. One looks forward to its preservation of Simpson’s work and further sharing of it. And maybe it will get built yet. It sure beats the exurban ugliness of so much of Butler County now. (Steven Rosen)
Bold Moves
It wasn’t apparent then, but the summer exhibition Not Just Pretty Pictures: The Carl M. Jacobs III Collection was the introduction to a new Cincinnati Art Museum.
While redoing its antiquities gallery to showcase all its collections,
the museum hinted at what lay ahead by presenting an eclectic range of
prints and photos bequeathed by the former Cincinnatian. There was
something for everyone, from Eugene Delacroix and Francisco Goya to
Robert Mapplethorpe and William Wegman. The art was hung salon-style,
without undue regard to period or medium, and it worked. Two months
later, the Schmidlapp Gallery reopened, showcasing 18 iconic pieces
ranging from a mummy to a Matisse. The open-storage exhibit The Collections: 6,000 Years of Art followed. Hundreds
of pieces — art-carved furniture, paintings, prints, Asian ceramics,
antiquities, contemporary crafts — are in one room. These are bold
moves, but Jacobs was a risk-taker, too — and look at how that benefited
the museum. (Kathy Schwartz)
