Six local companies make up Losantiville Collective, located on Main Street in Over-the-Rhine. The collective is owned by Dixon (Dixon Branded), Chris Heckman and Matt Anthony (co-founder, The LaunchWerks).   

This may seem a strange way to start a review of the year in Cincinnati’s visual arts, but the piece that stays with me the most — haunts me, really — doesn’t even fit any traditional definition of art.  

If you’re looking for cliché presents, head to your nearest department store. If you and your favorite recipients are looking for a memorable exhibit, head to the Weston Art Gallery for Straight from the Soul, a 25-year retrospective by the Atlanta artist.   

Matthew Rolston has taken close-up portraits, startlingly realistic headshots, of some 200 figures — colloquially known as dummies — at Fort Mitchell, Ky.’s Vent Haven ventriloquism museum. The results are in a new book, Talking Heads, to be published next month by Pointed Leaf Press.  

Shhh! There’s a tree sleeping inside Phyllis Weston Gallery. You’ll want to be silent — not because you might awaken it, but so that it can awaken you to Shinji Turner-Yamamoto’s thinking.   

A hybrid of a boutique hotel, a fine dining restaurant and a museum, downtown Cincinnati’s 21c Museum Hotel is a jaw-dropping, sui generis masterpiece.   

NINE is just fine — both the name and the Carnegie exhibit. The title discloses only the number of artists, who represent ceramics, sculpture, painting, glass and mixed media. The show is without an obvious or assigned theme. But rather than feeling like a mish-mash, it works.  

When we enter the grown-up world, there are quite a few aspects of life that lose a great bit of childlike mystique: visits to the dentist, overalls, Hostess products and, perhaps most glaringly, the holiday season.   

If Henri Toulouse-Lautrec and Herb Ritts could have a drink together, they’d find so much to talk about that the drinks might just keep coming. The Cincinnati Art Museum’s total collection of Toulouse-Lautrec prints (43) and posters (eight) fill niches at right and left of the Great Hall balcony entrance to Herb Ritts: L.A. Style, providing that sensuous outlay of black and white photographs with an historic backdrop.  

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.