The Lightborne Artist-in-Residence and Lecture series is in its fourth year, and — as always — it is doing an amazing job at bringing renowned, internationally established photographers with very contemporary, compellingly innovative practices to Cincinnati. This year's Lightborne AIR is Yamini Nayar, a Brooklyn-based artist who photographs installations and collages to achieve her final images.  

Since Esme Kenney's death in 2009, a project was mobilized to create a memorial sculpture that commemorates the School for Creative and Performing Arts student's life. Jessie Henson, a New York-based artist originally from Cincinnati, was selected to create the memorial, and a great deal of fundraising and effort went into the completion of Stardust, a metal and blown glass phenomenon that is suspended in the third floor atrium of the new SCPA.  

On Sunday the venerable Hyde Park Square Art Show celebrates its 44th year with well over 200 exhibiting artists. The event is credited as Cincinnati's largest one-day art show. Spanning categories of painting, sculpture, photography, ceramics, jewelry, fiber, crafts and multi-media, this year’s show will be most populated by painters and jewelry artists, though notable sculptors like Christopher Daniel and ceramicist Brenda Tarbell are also included in the mélange of mostly regional practicing artists.  

Thunder-Sky Inc. keeps finding celebratory and clever ways to continue magical, idiosyncratic art-making in the spirit of Raymond Thunder-Sky, a recently departed local artist. This weekend the organization has teamed up with Happen Inc. and Building Value, two other Northside nonprofit organizations, to put on the Raymond Thunder-Sky Folk Art Carnival Saturday and Sunday to bring together 30 folk artists (and similarly untrained or unconventional artisans) from across the Midwest and South.  

The Weston Art Gallery's new fall season opens with three solo exhibitions that push shape, color and the other building blocks of art making to new, personal places. Upstairs in the airy lobby space, Jarrett Hawkins presents 'Limits and Boundaries,' while the downstairs galleries house paintings and drawings by Cedric Michael Cox and Roy Johnston. The opening reception is 6-9 p.m. Friday.  

On the last Saturday in August, PAC Gallery in East Walnut Hills opened a new exhibition with an inventive strategy for including performance art in a commercial gallery exhibition. The gallery's E-invite explained that Kris Ebeling's solo exhibition The Pleasure of Your Companionship would open with an exclusive performance event for no more than 30 attendees, at $200 a head. Each guest would receive "an original work to remember the evening."  

On the last Saturday in August, PAC Gallery in East Walnut Hills opened a new exhibition with an inventive strategy for including performance art in a commercial gallery exhibition. The gallery's E-invite explained that Kris Ebeling's solo exhibition 'The Pleasure of Your Companionship' would open with an exclusive performance event for no more than 30 attendees, at $200 a head. The show continues through Sept. 18.  

Phyllis Weston Gallery's newest exhibition gives lasting and living proof that the Rosenthal clan has always been intrinsically involved in our city’s artistic development. 'A Cincinnati Legacy of Art: David Rosenthal (1876-1949) to David S. Rosenthal (b. 1968)' traces the work of two David Rosenthals. The first studied with Duveneck and Sharp at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. His paintings and etchings will be on view beside work by David S. Rosenthal, who is an accomplished and innovative photographer. Through Oct. 2.  

If a man screams alone in the expanse of Northern frontiers, does he make a sound? Local sculptor Richard Fruth spent part of his summer in Denali, Alaska, and returned to craft miniaturized recollections of his experiences hiking and otherwise communing with the wilderness in his new exhibition opening Friday at Thomas More College's Eva G. Farris Art Gallery (through Sept. 26).  

It's that time of year when art schools are entering their fall terms, and I can only hope that crisp autumnal weather is to follow. Kicking off Northern Kentucky University's season of exhibitions is 'Lost and Found: The Art of Collage,' curated by NKU alumn Randel Plowman. An artist in his own right, Plowman is no stranger to collage as a creative means.