The Week

Take a full historical of tour of Findlay Market and the new and existing BLINK murals in the neighborhood! We'll stop at 5 participating businesses along the way to enjoy delicious dishes and drinks.

Tickets are $40 and include all samples received on the tour.

Cost: $40

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

Take a full historical of tour of Findlay Market and the new and existing BLINK murals in the neighborhood! We'll stop at 5 participating businesses along the way to enjoy delicious dishes and drinks.

Tickets are $40 and include all samples received on the tour.

Cost: $40

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

Everyone’s favorite practically perfect nanny takes flight in this delightful adaptation of the Broadway and West End smash hit. Directed by TCT Artistic Director, Roderick Justice, and based on the books by P.L. Travers and Disney film, the unforgettable characters and songs including “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” “A Spoonful of Sugar,” and “Step in Time,” will lift your spirits and take your imagination sky high!

Artists: Roderick Justice

Cost: Tickets Start at $12!

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

Tours meet in the front lobby.

Discover the museum in just 60 minutes with CAM in 60, offered Tuesday–Sunday, highlighting artworks in our collection. The third‑Saturday tour includes ASL interpretation.

Thursday evening tours explore our exhibitions.

Homeschool and school groups as well as groups of 10 or more people are not permitted on public tours. Please reach out to the Tour Coordinator and submit a tour request form to ensure the best possible tour for your group.

Cost: Free. Registration is not required.

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

Jack O’Lantern Glow, presented by Medpace, is back for its third year at the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden!

Jack O’ Lantern Glow is an immersive walkthrough experience with more than 6,000 hand-carved pumpkins and fall displays along a half-mile trail in the Zoo, making it the largest of its kind in the Tri-state area! Experience the grandeur of fall at the Cincinnati Zoo, where it transforms into a mesmerizing wonderland of illuminated jack o’lanterns, breathtaking displays, and special effects that elevate your autumn nights to extraordinary heights. The family-friendly event is great for all ages.

Although the jack o’lanterns are the real stars of this event, Reptile House and Night Hunters will be open nightly until 9pm.

Cost: Adult Admission Price Range: $15 – $25; Child Admission Price Range: $10 – $20. Separate ticketed event; not included with Zoo membership or regular Zoo admission.

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

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

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

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Cost: Free

Registration (opens in a new tab)

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

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0H10M1ke is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist known as “The One-Line Master,” recognized for creating more than 15,000 live portraits and light-based performances across cities including New York, Miami, Tokyo, Kyoto, and Berlin. Working at the intersection of drawing, performance, and light, he translates real-time gesture into luminous forms using a Wacom tablet and stylus, treating each mark as an immediate, unrepeatable response to the moment. His ongoing series L1ght Graff1t1 Make0vers transforms participants into vivid, reimagined identities through live digital light performance, blending street aesthetics, improvisation, and spectacle. Across international exhibitions at venues such as the Park Avenue Armory, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Museum of Graffiti, his work explores light as both medium and metaphor for connection, impermanence, and shared human presence.

With 0H10M1ke

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

A lion dance group based in Dayton, Ohio.

With Au Lac Lion Dance Association

Source: anm.asianati.com (opens in a new tab)

A lion dance team based in Louisville, Kentucky.

With River Lotus Lion Dance

Source: anm.asianati.com (opens in a new tab)

An Urban Native Collective Exhibition

Urban Native Collective is a Cincinnati-based organization that serves the broad interests and needs of the Indigenous community within the Tri-State area. Urban Native Collective presents its eighth Indigenous People’s Day Convergence. This four-day celebration, which includes this exhibition, focuses on current issues affecting the Indigenous community, their past, their resilience and their bright future.

The Indigenous Peoples’ Day Convergence exhibition is presented in partnership with the Contemporary Arts Center in The Collective Gallery sponsored by P&G, located in the lower lobby. It brings together contemporary artists to highlight that Indigenous expression is not a recover of what was lost, but an explosive celebration of what has always survived. Moving beyond colonial narratives, the exhibition honors Indigenous life as a living, Sovereign, and evolving force. Grounded in an “Indigenized” punk aesthetic, this multidisciplinary showcase demonstrates that Indigenous presence, creative defiance, and joy are the ultimate forces shaping our shared future.

Artists presented in this exhibition include Jaque Fragua "Mobil Savage" (Pueblo), Robert Franklin (Diné), Steph Littlebird (Grand Ronde), Kobi Morgan (Diné), Cole Reuben (Seneca), Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos), Mariana Varela (Mexican), Hiro Cash (Diné), Jeremy Dennis (Shinnicok), Carlos Ramirez (Mexican), Isaiah Stewart (Oglala Lakota / Mohawk) and Solstar (Mayan). Curated by Leonard D. Harmon (Nanticoke).

The opening reception for this exhibition will be on Friday, October 9th, from 5 to 9 p.m. It will feature performances from the Copper Face United Powwow Troupe and DJ Creepingbear. Tortilleria Garcia will have a selection of food items for purchase. The reception and performance are free and open to the public.

Artists: Carlos Ramirez, Cole Reuben, Hiro Cash, Isaiah Stewart, Jaque Fragua, Jeremy Dennis, Kobi Morgan, Mariana Varela, Robert Franklin, Sara Siestreem, Solstar, Steph Littlebird

With Leonard Harmon (artist)

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

Challenging misconceptions of Indigenous culture

Indigenous culture is too often trapped in history books or reduced to outdated stereotypes. People of the Good River challenges these misconceptions by capturing the vibrant, everyday realities of Indigenous people living in Cincinnati today. Grounded in the legacy of the Ohi-yo—the Seneca word for "Good River"—this exhibition pairs candid portrait photography with hand-pulled screen printing on paper. Each physical layer of ink builds a portrait of modern life, work, and community, moving past romanticized tropes to celebrate an enduring present and archive for the people who are actively shaping Cincinnati's contemporary narrative.

“They say the truth is in the eye of the beholder… but who’s looking?” ~ Leonard Harmon

Leonard Harmon has always been drawn to a life of expression. Leonard credits a large part of his passion too. As he puts it, his “direct bloodline to art”. His father was a furniture maker, and his uncle, and namesake Leonard Allen Harmon, was a well-known portrait artist featured in the Heard Museum of Arizona. Art, in one form or the other, was always present in his life. As a young man, he was inspired by his grandparents' love of cooking to attend Johnson & Wales University, one of the finest culinary schools in the country, where he not only learned the fine art of creating culinary masterpieces but also began to explore his love of music. Eventually touring the country as a DJ, it wasn’t until 2010 that Leonard began to explore a new form of expression, traditional and contemporary mixed media.

In an interview with The Stranger, Leonard explains, “I like using older images to tell a new story of putting perspective on our history. As a new artist, I like exploring all kinds of methods and mediums. Each new style I incorporate helps me express myself in a new way. I’m never scared to try new things and see where my mind takes me.”

A citizen of the Lenape Tribe of New Jersey and the Nanticoke Tribe of Delaware, Leonard currently lives on the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indian Reservation. He reflects often on traveling to Connecticut and Oklahoma to attend Powwows and be immersed in his culture. He continues to be actively involved in tribal traditions on the Siletz Reservation. This immersion is seen in his work as he takes inspiration from his ancestors to put modern spins on traditional arts.

Curated by CAC's Education Department

With Leonard Harmon (artist)

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

Bringing together seven regional artists whose practices engage with the concept of time, In the Interest of Time was developed through a FotoFocus juried open call, led by independent curator Theresa Bembnister.

Joseph Vitone and Lynn Whitney document their subjects over extended periods of time. In 1998, Vitone began photographing relatives around his hometown of Akron, OH, which evolved into a series of intimate portraits recording nearly three decades of life transitions: birthdays, divorces, illnesses, children growing up to become parents themselves. Whitney photographed the shoreline of Lake Erie stretching between Cleveland and Toledo for more than a decade. Her work captures humanity’s complex relationship to this priceless natural resource.

For the series 1655 Ireland Rd., Jordanne Renner mailed prints of her family home to her father and stepmother, who added their observations to the photographs with markers and Post-its. Twenty-three years later, Renner revisits the work, inviting her brother and father to respond to the images following her stepmother’s passing, reflecting on the passing of time and loss.

Julie Renée Jones’ work in Hold Still marks a time of transition—a new mother’s psychological shift in identity—using visual characteristics of the horror genre, such as deep shadows and stark camera angles.

Robyn Moore’s Being in the Land functions as a visual metaphor for deep time, the temporal framework for slow-moving geological change. Spectral figures appear in her compositions, alluding to the ancient history of the surrounding landscapes.

Elijah Howe preserves a timeworn historical subject—the small town of Chained Rock, KY—through a trove of archival materials, handmade crafts, and contemporary photographs. A close look, however, may lead viewers to question their assumptions of photographic truth.

Through his series Witness Trees and Indelible Structures, Osamu James Nakagawa documents land once used as Japanese American incarceration camps during World War II. This work visually preserves physical histories at risk of being otherwise lost to time.

With Theresa Bembnister (curator), Elijah Howe (artist), Julie Renée Jones (artist), Robyn Moore (artist), Osamu James Nakagawa (artist), Jordanne Renner (artist), Joseph Vitone (artist), Lynn Whitney (artist)

Cost: Free for Pass Holders in October, venue members, children 18 and under, and SNAP/EBT recipients. General admission: $12

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

Photographing friends, artists, collaborators, and himself, Paul Mpagi Sepuya challenges traditional portraiture through layering, fragmentation, mirror imagery, and the perspective of the Black, queer gaze.

Sepuya’s practice is grounded in the studio as a site where people, objects, and experiences are both positioned and displaced. Early works made in his Brooklyn apartment simultaneously depict presence and absence, while works made following his move to Los Angeles become increasingly complex in their composition. Utilizing mirrors to radically alter the dynamics of a portrait or a scene, he allows glimpses of the studio setting and reveals the apparatus of photography, including backdrops, lighting, lenses, and the camera itself. Although little is hidden, much is obscured and fragmented, with narratives left open to conjecture. In contrast to the slick artifice of traditional or commercial portraiture, Sepuya points to the human element of picture taking—embracing fingerprints, smudges, and the dust on a mirror’s surface to make his images, and photography, more tactile.

Compressed Tenses explores an ancillary and ongoing practice of physical collage in Sepuya’s oeuvre. Starting with a Rauschenberg Residency in 2018, Sepuya deploys constructs previously employed in his studio practice, exploring the history of the homoerotic photograph, complicated by current conversations around queerness and Blackness. His collages are in direct conversation with his studio work. Using a small laser printer, the images are torn and their fragments directly re-arranged on sheets of paper. Together, they create analog compositions reminiscent of his larger digital works and encapsulate the multi-layered investigation of various histories: the gaze, otherness, queerness and the Black body, and, of course, the history of photography itself.

With Michael Goodson (curator), Paul Mpagi Sepuya (artist)

Cost: Free to the Public

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

Widline Cadet: Seremoni Disparisyon (Ritual [Dis]Appearance), the second presentation of the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States, presents her acclaimed series exploring Black diasporic life through her family’s immigration from Haiti.

After leaving Haiti as a child, Cadet originally photographed her extended family to supplement the small number of images of her ancestors that had been passed down, counteracting both the physical separation from her home country and the loss of these relatives. But increasingly limited access to her family abroad inspired the artist to turn the camera on herself, as well as other Black women around her, creating a stand-in archive that explores absence through presence.

