Plodding feet and murmuring voices mingle up the gallery stairs. Students Alvin, Ben, Chad and Matt have arrived from local community building organization Starfire and settle in front of laptops loaded with their digital photos as another day of art education begins at Prairie Gallery.
  

In one of those rare places people still come to browse for books, they are encased in glass. Touched by the hands of artists, they suspend like paper time capsules in the atrium of the Cincinnati Public Library for Bookworks 13, organized by Cincinnati Book Arts Society.  

I find a lost fledgling in my backyard. He blunders about on big feet and his bleating mouth asks to be fed or put back in the nest. I do not speak bird, but I know who does. I call Sheida Soleimani, artist, violinist with the band Marmalade Brigade and Cincinnati’s unofficial avian intermediary.  

A legacy of icon and miniature painting from Eastern Europe makes a great migration to the Phyllis Weston Gallery in O’Bryonville. Painters David Miretsky and Svetlana Derenshuk perplex and dazzle with quirky scenes of domestic life in Uniquely Ukraine, on display through March 31.   

When artist Sheida Soleimani was 6, her Iranian upbringing became the focus of intrigue among her Cincinnati classmates. They wanted to know if she had a flying carpet like Aladdin.    

When artist Sheida Soleimani was 6, her Iranian upbringing became the focus of intrigue among her Cincinnati classmates. They wanted to know if she had a flying carpet like Aladdin. There is actually   

Artist Stevie Grueter digs rocks out of the ground with a railroad spike. She's barely 5 feet tall and lugs them home like she's cradling a baby. That's where her art begins — on the uneven surfaces of rocks. Her life began in the rubble of an earthquake. It struck the Greek island of Crete, killing her parents.  

Artist Stevie Grueter digs rocks out of the ground with a railroad spike. She's barely 5 feet tall and lugs them home like she's cradling a baby. That's where her art begins — on the uneven surfaces of rocks. Grueter archives her rock collection with contour line drawings that accurately capture the texture of each rock. She writes beautiful quotations on the drawings.  

On a farm in Spring Grove Village, on a windy spring morning, a group of Baby Boomers, artists and organic farmers gather in a small structure known as the “puppet barn.” They swap stories of royalty over cups of coffee sweetened with local honey. They have come to hear the teachings of a master beekeeper: author, biodynamic farmer and 30-year beekeeper Gunther Hauk.  

In the Weston Art Gallery's new group exhibition 'Narrative Figuration,' on display now, curator Daniel Brown assembles five talented local artists whose chosen mode is representational, figurative work. All five artists have studied at the University of Cincinnati (DAAP). Their work focuses on genre scenes, with a renewed interest in beauty. These artists find abstraction by editing with the eye. The result is edgy.