Three festivals share one week, and on Thursday all three run at once.

In an age marked by accelerated change and ecological instability, Natural Fictions proposes a slower, stranger, and more speculative gaze. The exhibition gathers artists who harness photography’s potential to imagine new relationships with the natural world—ones that are not bound by documentary fidelity but instead embrace transformation, fiction, and play. Through their work, the landscape becomes a site of experimentation and wonder, where speculative futures and unseen pasts coexist in surreal, poetic, and scientific inquiry.

The artists in this exhibition use the lens not merely to capture the world as it is, but to destabilize it. They fold time, alter perspective, and merge disciplines, constructing images that evoke geological duration, cosmic scale, and embodied mythologies. Some simulate environments that never existed, while others render familiar terrain uncanny through shifts in material, scale, or cultural reference. Their practices explore the camera as both a tool and collaborator in seeing beyond the visible and the known.

Natural Fictions considers how photography can resist linearity and certainty. What new narratives emerge when nature is approached as something invented as much as it is observed? What futures might become imaginable when science meets spirit or when perspective is shaped by play instead of conquest? Natural Fictions invites viewers to look sideways—and forward—at the environments we inhabit, inherit, and imagine.

Artists: Lydia Smith, Mareiwa Miller, Ruby Que, Sean McFarland

Also with Joshua Berg (artist), Heesoo Kwon (artist), Phillip Maisel (artist)

Cost: Free to the Public

Source: fotofocus.org (opens in a new tab)

Nancy Rexroth: Secrets of My Power is the first major exhibition to explore the life and work of American photographer Nancy Rexroth. Born in 1946, Rexroth is known for a unique and powerful body of work made with a simple plastic camera published in 1977 under the title IOWA. A book unlike anything that came before it, IOWA remains a touchstone for many photographers nearly fifty years later.

This exhibition tells a richly detailed story of Rexroth’s original, often defiant artistic vision amid the changing social, institutional, and creative landscapes of the 1960s, 70s, and early 80s. Drawing on extraordinary access to the artist’s archive, it sheds new light on her most beloved photographs and enables a previously unavailable perspective on her work across five decades. Rexroth’s creative accomplishment emerges as a poetic, cogent, and remarkably cohesive exploration of the self, the will to expression, and the qualities and meanings of light.

Along with documents, snapshots, and personal possessions, the exhibition features nearly 150 artworks spanning the formative years before, during, and after Rexroth’s graduate studies at Ohio University to her later work with platinum, Polaroid transfer, and early digital tools. Many of the works on view exist in only one copy, and several are exhibited for the first time, including a 53-image carousel slide show, experimental multi-frame images on film, and a key corpus of self-portraits newly printed under the artist’s supervision from her negatives.

Nancy Rexroth: Secrets of My Power represents the public debut of the Nancy Rexroth Collection, an unparalleled archive of her life and work stewarded by the Cincinnati Art Museum. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated, multi-authored scholarly catalogue.

Artists: Nancy Rexroth

Cost: Free to the Public

Source: fotofocus.org (opens in a new tab)

Opening hours throughout the Cincinnati Art Week footprint.

Source: cincinnatiartweek.com (opens in a new tab)

Continue opening night at CAW Offsite.

Source: cincinnatiartweek.com (opens in a new tab)

Join us LIVE! from Beer Hall at Union Hall as we kick off festivities for the 10th Annual StartupCincy Week!

Also with Valerie Jacobs

Source: startupcincyweek.com (opens in a new tab)

Join us for lunch at Washington Park with a casual midday break full of fellow founders, funders, and entrepreneurship enthusiasts. Good food, great company, and one of OTR’s best gathering spots. Lunches are first come, first serve - so don't miss out!

Source: startupcincyweek.com (opens in a new tab)

New for 2026, the Ready. Set. BLINK! Opening Ceremony will offer a more immersive opening celebration that brings the community together. Featuring luminous interactive installations, electrifying live performances, hands-on creative experiences, and opportunities to create and wear your own light art, Ready, Set, BLINK! serves as the spark that ignites BLINK’s four-day celebration of art, creativity, technology, and community.

Cost: Free

Source: blinkcincinnati.com (opens in a new tab)

BLINK® transforms 35+ Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky city blocks into an immersive art experience.

Cost: Free

Source: blinkcincinnati.com (opens in a new tab)