Seremoni Disparisyon addresses shared themes of immigration, including loss, aspiration, and memory, through the specificity of Cadet’s experiences. Many works contain concrete autobiographical details: family photographs and videos, personal belongings like the curtains her mother brought from Haiti, and Kreyòl titles drawn from actual conversations. Others stretch across distance and memory, like the photograph of a model in a gingham dress, a re-creation of the artist’s childhood school uniform. Although displaced from her original home, Cadet nevertheless finds echoes of it everywhere, such as the breeze-block architecture and bougainvillea flowers of her current residence, Los Angeles. This doubling recurs throughout Seremoni Disparisyon —building a dreamlike, proxy world inhabited by elements both real and imagined, experienced and missed.

This exhibition includes work from across the entire series, bringing together photographs, installation, and video to encompass the breadth of Cadet’s imagemaking practice and capacious approach to photography, including vinyl application, photo-sculpture hybrids, and multimedia presentations.

Artists: Widline Cadet

With Kristen Gaylord (curator)

Cost: Free for Pass Holders in October, venue members, children 18 and under, and SNAP/EBT recipients. General admission: $12

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

With Nathaniel M. Stein (curator)

Cost: Free to the Public

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

Trevor Paglen operates at the crossroads of art, technology, and philosophy. His work explores image-making technologies as increasingly powerful animators of geopolitical exchange and arbiters of how we see our world. Balancing tensions between the visible and invisible, beauty and terror, Paglen reveals the ways digital imagery mimics traditional forms of representation while spawning unfamiliar and, at times, unsettling motifs.

His interest in images that are not based on human vision, but as logical outcomes of computational processes, stems from Paglen’s fascination with the sublime, an 18th-century philosophy of nature as both awe-inspiring and threatening. While considering Romantic paintings that visualized this concept, Paglen has asked: “What are the monsters in our skies now?” This reframing of the sublime, coined by theorist Hal Foster as the techno-sublime, no longer considers nature as the ominous threat but rather human-wielded technology such as spy satellites, Reaper drones, and rendition flights.

Trevor Paglen: the most merciful thing in the world features photography, video, and sculpture spanning a twenty-year period, presenting works that activate—through telescopic and computer vision—new ways of seeing the world while revealing what is designed to remain unseen within systems of surveillance or military power. The exhibition subtitle is borrowed from science fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937): “the most merciful thing in the world” is our ignorance, which ultimately protects us from fully comprehending the vast and terrifying universe. Across multiple distinct series, this exhibition examines how human interactions with technology— from telescopic views of military sites and the cosmos, to interactive facial-recognition technologies, to the darker prospects of AI-generated imagery and alternate-reality games—test the capacities of human perception and cognition.

With Kevin Moore (curator), Trevor Paglen (artist)

Cost: Free to the Public

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

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

With Lindsay Albert (curator), Sso-Rha Kang (curator), Joshua Berg (artist), Heesoo Kwon (artist), Phillip Maisel (artist)

Cost: Free to the Public

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

The Startup Clubhouse was created as a more open environment for startup founders, employees and people looking for opportunities to mix and connect throughout the week.

Registration (opens in a new tab)

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

VC Exclusive Lounge

Cost: Venture Capital Investor ticket ($300.00)

Registration (opens in a new tab)

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

The Cincy Bookstore Crawl connects readers with beloved local bookshops, curated routes, fun passport moments, and the kind of community that only independent bookstores create.

1. Save the Date! Mark your calendar for October 2nd–4th—you'll need all three days if you're planning to conquer the Crawl! 2. Map Out Your Adventure Choose your route and make a plan. Many participating bookstores are near great coffee shops, restaurants, and local attractions, making it easy to turn your Crawl into a full weekend experience. 3. Grab Your Passport Pick up your official Bookstore Crawl Passport at your first stop and collect a stamp at every bookstore you visit. Each stamp earns you one entry into our prize drawings. Visit 22 or more stores and you'll unlock entry into our exclusive Super Crawler Drawing! 4. Explore, Shop & Share Visit as many bookstores as you can throughout the weekend. Discover new favorites, meet fellow book lovers, and don't forget to snap photos along the way. Share your adventure on social media using #CincyBookstoreCrawl. 5. Enter to Win Complete the online entry form by midnight on October 5th and upload a photo of your completed passport. Winners will be selected at random and notified directly. Be sure to follow along on Facebook and Instagram to see prize announcements and Crawl highlights!

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

An archive of tangible memories

Artist Sarah Rodriguez’s work is an archive of tangible memories. Analyzing concepts of kinship and womanhood through discarded objects. Once reclaimed, objects are adorned and preserved, reflecting the intricacies of our lives, suspended between times of joy and sorrow.

With an emphasis on tactility, the work incorporates a variety of materials and techniques. Glitter, yarn, buttons, and beads are carefully assembled, forming text and highlighting the functionality of the object. Together, these elements examine the duality between the playfulness of girlhood and the weight and labor womanhood bears.

This practice seeks to honor the ordinary, transforming familiar materials into talismans of memory. By inviting viewers into this tactile archive, Rodriguez creates space for reflection on the stories we inherit, the ones we carry, and the ones we choose to preserve.

11 July 2026 Saturday 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM

Homespun Gathering

Homespun Gathering Join us in celebrating Sarah Rodriguez’s new exhibit, Homespun, now on view in CAC’s Community Gallery. Stop by CAC's 6th floor for a unique opening reception in the form of a community potluck. Pull up a seat to chat with the artist, share a meal, and create a unique memento to take home that’s...

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

Sink your teeth into a hilarious new take on the world’s most famous vampire! Filled with outrageous twists, playful innuendo, and more laughs than you can count, this delightful romp reimagines Bram Stoker’s gothic classic like you’ve never seen before. This dangerously debonair Dracula brings seductive chaos, proving that sometimes the Prince of Darkness can be as captivating as he is cunning. Join the hilarious hunt this Halloween season, where the only thing sharper than Dracula’s fangs are the gags that’ll leave you in stitches. Don’t miss the riotous ride that’s sure to leave you howling with laughter!

Artists: Brian Isaac Phillips

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

In exchange for borrowing the Taft’s James McNeill Whistler painting, At the Piano, the Tate Britain has lent the museum John Singer Sargent’s Claude Monet Painting by the Edge of a Wood.

Cost: Admission is free for Taft members, military (with ID), youth (17 and under), students (18 and over with ID), and teachers (with ID); $15 for adults; $12 for seniors. Sundays and Mondays are free!

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

Together, these paintings cover a wide range of subjects, including legendary heroes, beautiful women, Kabuki actors, mythical gods, Daoist immortals, landscapes, flower-and-birds, and animals.

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

Works by artist collaborative Batres Gilvin.

Works by Batres Gilvin reflect a meditation on in-between states, where memory, identity, and the body shift between presence and absence.

Batres Gilvin, an artist collaborative in Greater Cincinnati, is comprised of Karla Batres and Bradly Gilvin, life partners who met in 2011 while studying at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. In a multiethnic partnership that joins the personal with the professional, Batres’ Mexican American heritage and Gilvin’s Southern American roots are a catalyst for complicated conversations about difference, otherness, and identity. In their Morning View, Kentucky studio located on the property of the Gilvin family farm and homestead, Batres Gilvin explores the local and global implications of immigration. Their artistic work is informed as much by larger political conversations as it is by life on the farm and daily interactions with Bradly and Karla’s immediate and extended family.

In Batres Gilvin’s artistic work art becomes life and vice versa. As a multiethnic collaborative, Batres Gilvin is a study in contradictions. Playful irreverence exists alongside unflinching solemnity. An unsparing commentary on the inequities of US immigration policy is wrapped in sparkly, kitschy imagery, providing a sugar-coated dose of truth serum, Mexican American style. In Batres Gilvin’s world, contradiction is both material and tool; it is also a reminder of the complexity of humans and the necessity of holding space for difficult conversations.

With Batres Gilvin (artist)

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

Inspired by movies like Ocean’s Eleven, Now You See Me and The Usual Suspects, this theatrical caper is a high-tech mystery for the stage. When Marvin assembles a team of professional thieves to pull off one last job, the heist goes sideways into a web of danger, betrayal and double crosses. What follows is a high-octane production that will keep you on the edge of your seat with lasers, aerial stunts and state-of-the-art projections. Blending quick-witted banter and unexpected laughs with clever surprises and heart-pounding suspense, Heist takes you on a fun and thrilling ride.

“Thrillingly technical, fast paced, and cleverly scripted.” – Edmonton Journal

Artists: Arun Lakra, Blake Robison

Cost: Tickets start at $39

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

An adventure 6 million LEGO® bricks in the making.

Get ready for an immersive adventure like no other as Ryan “Brickman” McNaught re-imagines Jurassic World, the blockbuster franchise from Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment. Embark on an immersive adventure like no other. Featuring more than 50 massive dinosaurs, iconic scenes and interactive props made from over six million LEGO® bricks, LEGO® Jurassic World: The Exhibition invites you to relive the magic of beloved stories and characters from the Jurassic World franchise as you embark on a thrilling journey across Isla Nublar.

Cost: Exhibition Ticket Required. Adult: $19.50; Senior: $14.50; Child: $14.50; Member Adult: $14.50; Member Child: $9.50

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

A floating symphony of color and form

This installation, suspended from the ceiling of the CAC’s Dr. Stanley & Mickey Kaplan Hall Lobby, takes something invisible—gravity—and makes it visible. New York-based design firm SOFTlab constructed a frame made from shapes that mimic clustering bubbles. The custom cut and printed paper strips draped from this structure drift slowly up and down, following the movements of computer-controlled winches, causing their arcing forms to adapt to gravity’s pull. The hues of the brightly colored paper strips intermix as they adjust to the rise and fall of the winch, creating constantly changing patterns and colors. Taken together, these simple shapes generate a complex symphony of color and form.

SOFTlab found inspiration for this work in the floating concrete volumes of the Zaha Hadid-designed Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art. Stacked above Kaplan Hall’s open space, the forms appear to be floating, yet their heavy materials create a sense of stability. SOFTlab’s sculptural installation hangs from these boxes into the CAC’s voluminous, light-filled lobby, working with Hadid’s design to amplify the building’s own sense of gravity.

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

This world premiere delivers biting satire of the current media environment and will no doubt get people talking. Hoping for a ratings boost, the host of a news commentary talk show decides to do a live broadcast. When an unplanned guest is added to the mix of standard talking heads, the conversation goes off the rails, and the show descends into chaos. All political points of view are represented, and all are skewered as this razor-sharp and funny play shines a satirical spotlight on news and dialogue in today’s fast-moving media world. A centerpiece of the inaugural Made in Cincy: New Works Festival, Talk was commissioned by the Playhouse from the award-winning Broadway and Hollywood writer and Cincinnati native Theresa Rebeck.

Praise for Theresa Rebeck: “Theresa’s intelligence and rapier wit energize every word she writes.” — Jeff Goldblum, actor

Artists: Mêlisa Annis, Theresa Rebeck

Cost: Tickets start at $39

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

To See and Be Seen presents pictures by nineteen female photographers who examined society, expanded definitions of genre and craft, and explored topics of memory, identity, and the uses and materials of photography—often while working against social and institutional conventions that advantaged men.

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

Featuring sumptuous decoration and beautifully detailed paintings, the nine 18th-century fans in Unfolding Elegance represent the pinnacle of fan-making in Europe and a level of craftsmanship that was unrivaled in later periods. The museum’s rare examples depict classical myths, pastoral scenes, and biblical stories—images only seen when a woman unfurled and delicately fluttered her fan. In preparation for the exhibition, a conservator is spending over a year stabilizing these fragile objects, making it possible to share them with the public after years of being held in storage.

