FotoFocus, the citywide celebration of photographic and lens-based art planned for October 2012, is now well enough along that its organizers have shared detailed plans. In their first major press release, they also have announced their intention of making this ambitious photography event biennial.  

Saturday's Aronoff Center show is a chance to look back and appreciate the cultural relevancy — even avant-gardism — of The Monkees in their heyday. Micky Dolenz reflects on the band's 1968 movie 'Head,' which came out after the TV series had ended and was so psychedelically surreal and narratively irreverent that it freaked out those who saw its initial theatrical release.   

Cincinnati’s role as a national center for green progressivism gets spotlighted this week when the Greening the Heartland conference brings some 1,000 attendees and 100 exhibitors to downtown’s Duke Energy Conference Center. The theme of the three-day conference, which starts June 22 and is sanctioned by the U.S. Green Building Council’s Midwest region, is “Breaking New Ground.” And it’s a fitting one for what’s happening here.  

Even though the Cincinnati Art Museum’s Schmidlapp Gallery holds important Egyptian, Roman and Greek antiquities, it seems more a conduit than a destination. The display cases are no match for the determination of visitors to get where they’re going. As a result, the whole area itself has seemed antiquated. But a big change is coming.  

During an interview in advance of May’s MusicNOW festival, Bryce Dessner — its organizer and guitarist for The National — told me something very provocative about Cincinnati as a concert market for Indie Rock bands. And it might offer insight into why “vanguard” Indie acts — those whose experimentalism or artfulness, whose risky newness, resonates with enough fans to make a cultural impact — seem to skip Cincinnati once they reach mid-level (or higher) popularity.  

Springfield, a smaller city some 75 miles slightly northeast of Cincinnati, has lost plenty during the post-industrial era. So it’s important when it can reclaim, restore and celebrate something that once made it so special — an outdoor folk-art environment known as Hartman Rock Garden, created during the Great Depression. And the way it did so is a good lesson for much larger cities struggling with urban-preservation issues.  

Lunar, the technology-savvy, super-hip new nightclub at 435 Elm St., Downtown, is hosting an art show called Point of Ascension from 8-10 p.m. this Saturday. It will feature 16 pieces from three artists — Evan Hildebrandt and the team of Collin Rowland and Daniel Augur — commissioned to create work that natural enhances to club's futuristic interior.  

Many people don’t realize that — as Raphaela Platow, Contemporary Arts Center’s director and chief curator, says — her institution has an “s” in its name. It’s “Arts,” not “Art.” That means the center is about more than just visual art.  

Melvin Grier, a photojournalist for the late, lamented Post for some 30 years has produced a retrospective of his work, much of it in classic black-and-white but several in color, at the Kennedy Heights Arts Center. The show is called White People: A Retrospective, because — one presumes — as a black man, Grier didn’t take for granted the places to which his assignments gave him privileged access.  

Taggart Siegel documentary investigates how we’ve now managed to screw up the life of honeybees — there’s a crisis of what’s known as “colony collapse disorder,” in which the worker bees are disappearing from hives — and how this has a threatening impact on the entire world. Grade: B.