My dream is to see some new museums — maybe even one right here in Cincinnati — devoted just to video art. I’ve mentioned this before to arts professionals, including curators, and have heard the reasons against: video art is an integral part of the contemporary-art world and shouldn’t be separated.   

Carmel Buckley is an artist infatuated with line and uncertainty. An associate professor at Ohio State University and a native of England, Buckley is enjoying her third Cincinnati exhibition in a little over a year. Featuring a series of drawings and etchings along with freestanding and wall-mounted objects, Prints and Sculpture at Clay Street Press in Over-the-Rhine is a retrospective look at her creative output from the early 1990s through the present day.    

The cardboard 3-D glasses supplied for Brian Stuparyk’s work will make the comparison clearer. Put them on and feel like a kid, knowing that this art show is fun and different. A visit feels like an afternoon at the movies. Though there are just three small rooms to see, remember that the artists’ themes are perception and time. It’s possible to get lost awhile.  

The promotional material for the Cincinnati Art Museum’s new Art Deco: Fashion & Design in the Jazz Age does something I haven’t seen before in the world of art-museum marketing: It headlines, “From the Curator that brought you Wedded Perfection.” Pop culture does that a lot — “from the director of Jaws” — but fine-arts institutions?  

Last fall, as the economy continued its downward spiral and arts organizations laid off staff, Tatiana Berman started to map out plans for a new arts festival in Cincinnati, and this week — defying the odds — the Constella Festival of Music and Fine Arts debuts, aligning an impressive array of artists with the city’s major performing ensembles and arts venues.    

Darren Goodman plays with fire. It’s part of his artistic medium of choice — he blows glass. His extraordinary, downright gorgeous results are now on view in the Cincinnati Art Museum’s biennial 4th Floor Award exhibition, this year titled Trial by Fire. It’s up through year’s end.  

Sara Pearce had the world — many worlds — at her fingertips, but her fingers couldn’t feel. The former Enquirer arts reporter had volunteered for a buyout from the paper in September 2008 and wanted to become an artist herself. She’d finally create collages from the antique world maps, fashion magazines and other papers she’d collected for decades.   

Ken Burns believes his new three-part, 5½-hour Prohibition series, to be shown on public-television station WCET at 8 p.m. Sunday through Tuesday, contains many revelations about the disastrous era when America banned booze.  

Could art be the missing link? Oxford, Ohio, native John Bavaro would probably say yes. His current exhibition in the Duveneck Gallery at the Carnegie Center Visual and Performing Arts Center in Covington uses both traditional and digital painting to examine the similarities between humans and non-human primates. The exhibition is a sort of homecoming for Bavaro, who left Cincinnati in 2001 for a faculty post at Edinboro University in Pennsylvania.   

Realms of Intimacy: Miniaturist Practice from Pakistan, which opens the Contemporary Arts Center’s 2011-12 season Sept. 23, isn’t really about Pakistan. It’s not even all about small pictures. “It’s about using beauty to discuss difficult issues,” says Assistant Curator Justine Ludwig.  

Comic book culture is embedded in our collective imaginations like never before, inspiring a slew of Hollywood blockbusters like Batman and Superman (for starters), as well as a number of gritty independent films, such as American Splendor, Ghost World and Road to Perdition. The genre also attracts all manner of craftsmen to explore it as a new medium, from Michael Chabon to Kevin Smith to Stephen King.   

“It’s beauty in a whole different way, shocking at first, but so meaningful,” says Litsa Spanos, whose gallery, Art Design Consultants Inc., will show the traveling photography exhibition The SCAR Project from Sept. 29-Oct. 2. The show presents photographer David Jay’s life-size prints of young women whose struggles with breast cancer have left them scarred but valiant.  

YES is one of several recent additions to Over-the-Rhine’s gallery district along Main Street, which is being invigorated with a new wave of DIY energy. Along with the print studio and store Static Age, the design collection Losantiville, the clay studio MUD on Main and the Final Friday PopShops — one-night-only bazaars that show up in empty properties — Main Street’s galleries are becoming more geared towards affordable, accessible art and design.  

“I've had the opportunity to learn patience,” says Tod Swormstedt, founder of the American Sign Museum. He’s talking about a problem that other Cincinnati arts organizations and supporters of planned festivals, theater renovations and other projects have to share — how to raise money as the Great Recession grinds on.  

I moved to Cincinnati a little over eight years ago. Now I’m moving to Chicago to return to academia and to give myself a much-needed span of time to turn inward and concentrate on improving my art and my writing.