Usually when September rolls around, I spend my time prepping an opening at Carl Solway Gallery and anticipating all the new fall exhibitions in town. This year, I’m also preparing for my move back to Brooklyn. While everyone knows New York is a cool town full of art, I’m not ready to admit that it’s any cooler than my Cincinnati.  

The exhibition currently on view at the Taft Museum of Art, 'The Chemistry of Color: The Sorgenti Collection of African American Art,' highlights The artists who are essential to any history of African-American art. But, more than that, they're essential to the study of American Art.  

The exhibition currently on view at the Taft Museum of Art, The Chemistry of Color: The Sorgenti Collection of African American Art, highlights some of the key artists in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts — Saar, Faith Ringgold, Howerdina Pindell, Sam Gilliam, Beverly Buchanan and Romare Bearden, as well as artist Jacob Lawrence himself. The range of work is broad, but the time period is narrow. Through Nov. 1.  

The current exhibition at Aisle Gallery focuses on the centuries-old practice of printmaking. Of course, the practice has changed and expanded since its inception, but Rachel Heberling and Katherine Rogers seem to have found their niche in concentrating on straightforward lithography and etching and the beauty that can be found there.   

The current exhibition at Aisle Gallery focuses on a centuries-old practice: printmaking. Rachel Heberling and Katherine Rogers seem to have found their niche in concentrating on straightforward lithography and etching, and the beauty that can be found there. Both artists draw on aged and abandoned subject matter for their prints, often revealing a sad splendor in the relics of a past era. Monday-Friday through July 31.  

The two current exhibitions at Country Club Gallery have something in common: namely, a sense of place. And yet the two artists included here, Christina Seely and Evan Hecox, deal with the idea of place in profoundly different ways.  

Christina Seely and Evan Hecox deal with the idea of place in profoundly different ways at Country Club. Seely's exhibition, Lux, features 14 large-scale photographs that map the Earth's brightest places. Evan Hecox’s small exhibition, Unnamed Places, consists of three drawings and two paintings of urban landscapes. On view noon-4 p.m. Saturdays through Aug. 29.  

Anri Sala's solo exhibition fills two floors of the Contemporary Arts Center with sound, light and tactile objects. One work in particular confuses and simultaneously conflates the others. It's a small kinetic sculpture: a pair of hands sheathed in purple latex gloves, index fingers pointing toward each other, revolving slowly around an axis.  

Anri Sala's solo exhibition, 'Purchase Not by Moonlight,' fills two floors of the Contemporary Arts Center with sound, light and tactile objects. The echo in Sala's work not only serves to disrupt human engagement but also to add a sense of placement to the viewer. On display through August.  

I've seen Michael Wilson's photographs of major musicians like Over the Rhine, Lyle Lovett, Phillip Glass and B.B. King and start asking questions. He's so humble about his work it's almost unnerving. "See, at the Weston Gallery, they’re calling it a mid-career retrospective, which is probably as good a term as any," Wilson says. "For the most part, it will be drawn from 30 years of work that would have been done just for myself. Personal work."