Cost: Admission is free for Taft members, military (with ID), youth (17 and under), students (18 and over with ID), and teachers (with ID); $15 for adults; $12 for seniors. Sundays and Mondays are free!

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

Yayoi Kusama: All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins (2016) features an array of yellow gourds of various sizes, adorned with black polka dots, that are surrounded by mirrors. The result is an immersive installation that allows the visitor to become part of the artwork as they seemingly enter an infinite field of glowing pumpkins.

All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins illustrates Kusama’s characteristic themes, including infinity and obsessive repetition. The artist has described the pumpkin—one of her quintessential symbols—as a form of self-portraiture. A rare assemblage of a dozen Pumpkin acrylic paintings on canvas made between 1990-2004 will also greet gallery visitors, courtesy of the Masterworks Foundation.

Kusama’s career spans more than seven decades, and her Infinity Mirror Rooms are some of her most experimental and iconic works, often incorporating a variety of illuminated objects.

Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli’s Field (1965) was Kusama’s first installation to use mirrors to create a sense of endless space, featuring a floor covered in hundreds of red-spotted, white fabric-stuffed tubes. Kusama’s mirrored installations represented an innovative step in the emergence of an increasingly experiential practice. In each work, the visitor’s reflection seems to extend into infinity while they simultaneously have an intimate and individualized room experience.

All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins draws on Kusama’s seminal pumpkin room, Mirror Room (Pumpkin) (1991), which was shown at for the Japanese Pavilion at the 1993 Biennale Arte in Venice.

Yayoi Kusama: All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins is on loan from the Dallas Museum of Art.

Artists: Yayoi Kusama

Cost: Ticketed. Free for members. Tickets are available online only and are released one month prior to your visit date. Adult tickets: $17. Discounts available for seniors, college students, and children.

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

Cincinnati artist Edie McKee Harper (American, 1922–2010) developed a distinctive modernist vision across a wide variety of media, including photographs, paintings, enamels, weavings, illustrations, and prints. Edie McKee Harper: Modernist at Play and its accompanying catalogue highlight Harper’s exploration of these diverse materials through more than 100 works of art, re-examining her minimalist—and often playful—style to reveal a sophisticated artist who expanded the possibilities of mid-century modern art and design.

Curators: Angela Fuller, Ann Glasscock, Tamera Lenz Muente

Artists: Edie McKee Harper

Cost: Free to Pass Holders in October, venue members, military, and children 17 and under. General admission: $15 adults; $12 seniors. Free Sundays and Mondays

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

Queer Constellations: Photographs from the Aronowitz Family Collection is a sweeping exploration of identity and artistic lineage, presenting major photographs by and about queer artists. The exhibition celebrates a transformative gift of 50 photographs to the Columbus Museum of Art from the Columbus-based Aronowitz Family and significantly expands beyond it with an additional 100 works from the Aronowitz Family Collection.

The exhibition borrows its title from Andrea Geyer’s Constellation series, where the artist transforms archival images of women by collaging them to create kaleidoscopic photographs about connection and visibility. With works ranging from the early 20th century to the present, Queer Constellations considers how photography has been used to portray queer life and identity in the United States. It features works by contemporary photographers including Catherine Opie, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Shikeith, and Wolfgang Tillmans, alongside photographers of previous generations, such as Peter Hujar, George Dureau, George Platt Lynes, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, and Robert Mapplethorpe. By weaving together photographs from different time periods, the exhibition argues that queer histories of photography are constellatory: layered, refracted, relational, and continually rewritten.

The salon-style display of Queer Constellations evokes personal archives and everyday acts of arranging photographs through which queer histories have often been collected and shared. The installation, therefore, invites the viewer to read images through their own perspectives—for, as Vince Aletti argues, “Queer is in the eye of the beholder.” Queer Constellations is organized by Vince Aletti, independent curator and writer, and Kaitlin Booher, William and Sarah Ross Soter Associate Curator of Photography, with Rae Root, Roy Lichtenstein Curatorial Fellow.

Artists: A.L. Steiner, Ajamu X, Alvin Baltrop, Amos Badertsher, Andrea Geyer, Andreas Sterzing, Andy Warhol, Arne Svenson, Arthur Tress, Barbara Hammer, Bruce of LA, Camilo Godoy, Carl Van Vechten, Carlos Motta, Catherine Opie, Chivas Clem, Christopher Makos, Clifford Prince King, David Armstrong, David Wojnarowicz, Duane Michals, Emil Cadoo, Erwin Olaf, George Dureau, George Hoyningen-Huene, George Platt Lynes, Gerard Ferkel, Herb Ritts, Herbert List, Hunter Reynolds, Ian Lewandowski, Jack Pierson, James Klosty, Jason Byron Gavann, Jim Novak, Jimmy DeSana, Joan E. Biren, John Dugdale, John Edmonds, John Waters, Lola Flash, Lucian Clergue, Lyle Ashton Harris, Marion Scemama, Mark McKnight, Mark Morrisroe, Martine Gutierrez, Michael Harwood, Mickalene Thomas, Nan Goldin, Paul Smith, Peter Hujar, Ren Hang, Reynaldo Rivera, Richard Avedon, Robert Giard, Robert Mapplethorpe, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Ryan McGinley, Sam Contis, Shelby Sharie Cohen, Shikeith, Slava Mogutin, Stanley Stellar, Stephen Barker, Tim Greathouse, Tyler Mitchell, Wilhelm Von Gloeden, Will McBride, Wolfgang Tillmans, Zanele Muholi

Curators: Kaitlin Booher, Vince Aletti

With Paul Mpagi Sepuya (artist)

Cost: Free to Pass Holders in October, venue members, and children 3 and under. General admission: $20 adults; $18 seniors; $16 students and children 4–17

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Unfolding Stories traces the rich history of the Richard and Carole Cocks Art Museum’s (RCCAM) collection through the perspective of visual artists, art historians, dancers, and architects. From art historical research to experimental animation/video and mixed media installation, this expansive exhibition encompasses a wide array of studies, interpretations, and expressions by more than 60 artists, scholars, and students associated with Miami University.

Established in 1978, the RCCAM at Miami University hosts over 17,500 artworks in its permanent collection. The collaborators of Unfolding Stories engage in an in-depth exploration of the collection from pre-Columbian artifacts to contemporary art, including works by Eadweard Muybridge, Berenice Abbott, Steve Schapiro, Felice Beato, H. A. Sigg, William Douglas McGee, Philip Morsberger, Kara Walker, Judith Brown, Sam Gilliam, and Nancy Holt. The culmination of this multifaceted creative research is showcased through projection mapping events, a multimedia exhibition, and artist talks.

Projection Mapping Schedule:

Oct 8–11 7:30pm

Location: Miami University Center for Community Engagement (MUCCE), Cincinnati, OH

Oct 15 7:30pm

Location: Art Building, Miami University, Oxford, OH

Advisors: Annie Dell’Aria, Ashley Goos, Jordan Fenton

Artists: Auntora Azad, Billy Simms, De-Graft Boateng, Diane Fellows, Emmanuel Bonsu Osei, Jacob Jordan, Joomi Chung, Kate Rowekamp, Kelley Booze, Larry Collins, Lauryn King, Lucky Osman, Matthew Board, Michael Stillion, Noelle Hemrich

Cost: Free to the Public

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This exhibition highlights local photographers, collectors, and other artists, featuring approximately 20 tintype portraits produced by local studios, Ricky Willis Tintypes and Alex Lippert at Blue Creek Tinworks. Alongside these portraits, the exhibition includes photographic reproductions from the Cincinnati Art Club archives and other sources, altered and produced as tintypes.

For the past 135 years, the Cincinnati Art Club has provided services to the visual arts community, including support for members such as Frank Duveneck and Henry Farney. Joining these two groups of artists together provides an overview of the present photographic community and a re-imagined “long view” that links the past with the present.

Artists: Aleisa Yusko, Alex Lippert, ChengLun Na, Christine Kuhr, Emily Mayfield, Jens Rosenkrantz, Linda Jacobs, Su Ready

With Kip Eagen (curator)

Cost: Free to the Public

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Marzena Abrahamik’s imagined tableaus explore political and fantastical themes emerging at the intersection of women’s rights and cannabis culture. Cannabis legality and women’s freedoms remain sites of ongoing political struggle, their regulations shifting with the social climate. The mythology of the “stoner” has been coded male—humorous, passive, and carefree—while women’s desires have often been framed as excessive. GirlPlay counters these narratives, staging lush, dreamlike environments where cannabis becomes a site of feminine agency, sidestepping the male gaze and grounding new attachments to creativity and freedom.

Intimate and surreal, the photographs in GirlPlay portray nakedness not as a vulnerability but as a marker of agency and care. Portraits acknowledge the body as a site of both pleasure and struggle; landscapes blur the cultural touchstones of a daydreamy paradise; and still-lifes become a hyper-focused endeavor involving low stakes and joy. Abrahamik’s images insist on a female discourse, presenting women in relation to one another rather than as objects of a male fantasy. GirlPlay invites viewers to consider photography not as a passive reflection of reality but as an active site of women’s pleasure, rebellion, and transformation.

Artists: Marzena Abrahamik

Cost: Free to the Public

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A milestone is a wayfinding device, a roadside stone that marks distances between destinations. Figuratively, the word milestone signifies a noteworthy step or stage in the course of history or a person’s life. They make us pause to consider where we’ve been and where we’re going. In Milestones: Finding Our Way, 12 regional lens-based artists contemplate significant places and events while utilizing a range of time-laden approaches to photography.

Staged tableaux, long exposure techniques, and hand-stitched prints are tools wielded by Jingyin Che, Ishmael McKinney, Amena Sheikh, and Audra J. Shields to expose intimacy and distance within specific communities. Exploring academic and carceral institutions, the artists reveal both groundbreaking and everyday interactions, presenting achievement and progress not as a finish line, but as a negotiated marker along an evolving path.

Through digital prints, video, laser cutting, and split-tone gelatin silver prints, Tom Croce, Kent Krugh, Madde Lesnewich, and Michael Tittel utilize traditional and innovative approaches to landscape. Encouraging environmental stewardship and cultural reflection, their images of plains, watersheds, and mountains invite a longer look.

Within solvent ink prints on steel, installation art, photo lithographs, and macro prints, Robert Coomer, Will Jones, Fredrik Marsh, and Ardine Nelson find an appreciation of aging and death. Loss, remembrance, mystery, and imperfection are revealed as personal and universal manifestations. Cumulatively, Milestones: Finding Our Way inspires a broad perspective of place and time.

In addition to listed hours, galleries are open during scheduled weekend performances and events.

Artists: Amena Sheikh, Ardine Nelson, Audra J. Shields, Fredrik Marsh, Jingyin Che, Kent Krugh, Madde Lesnewich, Michael Tittel, Robert Coomer, Tom Croce, Will Jones

With Cathy Mayhugh (curator)

Cost: Free to the Public

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Return to the Mother is a photographic series by Nikita Gross that reveals the symbiotic relationship between women and the natural world. The work arises from the belief that the land continually offers healing, presence, and inspiration, and that creating art can serve as an offering in return. Each image is a gesture of reverence: to the land, the feminine spirit, and the unseen connections that bind them.

Rooted in Gross’ upbringing in the Ohio Valley, her work draws upon rivers, forests, rolling hills, and wild spaces that shaped her visual language and sense of spiritual ecology. The land is not backdrop but collaborator and guide, carrying a quiet magic that asks to be remembered. In her photographs, Gross seeks to reveal this presence through intimacy, stillness, and truth rather than spectacle.

