The idea of communities of inspiration is highlighted in tête-à-tête, an exhibition curated by artist Mickalene Thomas. Serving as a companion exhibition to Muse: Mickalene Thomas Photographs, this mini exhibition within the larger Muse show includes works that have inspired Thomas. Placed consciously in dialogue with her own practice, these artworks contain many of the same themes central to Thomas’ works, such as references to motherhood and family.

The 10 featured artists—from older generations of artists to those who are part of Thomas’s generation or younger—include Derrick Adams, Renée Cox, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Lyle Ashton Harris, Deana Lawson, Zanele Muholi, Malick Sidibé, Xaviera Simmons, Hank Willis Thomas, and Carrie Mae Weems.

Together, these exhibitions create a robust visual conversation about representation of the black body in today’s society and provide opportunities for visitors to reflect on how various forms of visual culture help shape their own identities and how they, too, collect and process information.

Both exhibitions acknowledge the art-historical canon and popular visual culture, while simultaneously creating an archive of artworks that stand in opposition to the traditions, reclaiming agency for both the artists and the subjects depicted.

Exhibition is organized by Aperture Foundation, New York.

In the not-too-distant past, the world waited and watched with bated breath as space travel developed before their eyes. Outside/In/Inside/Out explores various archives that have documented these ventures into the great unknown. Through the astronaut’s lens we are presented with our planet’s vulnerable beauty. Photos from the Mercury 7 and Apollo 11 missions are represented in this exhibition, with early, grainy photographs documenting man’s first glimpses of the earth taken by hand-held cameras.

Alongside these historic and iconic images are more recent photographs of galaxies taken with high-powered telescopes equipped with the most advanced photographic technology, like the Hubble Space Telescope. Outside/In/Inside/Out takes a glimpse into these important astronomical moments from past and recent human history and emphasizes the need for these recorded images to be seen and preserved for future generations.

Outside/In/Inside/Out is curated by Michael Stillion.

Featured Artists: TBA

The ARCHIVE [negative] project includes the work of roughly a dozen regional and/or national photographers selected by Manifest Resident Instructor and Photographer Michael Wilson. Public demonstration days led up to the exhibition allowing the public to observe and interact with Wilson in a laboratory-like collaboration. Wilson worked with the negatives provided by each participating photographer and printed them in the Manifest darkroom.

Featured Artists: Matthew Albritton, Barry Andersen, Gordon Baer, Maureen France, Melvin Grier, Barbara Houghton, Cal Kowal, Guennadi Maslov, Maurice Mattei, Nancy Rexroth, Gregory Rust, Brad Smith, Jane Alden Stevens, Connie Sullivan

J. Miles Wolf brings his considerable talents to Jewish Cincinnati, which from the early 19th-century has been an important center of American Jewish life. Like Cincinnati’s general community, the Jewish community’s synagogues, cemeteries, and other institutions expanded and dispersed from downtown during the mid to late 19th-century to North Avondale by the early 20th-century, to Amberley Village and Roselawn by the second half of the 20th-century, and up the I-71 corridor to the suburbs and beyond in the early 21st-century. This exhibition seeks to provide a comprehensive photographic documentation of Jewish institutions in the Greater Cincinnati area, including current facilities and former places of worship and communal gathering that are still extant but are either unoccupied or repurposed. Concurrently, the project calls for a gathering of historic photographs from local archives and collections that depict events and ceremonies within these venues. Jewish Cincinnati offers new and inventive ways of looking at and thinking about both new photography and historical images: How might they be merged? What features of historical photographs of people and places might be incorporated into or superimposed over new photography? How can these processes be jumping-off points for conversations about repurposing buildings, respect for architectural integrity, and historic preservation?

Visitors will come away from this exhibition with a greater sense of the rich history of the Cincinnati Jewish community and the important role it has played and continues to play in the life of the Queen City.

The Barn (Woman’s Art Club Cultural Center) features a selection of Nancy Ford Cones pictorialist photographs (some of her original prints from various archives, and some digital images) alongside contemporary smartphone photos submitted by the public. The general public is invited to respond and reinterpret Cones’s images by submitting their own smartphone photos. These responsive photos were either inspired by her work, expressed a similar intent, or contrasted “then” and “now.” The best submitted photograph will be selected to complement each Cones photograph, resulting in a paired exhibit of early 20th-century pictorialism and early 21st-century “pixelism.”

Submission Deadline: September 18th, 2018
Submission Information: Photo2Foto_08_finalprospectus.pdf

Featured Artists: Kylee Dhonau, Gillian Fajack, Paul Filipkowski, Abby Graham, Christine Kuhr, Gary Long, L Long, Alleen Manning, Maya Mehlman, Aquila Stoner, Joe Stoner, Kimberly Baer-Walk

Domus Oculi, House of Eyes, is a contemporary interpretation of a camera obscura created for the FotoFocus Biennial 2018 by Cincinnati artist Erin Taylor. It is a freestanding structure housing a collection of camera obscura viewing devices made from lenses repurposed from film cameras and slide projectors—traditional capture and viewing devices that have become antiquated in today’s digital age. By appropriating the lenses, this work gives a new life to analog technologies. Each lens has unique properties and varying brightness, sharpness, angle of view, and focal length. Domus Oculi provides real-time views of lighting conditions, weather, and pedestrian and automobile traffic.

This work acts as a counterpoint to the deluge of images we encounter in our digital world and redirects our attention to the world around us. Simultaneously, Domus Oculi acts as a transitory archive of the Camp Washington neighborhood, connecting the viewer to this often overlooked city fabric. Domus Oculi expands lens-based art into the realm of installation, while acknowledging photography’s historic origins.

