On June 20 at 7 p.m., Spring Grove Cemetery will offer a Twilight Tour of what I believe is one of the finest and most prescient war memorials in this region — its Civil War section, where 1,027 soldiers are buried in a manner so subtly unobtrusive to the surroundings that it’s easy to overlook.  

On May 20, the CAC announced cutbacks and layoffs to avoid fiscal deficits in the coming years. But there is more exciting news in the offing: A new Robert Mapplethorpe-related exhibition is planned for 2015.
  

In New York, under the stage name Patti Astor, she became a club habitué and Queen of the Downtown Screen. She was a star of some of the underground No Wave films of the late 1970s/early 1980s that helped spark New York’s grungy and wildly creative East Village arts scene.  

In 2009, after Cincinnati Magazine ran a story about a virtually unknown but magnificent early Modernist home in Woodlawn that was endangered, I drove over to see it. Or, rather, I tried.
  

In advance of last year’s FotoFocus festival, probably the largest photography-related event in Cincinnati’s history, I asked James Crump — the festival’s co-chair and then chief curator/curator-at-large at Cincinnati Art Museum — if there wasn’t an unspoken spirit hovering over the proceedings: Robert Mapplethorpe.  

The School of Art at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning doesn’t yet offer a specific MFA degree in duct tape, but you have to wonder how soon before they do after seeing a current DAAP exhibition, Rise and Fall: Monumental Duct Tape Drawings by Joe Girandola.  

The Contemporary Arts Center is so excited about a performance piece that musician Jace Clayton will be doing there in April that it’s bringing him here earlier — Friday — as an advance introduction to Cincinnati.  

Heiress Marjorie Schiele studied and practiced art and befriended early-to-mid 20th century European avant-gardists. She also, later in life (she died at age 95 in 2008), decided to leave her estate to the Cincinnati Art Museum.  

I loathe clockwatching — or so I thought, until I saw three hours worth of Christian Marclay’s amazing The Clock, a 24-hour art installation/video collage at Columbus’ Wexner Center for the Arts, on the Ohio State University campus through April 7. 
  

Pages of History: 80 Years at the Taft was on view Aug. 10-Jan. 6, and I saw it on the last day. I found it so fascinating — and such a role model for a show about a cultural institution — that it’s worth discussing even though it’s over.  

To say that 2012 was a great year for art films isn’t just a reference to the kind of foreign and American-indie narrative features, like Amour or Your Sister’s Sister, that are too thoughtful to play the multiplexes.  

It’s never too late in the history of humankind for a new Christmas tradition — especially if it comes out of the world of edgy, avant-garde participatory performance art. Edgy, avant-garde and fun participatory performance art, that is.  

If you drive to Columbus by Dec. 30, you can see a photography show — Annie Leibovitz — that serves as the culmination to the journey through celebrity/fashion photography begun by three FotoFocus-related museum shows here.
  

I hope the inaugural FotoFocus, which has formally concluded although related exhibits still are up around town, was successful by the standards of its organizers, and that they are eager to plan for the next one in 2014.  

On Monday, Todd Pavlisko conducted his commissioned artwork — a video piece he’s calling “Docent” — in which a retired military sniper fired a secured high-powered rifle inside the first floor of the Cincinnati Art Museum.