Using analog and digital photography with natural light, Gross emphasizes attention and presence. The women she photographs are friends, artists, and local community members who are invited to examine their own connections to place. Return to the Mother honors reciprocity and wildness, reflecting the untamed spirit of both nature and the feminine. These photographs are accompanied by a video component that deepens the immersive experience and expands the dialogue between body, spirit, and landscape.

Artists: Nikita Gross

Cost: Free to the Public

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New York-based artist Accra Shepp explores parts of culture so well-known they have been accepted without question. Although history unravels in a predictable manner, a lack of close examination and reflection leads to the repetition of the same mistakes. Bearing Witness, an exhibition including three bodies of his work— Occupying Wall Street, The Covid Journals, and The Islands of New York— takes a deeper look at subjects often overlooked or intentionally misconstrued.

Shepp’s photographs of the Occupy Wall Street movement depict the people who gave us the language to frame the 21st century through phrases like “income inequality” and “the 99%.” The images take the viewer beyond false narratives— nothing was accomplished, it didn’t last that long, or it was mostly young white men— and offer a more realistic portrayal. The Covid Journals chronicles the phases of the pandemic. Contagion, Hunger, Justice, Democracy, and Vaccine —these chapters trace the unexpected trajectory of events that gave birth to our collective responsibility and the recognition of the connectivity between personal and communal welfare. The Islands of New York uncovers the 45 islands that make up New York City, highlighting the city that goes unseen, even in the information age, and focusing on its landscape as the climate changes.

Artists: Accra Shepp

Cost: Free to the Public

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Depth of Field highlights the work of student artists from the Art Academy of Cincinnati who consider the present state of their medium and its possible future directions. The exhibition uses “depth of field” to frame how emerging artists balance what is in front of them with what lies ahead. The selected works represent a moment in time, showing current ideas, approaches, and concerns, while also pointing toward the new directions that may shape artistic practice in years to come. Student artists are in a unique position to question what has been established, test new ways of working, and make connections across different disciplines. Their perspectives demonstrate that “the long view” is not only about the future, but also the present—when the promise of future potential can be best envisioned.

Artists: Autumn Fletcher, Avin Martin, Camille Simpson, Gina Tarantino, Harper Thomson, Kaiden Jacques, Kamaire Jones, Kelsey Gallagher, Kennede Oninku, Olivia Kaiser-Piazza, Tammie Le

With Lila Ungs (artist)

Cost: Free to the Public

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Centered on Franklinton, OH, Franklinton Across Time: The Floodplain Imagination explores how history and collective memory persist in relation to place, and how distance, perspective, and time shape our understanding of a neighborhood that continues to transform. Through visual storytelling and research-based practice, the exhibition asks how artists can interpret the layered histories embedded in a community’s landscape.

Franklinton, one of Columbus’ earliest neighborhoods, serves as a compelling microcosm of urban change. Its history reflects broader social and environmental forces, including Indigenous displacement, early American settlement, cycles of devastating flooding, redlining and economic divestment, periods of abandonment, and more recent waves of redevelopment and gentrification driven in part by arts initiatives. These overlapping histories reveal a place continually reshaped by both loss and renewal.

Approaching Franklinton as a living archive, the exhibition traces shifts in land use, community identity, and cultural memory across generations. Franklinton Across Time pairs contemporary lens-based artworks with archival photographs, documents, oral histories, and interviews with residents, engaging with the present moment while situating it within a longer historical framework. Site-responsive installations further connect the work to the physical and social landscape of the neighborhood, encouraging viewers to reflect on how past and present intersect within the evolving story of Franklinton.

Artists: Alicia Cook, Alison Kraniske, Amir Behroozi, Clarissa Brown, Dilge Dilsiz, John Blom, Josh Chaney, Larry Robertson, Logan Bruni, Logan St Hilaire, Luke Albu, Madison Blue, Michael Indriolo, Onni Estabrook, Samuel Lo

Jurors: Claire Wiedman, Marcus Jackson

With Bethani Blake (curator)

Cost: Free to the Public

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Jon Yamashiro: Framing the Forgotten presents a series of black-and-white photographs documenting sites of Japanese American incarceration during World War II. Created between 2010 and 2019, the photographs emerge from the artist’s visits to all 10 incarceration camp locations with his family. Yamashiro, a Professor of Art at Miami University and photographer with a long studio practice, approaches these landscapes with quiet directness. Some sites contain memorials or preserved structures. Others remain as open desert, scattered rubble, or traces barely visible in the terrain. Yamashiro’s images emphasize the isolation of these environments and the physical distance from the communities where those imprisoned once lived.

Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, more than 120,000 Japanese Americans, many of them citizens, were forcibly removed from their homes and imprisoned in government camps across remote areas of the United States. Yamashiro, who is of Japanese ancestry and raised in Hawaii, did not have immediate family members incarcerated, yet the history remains deeply personal. This work also reflects the artist’s experiences raising biracial children who have faced questions and comments about race and identity. In some photographs, his children appear within the landscapes, placing contemporary Asian faces within spaces marked by historical injustice. The photographs invite viewers to confront these locations not as distant history but as present landscapes shaped by memory. Through quiet, stark imagery, the work asks how the legacy of incarceration continues to shape conversations about race, belonging, and citizenship in America today.

Artists: Jon Yamashiro

With Robert Mullenix (curator), Ellen Price (curator)

Cost: Free to the Public

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Over Everything explores the relationship between memory and self. Running through the nostalgia ingrained in familial archives, Noel Maghathe navigates moments they never lived; some they can still feel, others are barely tangible. In the process, they construct new memories that blur the lines between truth and fabrication. Stories surface through images, layering time, absence, joy, and longing into overlapping frames that offer fragments of past truths. These photographs become points of rediscovery, each holding inherited narratives. Embedded with words and motifs, the fabric becomes a means of communication with the past—messages to a younger self, to close and distant relatives. Over Everything examines how memory is shaped, altered, and reconstructed through the act of retrieval, initiating a dialogue between longing, connection, and remembrance.

Artists: Noel Maghathe

With Jenie Gao (curator)

Cost: Free to the Public

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Untwined/Interwoven considers the photograph as a fragment—memory as shards of glass, scraps of fabric, or prints sewn together. Faded due to time, memories are often fickle and unreliable in nature. What pieces can be collected, selected, and separated to tell personal and collective histories? This question highlights the ephemeral, impermanent, and fragmented nature of photography as a medium that translates memory into a solid entity and serves as a vessel for remembrance and storytelling.

Curated by students at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, artists Angela Kahoali’i Casagrande, Diana Noh, and Kaitlin Santoro investigate memories through lens-based and mixed media images and fragments. By collaging found materials with photographs, all three artists show their own unique vision of what it means to hold onto and mend lived experience. Their work serves as a metric to reach into the past and reflect, creating a space for distressed recollections of place and fractured dimensions of time.

Artists: Angela Kahoali’i Casagrande, Diana Noh, Kaitlin Santoro

Course Faculty: Rachel Reisert

With Julio Acosta (curator), Emerson Forrester (curator), Raye Griffin (curator), Mambi Morris (curator), Taleal Robinson (curator), Lila Ungs (curator)

Cost: Free to the Public

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Afterlife explores the enduring work of Corson Hirschfeld (1942–2020) through a selection of his photography, co-curated by his wife, anthropologist Tassie Katherine Hirschfeld. Hirschfeld’s interdisciplinary photography evolved from documentary research for the scientific journal he edited, Journal of Herpetology, to commercial projects like the iconic “Rainbow Legs” for the Cincinnati Ballet, ultimately leading to his works of art focused on cultural artifacts. For over 15 years, Hirschfeld obsessively photographed ancient sacred sites, culminating in Places of Power: Sacred Sites of the Americas and Pacific, a traveling exhibition originating at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in 1988. Hirschfeld’s research, travel, and creation of photographs were painstaking, including his post-production technique of hand painting selenium-toned gelatin silver prints in limited editions of 25.

While time breaks apart the physical world into ever-increasing entropy, it simultaneously builds the essence of our being—culture and self. Time gives us more history and experience, not less. Hirschfeld’s work manifests this paradox, pulling ruins of the past into a present experience—a long view of our timeless humanity. Hirschfeld saw his photography as “a thread attached to the person who did it, a bridge between us and the people.” Viewing his work, audiences inherit that thread and bridge to the ancients—and Hirschfeld.

Artists: Corson Hirschfeld

With Tassie Katherine Hirschfeld (curator), Holly Doan Spraul (curator)

Cost: Free to the Public

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The inaugural Fort Hayes Photography Program Alumni Exhibition, One Shot, brings together generations of lens-based artists whose creative foundations were shaped by the Photography Career Program at Fort Hayes Metropolitan Education Center in Columbus, OH. Established in the 1980s, the program has long served as an incubator for emerging image-makers, equipping students with both technical expertise and the conceptual tools to explore photography as a form of artistic expression and storytelling.

The artists in One Shot span multiple decades, professional paths, and creative approaches. Some have pursued careers in fine art, commercial photography, journalism, and filmmaking, while others have carried their visual training into entrepreneurship, education, music, food, and family life. Collectively, their work reflects the enduring influence of a program that encourages experimentation, collaboration, and a deep engagement with the photographic medium.

By foregrounding these varied trajectories, the exhibition highlights the transformative power of arts education and the ways creative mentorship can shape lives, careers, and communities. The Fort Hayes Media Arts Programs stand as a rare and vital model—one that merges vocational training with artistic inquiry, enabling young people to see themselves as artists, skilled professionals, and active contributors to cultural life. Together, these works offer a living archive of creative possibility, tracing the lasting impact of a program that has quietly yet profoundly shaped the photographic landscape of Columbus and beyond.

Additional open hours: Saturday, October 24, 1–5pm and Friday, November 6, 6–8pm.

Artists: Brooke LaValley, Corrie Witt, Ed Elberfeld, Kate Morgan, Leslie Norton, Nick Fancher, Rick Kocks, Stephen Takacs

Cost: Free to the Public

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Beneath All Distance presents Erika NJ Allen’s body of work that merges experimental photographic processes, ceramic surfaces, and moving images. Working exclusively with pinhole and analog photography, the artist documents landscapes shaped by vast geological time—sites whose physical features bear visible traces of history, endurance, and change. These terrains serve both as subjects of visual inquiry and as catalysts for reflection on humanity’s place within a broader temporal continuum. Through analog processes, ancient landscapes, and durable materials, Allen’s work offers a meditation on scale, memory, and endurance across deep time.

Artists: Erika NJ Allen

Cost: Free to the Public

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A curated silent film series designed to intellectually challenge preconceived notions of early cinema, Reverse Shot is crafted to physically transport viewers into another time through the retrofitting of the Woodward to its early 20th-century origins. This series examines the evolutionary record of cinema, grappling with collective memory and conventional understandings of film’s early days and how they shape our perception of cinema today.

This selection of films aims to open thought and discourse around the ideas of linear progress in cinematic representation, and to reveal the ever-present confrontation between diverse, bold voices and homogenous systems.