Taylor’s artistic practice is a culmination of years of experience in photography, architecture, wood-working, metal-working, installation, sculpture, and glass. His work references pre-film and pre-cinematic concepts and devices. He is an Adjunct Professor and Digital Fabrication Specialist at the University of Cincinnati College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning.

Extension Viewing Dates:
November 10th-11th, 2018 from Noon – 4PM
November 17th-18th, 2018 from Noon – 4PM

Time, Space, and Place brings forward a selection of photographs from the archives reflecting the experience of diverse artists at different time periods and locations, sharing their personal viewpoints and providing glimpses into the past—preserved slices of life and time, flashes of memory.

Featured Artists: Gordon Baer, John Wimberley, Kojo Kamau, John Chewning, June Archer

Paris to New York: Photographs by Eugène Atget and Berenice Abbott explores the encounter between American photographer Berenice Abbott (1898–1991) and French photographer Eugène Atget (1857–1927) during the 1920s—an encounter that would have profound and lasting effects on the careers and legacies of both artists. Berenice Abbott and Eugène Atget met in Man Ray’s Paris studio in the early 1920s. Atget, then in his sixties, was obsessively recording the streets, gardens, and courtyards of the 19^th-century city—“Old Paris”—as it was undergoing modernization. Abbott acquired much of Atget’s work after his death and was a tireless advocate for its value. In 1929, she relocated to New York and emulated Atget in her systematic documentation of that city, culminating in her epic photographic series Changing New York.

Abbott paid further tribute to Atget by publishing and exhibiting his work in the United States, and by printing hundreds of images from his negatives, using the gelatin silver process. Through Abbott’s efforts, Atget became known to an audience of photographers and writers who found diverse inspiration in his photographs. Abbott herself is remembered as one of the most independent, determined, and respected photographers of the 20^th-century, and is celebrated in particular for her photographs of 1930s New York.

This exhibition and publication bring together for the first time selections from two enormous bodies of work—Atget’s Old Paris and Abbott’s Changing New York—and explore the legacy and artistic influence between two great photographers and their obsession with documenting the transformations of two of the world’s great modern cities.

Old Paris and Changing New York: Photographs by Eugène Atget and Berenice Abbott (Yale University Press) is published on the occasion of the FotoFocus Biennial 2018 and the exhibition at the Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati.

The present seems to flow ceaselessly through the tiny sliver of memory nature allotted us—memories we try to hold onto (if only for a moment) in their vast immensity. It is this ineptness of memory, the apparent smallness of it, that has motivated people throughout history to try and capture it with more permanent and capable mediums. We attempt to hold on to the artifacts of experience by inscribing them on everything around us—on cave walls, stone tablets, animal hides, trees, electrical currents, even the binary spins of electrons themselves.

In Place of Forgetting is an interactive multi-channel audio-visual installation exploring the contemporary overabundance of memory and its impact on the quality of the experiences we attempt to remember. With each repost, recontextualization, reiteration, or translation, a connection to the original moment is further obscured. Viewers traverse this sense of iterative loss through their physical interactions, shaping their experience by sifting through and reassembling text and images sourced from an archive of historical Cincinnati postcards collected by Mark Rohling, Senior Exhibition Designer/Chief Preparator at the Taft Museum of Art. By influencing which fragments of the audio archive are amplified through their action, the visitors evoke new and unique relationships between them, continuously transforming their context. One box tells a story, while its companions speak in counterpoint and a pair on the side hold a conversation. A trio sing in harmony together, their voices echoing the marks of handwriting scribed on the back of each postcard.

Intermedio also presents Mid-Day Ghost, a collaborative composition combining spoken word, stories, and experimental vocal sounds with interactive multichannel audio, performed by multi-instrumentalist/vocalist Jennifer Simone and saxophonist Om Srivastava. Through interactions with the installation In Place of Forgetting, Mid-Day Ghost explores the ephemerality of our contemporary experiences and how they are shaped by memories of the past—what we keep and what we leave behind.

Download the INTERMEDIO: In Place of Forgetting Gallery Guide as a PDF.

A Kick in the Head: Uncouth Stories of Sunken Beauty focuses on a disparate group of artists that utilize various photo-based techniques to archive lives lived on the edge, finding dark beauty in unseen and often misunderstood aspects of humanity. Their stories are told through bodies of work that focus on subcultures or obsessions that can only be properly conveyed when a viewer is able to experience a multiplicity of images. These are artists that utilize the photographic medium to express their dissatisfaction, their otherness as obsessives and outsiders, or a fixation on the odd and obscene. The images are evidence of activities, documentation, categorization, and obsession. Invention and reinvention share the stage. Genesis P-Orridge explains the motivation for h/er practice and life: “I’ve been involved in a total war with culture since the day I started…I am at war with the status quo of society, and I am at war with those in control and power. I’m at war with hypocrisy and lies.”

For many of these artists, the publication of their images in book form is a critical aspect of their practice. This allows them to create a narrative through the curation and sequencing of images, as well as ensuring that their story reaches a much wider audience and is preserved as a specific document. Many of these publications are included in the exhibition, and Alternate Project’s concurrent, pop-up bookstore offers a wide variety of rare publications and editions.

Curated by Michael Lowe and George Kurz.

Presented in conjunction with Alternate Projects, Covington

Featured Artists: Vito Acconci, Nobuyoshi Araki, Morton Bartlett, Richard Billingham, Guglielmo Achille Cavellini, Larry Clark, Bob Flanagan, Katy Grannan, Mike Kelley, Richard Kern, Robert Mapplethorpe, Ryan McGinley, Annette Messager, Pierre Molinier, Otto Muehl, Catherine Opie, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Rob Pruitt, Arnulf Rainer, Lucas Samaras, Penny Slinger, Bob Wade, Count Zichy