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.  

Not many libraries can claim to be a room with a view. The Mary R. Schiff Library of the Cincinnati Art Museum, now in its new space and again open to the public, has a spectacular one.  

“If something is worth doing, it’s worth overdoing,” proclaims one of the spunky gals in the current iteration of The Marvelous Wonderettes at Ensemble Theatre Cincinnati this month. ETC apparently agrees, since this is the fourth consecutive year it has staged one of Roger Bean’s retro shows featuring music from the ’50s and ’60s.  

The Hilton Brothers — photographers Christopher Makos and Paul Solberg — have arrived in Cincinnati with food on their minds. They don’t specify that it needs to be organic, but it might as well be. The term pops up repeatedly as the New Yorkers discuss their natural, open-ended approach to life, art and collaboration.   

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.   

Two grand experiments fusing art, science and technology will be revealed Friday night.   

The huge stone quarries that hide in the landscapes of Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky are strange things, monsters of ruggedly carved-out negative space that — when abandoned and filled with water — attract illicit swimmers and divers.   

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.  

Matt Distel, an almost constant presence in the Cincinnati art scene for the last couple of decades, suddenly seems to be everywhere at once. But no, he’ll not be working three jobs  

Visionaries and Voices (V&V) has experienced many changes in the decade since it was first incorporated as a nonprofit organization...As the organization has evolved, so has its administrators’ approach to curating exhibitions.