Screening schedule:

Tuesday, October 6: Female Directors Short Film Block, including The Drunken Mattress (dir. Alice Guy-Blache, 1906), Suspense (dir. Lois Weber, 1913), Cinderella (dir. Lotte Reiniger, 1922), and The Seashell and the Clergymen (dir. Germaine Dulac, 1928)

Monday, October 12: Man With a Movie Camera (dir. Dziga Vertov, 1929)

Monday, October 19: Within Our Gates (dir. Oscar Micheaux, 1920)

Monday, October 26: Faust (dir. F.W. Murnau, 1926)

Artists: Alice Guy-Blaché, Dziga Vertov, F.W. Murnau, Germaine Dulac, Lois Weber, Lotte Reiniger, Oscar Micheaux

Cost: Free to the Public

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In The Places We Keep, students reflect on their most cherished spaces—familiar domestic settings, shared public forums, secret hiding spots, culturally significant locations—during a 12-week course. Guided by instructors Shannon Eggleston and Michael Wilson, students investigate the impact that time, civic development, and unseen natural forces inevitably have on their treasured places’ appearances, functions, and associations, as seen through the lens of both intimacy and distance. The resulting images consider how spaces and moments of time can hold personal and collective significance, inviting viewers to consider how individual and communal identities and memories can shape environments.

In addition to the exhibition, students created time capsules to house film negatives of their selected works, and in some cases the displayed photographs themselves. These capsules, left at meaningful sites, offer a tangible archive for future audiences to discover. The Places We Keep is not only an exhibition, but also a gesture of continuity: a message from the present to those yet to come and an invitation to honor the places we cherish before they inevitably change.

Artists: Erin Collins, Isabella Carty, Jakobi Lundy, Norah Shoemaker, Preston Frater, Ryland Eger, Ta’Kaia Miller

Cost: Free to the Public

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Image Destabilization illuminates how the deterioration of lens-based media can take on new aesthetic and personal qualities. Oftentimes, tarnished media is discarded, pawned off, or restored to its original state of creation; however, immense beauty can be found in what we perceive as damaged goods. Expired film, eroded tintypes, and forgotten slides can be cherished for their newfound purpose and interpretations. The concept of appreciating natural wear and tear reflects how life is transformative, and, hopefully, through finding beauty in timeworn media, allows visitors to reconsider themselves in a society that often ignores and neglects the elderly.

Image Destablization will be on display in the third floor atrium.

Artists: Larry Evans

With Ella Lipnik (curator)

Cost: Free to the Public

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Instructor Steve Groh leads students by mapping out and documenting his journey in photography, ultimately encouraging his students to envision and illustrate their own paths. Wayfarers displays three views: Groh’s own path, illustrated through one-on-one sojourns with those significant to his development as artist and teacher; his current students’ work, imbued with their own histories and future longings; and former students’ photographs, evoking further introspections, hopes, and fears. Groh inspires each of his students to travel back into the past and forward into the unknown, and to capture key moments with dedication and heart. As fellow travelers of their own long roads, viewers can experience the personal expeditions of others through the lenses of “wayfarers” at different stages of their journeys.

Artists: Abby Brown, Alexandra Boise, Alyssa McRoberts, Amanda Whalen, Amy Scarpello, Autumn Shelton, Bre Rice-Opry, Britni Bicknaver, Brynn Ensminger, Cailee Plunkett, Chloe Kelley, Corey Watzek, Courtney Smith, Darrien Bockting, Drew Horton, Emily Shutte, Erica Kolianos, Felicia Head, Hannah Knight, Jake Hicks, Kim Czulewicz, Lauren Reis, Maggie Schwoeppe, Marin Smyth, Morgan Becker, Stephanie Stone, Steve Groh, Tatum Barkley, Taylor Askin

With Virginia Volle (curator)

Cost: Free to the Public

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A three-year project by George Rush culminates in an installation of 204 paintings. Rush, who has spent years painting the boundary between inside and outside, continues this exploration with paintings generated from cell phone photographs made during walks and drives throughout Columbus, OH, and candid moments from work and home life. Though each work starts with the now ubiquitous cell phone image, they are more than a treatise on technological reproduction; they are a meditation on the visual rhythms of suburbia. While this array of moments might potentially lend themselves to cacophony, they instead evenly and calmly illustrate the lay of our current psychological landscape. Collectively, they consider a span that begins before COVID-19, deepens during the height of the pandemic, and tapers off with the slow acclimation to our “new normal.”

Artists: George Rush

With Michael Goodson (curator)

Cost: Free to the Public

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Luminous Flow: Time Made Visible utilizes the expressive possibilities of long-exposure photography. Through extended shutter times, photographers transform ordinary scenes into images that reveal motion, energy, and the passage of time. Participating artists use techniques ranging from subtle, multi-second exposures to extreme durations lasting minutes or hours. Moving water becomes luminous ribbons of light, city streets dissolve into streaks of motion, and shifting clouds paint across the sky. In each image, time becomes a visible element within the composition, exemplifying how photography can stretch beyond the instant to capture duration, rhythm, and transformation. By allowing light to accumulate over time, long-exposure photography reveals patterns that the human eye cannot normally perceive. The exhibition invites viewers to slow down and consider how photography can transform fleeting moments into enduring visual experiences.

Artists: Annette Fournet, Casey Macko, Curtis VanWye, Dan Cleary, Daniel Landis, Darlene Yeager-Torre, Dilge Dilsiz, Elizabeth Larsen, Isaac Glimka, J. Michael Skaggs, Joshua Cardiff, Kevin Rotramel, Kinga Owczennikow, Linda Phillips, Marcia Lang Canter, Marilyn Szabo, Michael Pointer, Rebecca Cummings, Robert Parkey III, Roberta Kayne, Rod McIntyre, Scotty Davis

Juror: Gregory Changa Freeman

Cost: Free to the Public

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Picture Perfect features works by artists utilizing photography as a starting point and visual reference in their artmaking processes. As a group show featuring artists with and without disabilities, Picture Perfect exhibits final artworks alongside the artists’ initial photographic inspiration, demonstrating the ways in which artists of all disciplines and abilities often rely upon photography to strengthen and deepen their creative processes.

Multimedia artist and sculptor Brian Dooley depicts images from found, online sources, using non-traditional materials such as Perler Beads and Shrinky Dinks. Painter Ross Bicknaver creates hyperrealistic landscapes from photographs he takes on his smartphone. Antonio Adams poses and photographs friends and mentors, to be subsequently recreated as painted portraits. DC-based artist Charmaine Jones draws portraits of her family directly from their Instagram posts. Painter and photographer Toni Lane paints directly on top of family photographs. All of these artists work specifically with photography as their inspirational source: snapshots capturing lived experiences, sublime landscapes, friends and family members, or simply beloved objects, which become the springboard for art-making, allowing the artist a reference point for their ongoing creative practice.

Artists: Antonio Adams, Brian Dooley, Charmaine Jones, Curtis Davis, Duane Blacksheare-Staton, Imani Turner, Joel Martinez, Rosalind Bush, Ross Bicknaver, Toni Lane, Tyler Spohn, William Howell

With Maria Seda-Reeder (curator)

Cost: Free to the Public

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What kind of future do young people want? In Sense of Tomorrow, gallery fellows investigate this question, exploring possible futures and the collective impulse to understand the unknown. The exhibition presents lens-based works that reflect on beauty, fulfillment, and belonging while imagining what lies ahead. Through photography and image-making, the artists allow viewers to consider how emerging generations see themselves, their communities, and the world they will inherit and shape.

Sense of Tomorrow is led by HATSUE, a Japanese-American photographer and educator from Southwest Ohio whose work explores themes of cultural connection and belonging. For the exhibition, HATSUE leads an eight-week artistic residency at ArtWorks/1001 Colors’ Your Name Here Gallery, which offers free educational programs for aspiring artists ages 16–24. During the residency, HATSUE mentors a diverse group of 10 teens and young adults, selected through an open application process, as they develop original projects that anticipate and respond to the future.

Artists: HATSUE

Cost: Free to the Public

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Athletes in Unconventional Spaces highlights the tension between physical bodies and the environments they inhabit. Ongoing since 2013, the series by Cincinnati-based photographer Romain Mayambi creates layered photographic portraits that place athletic movement within unexpected urban and architectural settings, including empty rooftops, abandoned buildings, parking garages, and suburban landscapes. Using a distinctive hybrid approach that merges analog and digital photography, Mayambi juxtaposes strength, motion, and stillness, inviting viewers to reconsider the boundaries of performance, both physical and visual.

In partnership with ArtWorks/1001 Colors, Cincinnati Parks, and Pickleball at Sawyer Point, Mayambi presents an outdoor exhibition that brings the series into the public realm. The public art display features photographs from Athletes in Unconventional Spaces that emphasize endurance across time and space. Together, the installation explores themes of displacement, belonging, and resilience, offering a powerful meditation on bodies in motion beyond traditional arenas.

Cost: Free to the Public

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Developed by the Richard and Carole Cocks Art Museum at Miami University, the Culture Crops project engages Cincinnati-based fine art photographer Tina Gutierrez to conduct site visits and create a series of photographic portraits that celebrate the history and diversity of Ohio’s food-growing communities. Culture Crops includes stories of Indigenous, immigrant, and local community and family farmers and the history of the food they produce. The project raises awareness of the depth and breadth of Ohio residents and the land they cultivate across Southwest Ohio. The resulting series of photographic portraits and video interviews tell the stories of these present-day Ohioans, their experiences growing food, and the history of farming traditions. The exhibition is accompanied by a documentary film by Asa Featherstone IV.

Artists: Asa Featherstone IV, Tina Gutierrez

With Jason E. Shaiman (curator)

Cost: Free to the Public

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Considering the Cultivated consists of two bodies of work by Heather F. Wetzel: Salvage and Creeping, Climbing, both exploring the role humans have on the environment, ecosystems, and food production. Salvage investigates ideas of biodiversity, monocrop culture, genetically modified crops, and the science and controversy surrounding these topics, while Creeping, Climbing takes a close look at the beauty, usefulness, and destruction of kudzu, “the vine that ate the South.”

Wetzel’s work is grounded in contemplation of life in the 21st century and current social concerns, and uses a variety of materials and methods such as historic photographic processes, hand papermaking, book arts, metal, and wood. Guided by her interest in how process and materials contribute to art as an object, Wetzel works predominantly with analog processes and craft. Her work is equally concerned with the object, alternative methods of display, and how the chosen materials support concept and content.

Artists: Heather F. Wetzel

Cost: Free to the Public

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King in Chicago is a solo exhibition featuring Paul Natkin, one of rock music’s most prolific photographers of the last 50 years. His work has been featured extensively, including in Rolling Stone and TIME magazines, national news broadcasts, and rock biographies. Additionally, his photographs have appeared on many album covers, perhaps most famously his image of Ozzy Osbourne holding Randy Rhodes in his arms, which became the cover of Osbourne’s Tribute album. Natkin was hired by The Rolling Stones as their official photographer for several tours, and beyond his iconic images of Ozzy and the Stones, he produced thousands of photographs, capturing just about anyone who came through Chicago to play a show in a bar, ballroom, or arena.

In preparation for King in Chicago, Natkin searched his archives for alumni of King Records—the Cincinnati label operating from the 1940s through the ‘60s—and found several icons: James Brown, Bootsy Collins, Hank Ballard, Albert King, Johnny Otis, and John Lee Hooker, all members of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. The exhibition also includes a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame: Jethro Burns, a mandolinist who first gained fame as a member of the King Records country duo Homer & Jethro. King in Chicago captures these legends years or decades after their King Records years, revealing artists at various stages in their careers but all similarly photographed by Natkin during an ephemeral moment on stage.

Artists: Paul Natkin

Cost: Free to the Public

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Work Life Balance is an iterative exhibition of photographs and sculpture by Peter Happel Christian that studies and imagines homeostasis as the primary desire of modern life. Through a range of subject matter that draws from personal narratives and economics to gestures and objects, Happel Christian’s installation meditates on the namesake of the project, a phrase made popular in the last half decade, and its natural antonym: “play death imbalance.” Imagined by the artist as an equally valid inversion of the popular, aspirational platitude, Happel Christian’s work entangles the sentiments of each phrase as a guide to follow. Photographs document moments of ingenuity and surprise or imagine humdrum actions as mystical gestures, while sculptures capture the fatigued body’s need for rest or support.

Artists: Peter Happel Christian

Cost: Free to the Public

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Picturing Tomorrow specifically gazes forward, inviting artists to imagine and construct visions of the near or distant future. The exhibition reveals how photography can be used to document not just what is, but also speculate on what could be. This is the long view of the investor, the futurist, and the utopian/dystopian dreamer, utilizing the visual language of today to build the worlds of tomorrow.

Selected artists respond to ideas including: speculative environments that visualize the long-term effects of climate change; future societies that imagine future social structures, family units, or evolving forms of communication and interaction; technological evolution that explores the co-evolution of humanity and artificial intelligence, bio-engineering, and space exploration; the “future archive” where future photographic artifacts are created and presented as historical documents of an era yet to come; among others.

Artists: Alex Witteman, Cameron Peagler, Debora Hurst, Glenna Jennings, Shon Curtis

With Ed Dixon (curator)

Cost: Free to the Public

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100 Years From Here contemplates the idea of “home” through the faces and stories of those living in Springfield Township. Photographer Romain Mayambi creates intimate portraits of 20 residents, each representing a five-year age milestone—from a days-old newborn to a centenarian who has witnessed a full century of change. Together, they form a living timeline that reflects a community shaped across generations. Each resident, photographed in a place where they feel a strong personal connection—spaces that evoke memory, belonging, and a sense of home, public or private—shares a memory tied to that exact place, reflecting on why it represents comfort, joy, or a defining moment in their life. These reflections affirm that the feeling of belonging is shaped by experiences and emotions as much as physical space. With artifacts and visual references from the past century integrated throughout, the exhibition invites visitors to reflect on continuity, change, and collective memory.

During the Township’s Halloween Hootenanny, families contribute handwritten reflections to a Community Time Capsule to be opened in 2036, Springfield Township’s 250th anniversary.

Artists: Romain Mayambi

Cost: Free to the Public

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These photographs of Antarctica, at once biographical and historical, are from Ron Tisue’s time “on the ice” during the International Geophysical Year Operation Deepfreeze IV. In 1958, Tisue, then stationed in Phoenix, AZ, saw a post calling for volunteers to “winter over” in Antarctica and signed up. The landscape first struck him as stark, barren, bitterly cold, and empty. His job was to track weather, study clouds, release Hydrogen balloons, and take readings every 3 hours—12 hours on and 12 hours off.

Tisue traveled with a Brownie camera, a wind-up Brownie movie camera, and a Wollensack tape recorder with classical music reels. As Tisue describes, “I painted with my camera—shapes, lines, angles inspired me. I had to learn how to get good photos. I created a visual record of everything. I wanted to document everything. I needed to document everything.” The experience was life-altering: Tisue later went to art school on the GI Bill, leading to a career as an art educator and sculptor, and to a lifetime of building and transforming historic spaces.

Artists: Ron Tisue

With Diana Tisue (curator)

Cost: Free to the Public

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This Land, Here We Dwell focuses on contemporary photographers in the United States who engage with time and land as both subject and material. The featured artists incorporate meditations on the land and environment as part of their practice, encompassing historical ecologies, current climates, and imagined futures. Within their studies of the land, each artist also embraces time as a critical element of photographic language and integrates time as material, subject, and methodology. Artists employ long exposures and moving images, research-based practices, and ephemeral materials during repeated visits with their subjects. Based throughout the United States, these photographers unveil rich knowledge of the different ecosystems within the country and how these environments inform our daily lives.

Artists: Anna Rotty, Anne Eder, Elizabeth Ransom, Heather Palecek, Julia C. Martin, Leah Sobsey, Lindsay Godin, Rosalba Breazeale

With Kelsey Nolin (curator)

Cost: Free to the Public

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Created by six youth artists in collaboration with filmmaker Andrea Sisson, True Body Project: Time is a Circle is a multi-channel film reflecting on the nature of time, memory, and identity, inspired by Alan Lightman’s much-loved book, Einstein’s Dreams. Youth artists ages, 16–20, create this film experience over seven weeks as part of The Well’s True Body Project and in collaboration with ArtWorks/1001 Colors’ Youth Apprentice Artist program. These artists collaboratively ponder their own sense of time while creating all aspects of a multi-channel film experience focused on the cartography of place and belonging. This dynamic meeting of time and place gives a haunting and hopeful view of our world from today’s future artists and leaders.

Artists: AJ Johnson, Andrea Sisson, Desmond Reeder, Harmony Jackson, Max Bertram

Cost: Free to the Public

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

Waiting to be Seen pays tribute to the charged, chaotic, and deeply human theater of street life. Inspired by the spirit of Diane Arbus, the exhibition features street photography and photojournalism that documents drag performers, queer communities, clowns, bodybuilders, and everyday passersby in moments of unfiltered presence.

From the defiant joy of a sidewalk voguing battle to the quiet intimacy of public rituals, these images capture the unscripted drama of urban life. The work blurs the line between art and reportage, suggesting viewers see the street not just as a backdrop, but as a living, breathing character.

Artists: Ave Pildas, Brad Smith, Matthew Zory, Maureen France, Maurice Mattei, Melvin Grier, Michael Wilson, Rachel Rampleman, Robby Parsons, Tim Harrier

With Sandy Eichert (curator), William Messer (artist)

Cost: Free to the Public

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“Equal to Any in the City:” Ball & Thomas Photographs, 1840s–1870s reveals the pioneering work of photographers James Presley Ball and Alexander S. Thomas, whose studios helped shape early photographic culture in 19th-century Cincinnati. Drawing on the Cincinnati Museum Center’s rich collection of their work (the largest known), the exhibition examines Ball’s training, his decision to establish a studio in Cincinnati, and the collaborative role of his family and professional partners in producing and circulating photographic images. Through portraits, studio scenes, and contextual materials, the exhibition reveals how photography functioned as both an artistic and social medium in the mid-19th century. Visitors are invited to learn how photographs were produced, experience sitting for a portrait, and discover the technologies, props, and retouching techniques that defined early studio photography. The exhibition also highlights Ball’s connections to Cincinnati’s vibrant Black community and abolitionist networks, demonstrating how photography intersected with social reform movements and the cultural life of the city during a pivotal era in American history.

Artists: Alexander S. Thomas, James Presley Ball

With Arabeth Balasko (curator)

Cost: Free to Pass Holders in October, venue members, and children 2 and under. General admission: $24.50 adults; $17.50 seniors and children 3–12

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

Amanda Bradley’s Notations from Home is an ongoing body of work and archive that uses photography as a language, in which the camera becomes a tool for note-taking, discovery, and relationship building. The images encapsulate the sentiments of belonging and home through a long view of landscape across geography and time.

Bradley explores water and land as critical spaces of history, imagination, and memory. The work is deeply rooted in navigating the duality of her sense of identity as a first-generation American, tethered to two lands and moving through the waters between them. Growing up between Miami, FL, and Belize, Bradley is anchored at the intersection of diaspora, migration, and memory, with photography allowing her to build connections across geographies. Her photographs investigate how landscape can function as a visual threshold, embracing movement through time, memory, and belonging. The work ultimately asks: what dictates a memory, and what do individuals attach their own histories to?

Artists: Amanda Bradley

Cost: Free to the Public

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In the 19th century, enormous crowds engaged in bold looking at circuses and sideshows. Thrilled by colorful spectacles, death-defying acts, exotic cultures, wild animals, rousing music, and amusing clowns, audiences savored both watching dynamic performances in person and sustained, private gazing at performers in buying their carte-de-visite and cabinet card portraits. Among these portraits were bearded ladies, conjoined twins, snake charmers, albinos, contortionists, fire breathers, little people, and sword swallowers.

By examining choices that sitters and photographers made regarding clothing, jewelry, hairstyle, pose, and gesture, as well as autographs and inscriptions on card mounts, this exhibition shifts the historical focus of such photographs from spectacle and curiosity to empathy and a deeper understanding of self-presentation and performativity. This interrogation asks why such portraits were so popular, what they expressed about visual culture in the United States, and how consumers viewed, shared, and displayed their souvenirs. The intention is to analyze such photographs in terms of the sitters’ agency, dignity, and autonomy. While some performers developed highly specific skills to achieve notoriety, others transformed circumstances of birth with physical anomalies to make a living by captivating audiences with their distinctive appearances. Disabilities Studies demand that we consider the achievements of differing bodies from the past as vital to all Americans today.

Artists: Aaron A. Smith, Abraham Bogardus, Abraham S. Feinberg, Albert W. Wood, Alfred D. Goldsmith, Alvin B. Warfel, Andrew Alison Grier, Andrew Augustus Grier, Andrew J. Simpson, Anson Lentz, Antoine Lumiére, August Wilhelm Obermüller, Benjamin J. Falk, Bransby Cooper Pentz, Caroline B. James, Charles B. Conant, Charles DeForest Fredricks, Charles E. Ridenour, Charles Eisemann, Charles Frederick Treble, Charles G. Carleton, Charles Henkel, Charles Lincoln Lentz, Charles Sweet, Culver Pictures, Inc., Daniel Downey, Daniel T. Cowell, David Husted, David Thomas Burrell, Dorrance F. Butler, E. Percy Olive, Edward Anthony, Edward Bierstadt, Edward G. Zoellner, Elmer Chickering, Enrico Negretti, Ezra J. Pottter, Frank Dawson, Frederick William Clark, George Albert, George Albert Swords, George Kendall Warren, George M. Dempsie, George M. Watson, George Wilbert Browning, George William Howie, Gertrude Davis, Gustave Moses, Henry T. Hughes, Henry Tiebout Anthony, Herbert Goodridge, Isaiah N. Packard, James A. Linder, James M. Goins, James V. Brown, John Carbutt, John Dey Maxwell, John Friis, John H. Fitzgibbon, John White Hurn, Joseph Havard, Joseph J. Caddy, Joseph Samo, Joseph Zambra, L. F. Dobler, Lorenzo Marvin Baker, Margot, Mark Allen & Co, Mathew Brady, Max P. Thiele, Michael A. Wesner, Minnie K. Wachtman, Napoleon Sarony, Ray D. Chapman, Stephen David Morris, Stereoscopic Co., The Rembrandt Studio, Thomas A. Brown, Thomas S. Johnson, Walter Burton Wright, Washington Lafayette Germon, William Downey, William E. Steckbauer, William H. Swords, William Henry Brown

With Theresa Leininger-Miller (curator)

Cost: Free to the Public

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In The North Fork, Trent Davis Bailey intertwines childhood memories with images and moments from family farms on Colorado’s Western Slope. “The North Fork” comes from the name locals use to broadly describe the agrarian valley in which they live, which is situated on Colorado’s Western Slope and irrigated by the North Fork of the Gunnison River.

In addition to The North Fork series, a selection of archival photographs depicting the same region is on view. Included are prints by two Farm Security Administration photographers, Russell Lee and Arthur Rothstein, as well as lesser-known photographers whose prints are held in the archives of a local historical society, weaving together past and present. Suggesting the arc of history in the region, as well as the artist’s long-standing connection with the place, this exhibition demonstrates how Bailey’s work connects with a photographic and historic lineage while also serving as a tool for self-discovery.

Artists: Trent Davis Bailey

Cost: Free to the Public

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Afterimage: Portraiture as Memory includes works by photographers and lens-based artists from Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky engaging with the remnants of what has been and the echoes of what is yet to come. Every photograph leaves a mark on the viewer and the maker, a visual and emotional connection that extends beyond the moment it was taken. Portraits become cherished artifacts and family albums transform into archives filled with love and resilience.

Afterimage: Portraiture as Memory invites one to pause and reflect on how photographs can bridge distances, connecting the past with the present, the self with others, and here with there. The camera is not just a tool for recording; it transforms moments and gazes into images that resonate beyond their creation and explores connections between memory, identity, and time through portraiture and contemporary storytelling. In this exhibition, artists revisit family photographs, document the closeness of current relationships, and envision futures in which today’s images become tomorrow’s proof. Whether personal, collective, documentary, or experimental, these works showcase photography’s quiet ability to capture who we were, who we are, who we might become, and how we might be remembered.

Artists: Alane Shoemaker, Alyssa McRoberts, Amy Kim, Cassidy Brauner, Cate Cole, Claire Wiedman, Clarissa Brown, Clementine Deck, Crystal Tursich, Daniel McInnis, Edmund Boateng, Elan Schwartz, Ella Wiggins, Frank Geiser, Grant Lawler, Ian Gunn, Jesse Ly, Jessica Raetzke, Julie Rae Powers, Logan St Hillaire, Michael Molloy, Michaelann Kelley, Nicholas Shellman, Sarah Smith, Swati Chopra

With Emily Wiethorn (curator), Dahlia Baer (curator), Joshua Berg (artist), John-David Richardson (artist)

Cost: Free to the Public

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The Artist in His Studio presents photographs by Alexander Liberman that document some of the most influential multidisciplinary artists of the 20th century within the spaces where they lived and worked. Created over more than a decade, Liberman’s photographs capture painters and sculptors of the School of Paris—including figures such as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse, and Alberto Giacometti—surrounded by their tools, materials, and unfinished works. Unlike traditional portraiture, these images reveal the intimate environments of artistic production and the personalities behind modern art. At the same time, the exhibition highlights the remarkable range of Liberman’s own creative life.

Born in Kyiv, Ukraine, and later emigrating to the United States, Liberman built an influential career as a photographer, painter, sculptor, and longtime art director at Vogue. His photographs reflect the perspective of an artist documenting fellow artists—what one curator described as “a Vasari with a camera.” The exhibition also resonates with Pyramid Hill’s permanent collection, which includes several of Liberman’s monumental steel sculptures installed throughout the landscape. Together, these photographs and sculptures reveal Liberman’s lifelong engagement with form, scale, and artistic community across media.

Artists: Alexander Liberman

With Sarah Templeton Wilson (curator)

Cost: Free to Pass Holders in October, venue members, and children 5 and under. General admission: $10 adults; $5 children 6–12

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The chase can be defined in many ways, but is a nearly universal experience. Humans are always in pursuit of something, whether it be financial success, career ambitions, love, or abstract dreams. The chase can be as playful as a game of tag and as serious as daily survival. Photography itself is a chase—the pursuit of a vision or reality never quite captured, moments held forever in stasis. Art of the Chase asks the artists to express their interpretation of “the chase” from documentary, narrative, and conceptual photography perspectives.

Artists: Brad Smith, Craig Rouse, Dee Henry, Deogracias Lerma, Dorothy Feldis, J. Miles Wolf, Jymi Bolden, Melvin Grier, Sharon Wilson, Stacey Dolen, Tim Harrier

With Anthony Jenkins (curator)

Cost: Free to the Public

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Cultural Ties is an interdisciplinary exhibition that celebrates Latin American culture while confronting stereotypes. Interweaving the photography of Tina Gutierrez and Andrea Sabugo with mixed media works by Ximena Flores and Rebecca Nava Soto, alongside a selection of short films curated by Mary Leonard, the exhibition offers a multi-sensory exploration of place, history, and identity.

Gutierrez’s América series presents large-scale portraits celebrating the diversity and strength of Hispanic women, collaborating with her subjects to reclaim narratives and challenge assumptions. Similarly, Sabugo’s paired images draw on editorial fashion photography and traditional dress, hair, and cultural objects to present authentic representations of Mexican and Chicano/a heritage, inviting viewers to reconsider assumptions.

Mixed media works by Nava Soto and Flores add tactile and symbolic dimensions. Nava Soto, inspired by Mesoamerican materials and writing systems, considers contemporary issues through a Xicanx lens, reflecting on her Midwest immigrant upbringing. Flores’ wall boxes filled with natural materials evoke life cycles, migration, and enduring ties to homeland, celebrating resilience and cultural continuity.

The final component, Leonard’s film series, Sin Vergüenza, features Cuban and Puerto Rican performers, unapologetically confident and often breaking gender norms, blending the political and the sensual. Together, these works exalt identity, heritage, and representation across photography, sculpture, installation, and video. By honoring ancestry, ritual, and lived experience, the exhibition affirms dignity, resilience, and pride, preserving Latin American cultural knowledge and narratives for future generations.

Filmmakers: Andrea Narvaez, Ela Troyano, Lorraine Jones Molina, Ramón Pereda, Val Vega

Visual Artists: Andrea Sabugo, Rebecca Nava Soto, Tina Gutierrez, Ximena Flores

With Mallory Feltz (curator), Mary Leonard (curator)

Cost: Free to the Public

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Darshan presents a collaboration between American photographer Conor Martin and Indian photographer Vibhav Kapoor. Since 2021, they have developed an artistic camaraderie traveling and working together. The driving principle of their art is the Hindu phenomenon of darshan, which literally means “to see.” A reciprocal act of seeing and being seen, darshan is also the Hindi word for a philosophy that addresses insight as the immanent source of experience and knowledge. This idea transcends Hindu culture, becoming the ethos guiding Kapoor and Martin’s shared photographic purpose. To them, life itself is an endless source of inspiration to make resounding dramatic photographs.

In 2023, they traveled across the Indian subcontinent to photograph the Jyotirlingams, twelve ancient temples dedicated to Shiva. They were compelled to document sites of religious pilgrimage, using them as a lens to record cultural and economic realities across the country. In 2025, they documented the Maha Kumbh Mela, the world’s largest public gathering which takes place in a temporary city erected to accommodate hundreds of millions of visitors on the flood plains of the Ganges River. These two photographers work with historic traditions to examine contemporary culture, sharing perspectives, ideas, and often even a camera. Their working process has been a mutual education through the act of seeing, resulting in a record of contemporary India through their combined sensibility and unique worldviews.

Artists: Conor Martin, Vibhav Kapoor

Cost: Free to the Public

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The exhibition Elizabeth Mead: Incident(als): objects+things, sculpture+photographs features work by Virginia artist Elizabeth Mead. Sculptures and photographs occupy spaces simultaneously connected and divided in an installation charged by tensions between actual objects and their photographic representations. The installation underscores the artist’s aesthetic and conceptual interests with paralleled perceptual and tactile experiences. The subjects of Mead’s photographs, her abstract paper and ceramic sculptures, exist as models for the photographs as much as distinct, independent objects. Which one takes precedence: the reality of the physically discernible objects or their photographic reflections observed and framed through otherwise unlikely angles? This is a question that dominates her work. The photographs elevate the experience of the sculptures through unique perspectives and inverted scale. In turn, the sculptures invite a visual engagement that, as in a photograph, is singular and momentary.

This reciprocal take on images and objects draws attention to seemingly insignificant moments and details. In Mead’s words, “these moments and things are nonheroic, but when we take a moment, we find they can be as intriguing as the monumental. In the end, these incidentals are the things that populate the world around us the most.” Alongside her sculptures and photography, images of other subjects—“things,” as Mead refers to them—carry her observations outside of the studio and illustrate the importance and consequentiality of fleeting experiences.

Artists: Elizabeth Mead

With Stefan Chinov (curator)

Cost: Free to the Public

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Appearances is the premiere exhibition of an ongoing photographic series by artist Ella Kraimer, based in New Bremen, OH. Working primarily through photographic self-portraiture, Kraimer transforms secondhand garments sourced from thrift stores into carefully staged fictional identities. Through irony, humor, and cultural critique, the work investigates how identity is constructed, performed, and circulated within contemporary visual culture.

Featuring large-scale digital prints, Appearances functions as a visual diary that exposes a culture shaped by social media, fast fashion, and digital spectacle. Drawing on the legacy of artists such as Cindy Sherman and Yasumasa Morimura, Kraimer extends their investigations of performance, gender, and cultural codes into the context of today’s image-saturated environment. Inspired in part by childhood memories of paper dolls, Kraimer employs collage, assemblage, and costume to deconstruct and reconstruct her own image. Each photograph stages a carefully constructed persona, revealing identity as fluid, fragmented, and negotiated between self and society, interiority and exteriority, authenticity and performance.

Kraimer’s practice is informed by cultural theory addressing spectacle, media, and simulation, raising questions about how contemporary technologies reshape perceptions of selfhood. At the same time, her use of thrifted clothing foregrounds issues of reuse and sustainability, questioning the material and symbolic economies in which clothing circulates. Through these layered images, Appearances invites viewers to reflect on how their own identities are mediated by images, shaped by systems of consumption, and entangled within the aesthetics of visibility in the digital age.

Artists: Ella Kraimer

With Heather Jones (curator)

Cost: Free to the Public

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How does one tell a story with no beginning, middle, or end? A survivor of sexual assault and abduction, Emily Wiethorn uses this body of work to speak her truth and feel the anger society says she must leave behind. Six years ago, Wiethorn was drugged, abducted, and sexually assaulted by a man who remains a stranger to her. That time exists mostly as a black hole in her mind; memory is challenging when it’s been taken. The memories that do remain from that night haunt her. The Death of You and Me is an examination of memory, suffering, and the effects of trauma. Wiethorn’s work exists outside the confines of reality in the nonlinear path of healing, recovery, and the suffocating feeling of PTSD. Her work questions how trauma and imprisonment change one’s understanding of oneself; how trauma changes those closest to the victim; and how one tells a story with no beginning, middle, or end.

With Emily Wiethorn (artist)

Cost: Free to the Public

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Understanding that we are all part of a shared system, Forgetting is Everywhere is a group exhibition over two storefronts, one in a traditional white-box gallery and the other inside of a bookstore café. The featured artists explore human and nonhuman histories, showcasing transformations that are both slow and sudden, unexpected but also predestined.

In this exhibition, Noah Stephens presents works from his Southern Trees series, photographs of the towering trees of a Northern Virginia plantation. These depictions of ancient trees that witnessed, and sometimes played a role in, a horrific part of our country’s history expose the relationship between humans, nature, and time. Beth Moon travelled the world to photograph Earth’s most ancient living beings, trees, and has documented some as old as 4,000 years. Moon’s series delves into time and survival, celebrating the wonders of nature that have endured throughout the centuries. Also on view is a series of photographs symbolically documenting the gender transformation of artist Guillermo Galindo as a spiritual journey guided by the Book of Hours of Saint Theresa, created in partnership with photographer Tina Gutierrez. Collectively, this exhibition reframes time, illuminating “the long view” as we consider histories, transformations, and the invisible threads that connect us all.

Forgetting is Everywhere is presented at both Swell Art Cafe and Wave Pool.

Artists: Beth Moon, Guillermo Galindo, Noah Stephens, Tina Gutierrez

With Calcagno Cullen (curator)

Cost: Free to the Public

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

Understanding that we are all part of a shared system, Forgetting is Everywhere is a group exhibition over two storefronts, one in a traditional white-box gallery and the other inside of a bookstore café. The featured artists explore human and nonhuman histories, showcasing transformations that are both slow and sudden, unexpected but also predestined.

In this exhibition, Noah Stephens presents works from his Southern Trees series, photographs of the towering trees of a Northern Virginia plantation. These depictions of ancient trees that witnessed, and sometimes played a role in, a horrific part of our country’s history expose the relationship between humans, nature, and time. Beth Moon travelled the world to photograph Earth’s most ancient living beings, trees, and has documented some as old as 4,000 years. Moon’s series delves into time and survival, celebrating the wonders of nature that have endured throughout the centuries. Also on view is a series of photographs symbolically documenting the gender transformation of artist Guillermo Galindo as a spiritual journey guided by the Book of Hours of Saint Theresa, created in partnership with photographer Tina Gutierrez. Collectively, this exhibition reframes time, illuminating “the long view” as we consider histories, transformations, and the invisible threads that connect us all.

Forgetting is Everywhere is presented at both Wave Pool and Swell Art Cafe.

Artists: Beth Moon, Guillermo Galindo, Noah Stephens, Tina Gutierrez

With Calcagno Cullen (curator)

Cost: Free to the Public

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

Spanning approximately 175 years, Getting Technical navigates the varying and conflicting definitions of “alternative processes.” The exhibition features historical practices prior to the invention of gelatin silver prints, some of which lack factory-ready materials, produce images with a lensless camera, or require hand-manipulation. Photography was born out of interest in science and chemistry, dedication to trial-and-error, and the circulation of ideas and enthusiasm amongst photographers. This exhibition honors those early commitments to experimentation and their lasting influence.

Artists: Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, Charles Swedlund, Daniel Ranalli, Darryl Curran, Ed Grüne, Ernst Haas, Jon Verney, Karina Serapio Rendon, Lou Krueger, Nolan Preece

With Mariah A. Postlewait (curator)

Cost: Free to Pass Holders in October, venue members, and children 6 and under. General admission: $15 adults; $10 seniors and active military; $5 college students and children 7–17

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

Haunting features artists working across media who share a restless relationship with time. Whether reaching into the deep past, inhabiting an unsettled present, or anticipating an arriving future, the artists make visible what ordinary sight cannot hold.

The exhibition considers that time is never neutral: it accumulates, repeats, and haunts. Lydia Smith folds 2,000 years of Indigenous history into a single panoramic view of a burial mound. Hans Gindlesberger compresses the arc of photographic history into rubbings, obscuring images to reveal the material memory beneath them. Considering the suspended time of the pandemic, Amber J. Anderson constructs Victorian paper houses as a way of moving through confinement. Kate Shannon returns to filmed testimonies, holding intimate human faces against the unimaginable weight of what they carried. Arne Svenson uses gun-violence data and internet imagery to present haunted photographs, seeking to shock viewers out of their “terrifying normal.” Lori Kella memorializes species already fading from the Great Lakes through translucent, light-held forms that grip precisely because they are disappearing. Together, these artists propose that the image is not simply a record of what was, but a place where past, present, and future press against one another.

Artists: Amber J. Anderson, Arne Svenson, Gina Osterloh, Hans Gindlesberger, Kate Shannon, Lori Kella, Lydia Smith

With Tim Rietenbach (curator), Melissa Vogley (curator)

Cost: Free to the Public

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Through the layering of paint, photographs, and collaged materials, Holly Roberts converges form, memory, mythology, and emotion. She is an artist celebrated for her ability to merge and combine media into hauntingly layered visual narratives where the intersections between image and imagination overlap. Using the interplay of human figures, animals, and landscapes, she calls attention to the fragile beauty of the human and natural worlds, bringing the viewer into a state of psychological tension and emotional unease. Working with fragments of photographs as raw material, Roberts paints into and over them, blurring the boundaries between what is captured and what is created. The resulting images feel both personal and archetypal, evoking myths, dreams, and primal states of being. Figures emerge from landscapes, animals embody human traits, and stories surface that resist literal explanation and instead tap into the intuitive and the subconscious.

Artists: Holly Roberts

With Tracy Longley-Cook (curator)

Cost: Free to the Public

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Photographer J. Miles Wolf weaves a personal narrative into his collection of photographs from Red River Gorge. This chronological narrative follows Wolf’s journey over five decades, documenting the evolution of his photographic techniques and equipment—from 35mm to medium and large formats to digital, drones, high dynamic range (HDR), and long exposures—as well as his personal growth.

Red River Gorge, a National Natural Landmark, boasts over 100 natural stone arches, wild rivers, sheer cliffs, and enormous rock houses. These photographs capture the essence of Wolf’s early years of camping and exploring the unique features of the area. Wolf has made annual trips to the Gorge, continually documenting its captivating beauty and geological wonders.

Artists: J. Miles Wolf

With Jason French (curator)

Cost: Free to Pass Holders in October, venue members, and children 2 and under. General admission: $12 adults; $10 seniors; $5 children 3–17

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The images that make up this exhibition capture places that caught the attention of Juan-Sí González during his itinerations along the roads of the American Midwest. At first, taking these photographs served a practical purpose: helping to orient himself in a vast, homogeneous, sprawling territory. Later, González began to observe how physical surroundings condition and are conditioned by the lives of those that inhabit them. His focus turned to documenting deserted spaces that, like abandoned sets, were charged with the vestiges of material culture—desolate places where, despite the absence of people, one could still feel the human presence. In these landscapes—intervened upon, transformed, and abandoned by human beings—we can perceive and interpret aspects of the social imaginary. Signs, buildings, and objects illustrate ways of thinking, being, and inhabiting that have sedimented over time, forming and transforming public spaces. With this series, González investigates the subtle boundary between documentary and fiction, creating a representation of reality that exposes an absurd fiction and, in doing so, further reveals reality. These images serve as metaphors, reinterpreted topographies that are intended to suggest new meanings and call attention to shared physical, ideological, and psychological landscapes.

Artists: Juan-Sí González

With Jorge Rodríguez Diez (curator)

Cost: Free to the Public

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Ruminating on themes of control, manipulation, and unquestioned social constructs, Katria Foster explores physical and mental aspects of the female perspective in Domestic Affair. While some images highlight a very specific memory, the ambiguity and mystery present throughout the photographs encourage viewers to insert their own narrative into her works. Foster’s photographic subjects are selected through intuition, memory, and analysis of social norms. Within these spaces and moments her work feels intimate and private, yet familiar. The figure in each photograph is almost always alone, yet there often seems to be an outside influence present, creating tension. Foster combines the duality of emotions women feel within both domestic and public spheres: feelings of restlessness, anxiety, and loneliness coupled with those of comfort and safety. Her work persistently explores these contradistinctions women experience simultaneously.

Artists: Katria Foster

Cost: Free to the Public

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Kent Krugh’s multi-exposure photographs of trees connect viewers to the past, present, and future all at once. In this exhibition, Krugh expands on themes present in his earlier work, Inside the Gate, a photo montage of tree portraits from around the world. In this next chapter, Beyond the Gate, Krugh superimposes moments of time at locations that have deep roots in Greater Cincinnati and specific connections to the Lloyd brothers, who founded Lloyd Library & Museum in the 1870s. From paying homage to Cincinnati’s Spring Grove Cemetery and Arboretum, to channeling the spirit of Lloyd Library & Museum co-founder Curtis Gates Lloyd in the woods of Crittenden, KY and Ithaca, NY, Krugh conveys reflection, patience, and calm perspectives using organic, botanical imagery.

Artists: Kent Krugh

With Christine Jankowski (curator)

Cost: Free to the Public

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Long Exposure: Recent Work by Alumni of College of DAAP Fine Art Photography Program surveys the breadth and vitality of contemporary lens-based practices by alumni of the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning. Drawing from work created since the year 2000, the exhibition traces the range of approaches, concerns, and aesthetics that graduates carry into the broader field. Curated by current and former faculty including Jane Alden Stevens, Jordan Tate, John-David Richardson, and Kate Bonansinga, the exhibition highlights the continued relevance of a program grounded in critical inquiry and expanded photographic practice.

Artists: Addie Eichbauer, Alex Macon, Anjali Alm-Basu, Annie Concannon, Aubrey Theobald, Casey James Wilson, Danielle Schuster, Ellis Johnson, Emmaline Carter, Fazilat Soukhakian, Frankie Park, Gabrielle Barrera, Grant Lawler, Ivo Vretenarov, Jacob Riddle, Jesse Ly, Justin Hodges, Katie Brenner Wolf, Laura Fisher, Lauren Darpel, Luke Kindle, Mallory Henman, Peiter Griga, Rachel Rampleman, Robert Hein, Sarah Knobel, Sheida Soleimani, Tyler Chumney, Vidushi Shrivastava, Wyatt Niehaus

With Jane Alden Stevens (curator), Jordan Tate (curator), John-David Richardson (curator), Kate Bonansinga (curator)

Cost: Free to the Public

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The Meiji Period in Japan (1868–1912) brought great changes to Japanese culture and society. Looking for Japan: Early Japanese Photography brings to the foreground how these cultural beliefs, traditions, and practices may have been packaged for, and influenced by, Western audiences via the newly established tourist trade. Objects range from single photographs and postcards to albums, from albumen travel photographs to hanging scroll collotypes. The exhibition spotlights hand-colored prints depicting landscapes, cities, and portraits, including historical Japanese architecture, hairstyles, clothing, weapons, and even tattoos. The highly personal, and sometimes provocative, images prompt us to consider history, culture, and societal change.

The exhibition will include photographs from the studios of Ogawa Kazumasa, Kusakabe Kimbei, Tamamura Kozaburo, Suzuki Shinichi II, and Stillfried and Anderson, among others.

Artists: Kusakabe Kimbei, Ogawa Kazumasa, Stillfried and Anderson, Suzuki Shinichi II, Tamamura Kozaburo

With Mariah A. Postlewait (curator), Peter Doebler (curator)

Cost: Free to Pass Holders in October, venue members, and children 6 and under. General admission: $15 adults; $10 seniors and active military; $5 college students and children 7–17

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The celebrated Slovak photographer Miro Švolík (b. 1960) created this body of work as a graduate student. Collaborating with his fellow students, he arranged them on the ground and photographed them in black and white from significant heights, creating whimsical compositions akin to collage or children’s paintings. Švolík’s text captions further animate the photographic narratives.

Artists: Miro Švolík

With William Messer (curator)

Cost: Free to the Public

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Reflections Through Time is the resultant exhibition of the Evendale Cultural Arts Center’s 2026 juried photography call. Mounted on large-scale, weatherproof panels along the fence surrounding the Village of Evendale’s public pool, this exhibition transforms a familiar recreational space into an accessible, immersive open-air gallery.

Reflections Through Time highlights how photographers consider the medium’s power to connect past, present, and future, creating images that address history and memory, time and duration, distance and perspective. Whether personal or collective, abstract or documentary, selected works share a common thread: engaging with change and how we understand it.

This year’s exhibition holds particular resonance as the Village of Evendale celebrates its 75th anniversary and the nation marks its 250th. Together, these milestones offer a timely invitation to reflect on local and collective history through a photographic lens.

Born out of necessity in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this outdoor exhibition has evolved into a beloved community tradition. Viewers encounter the work during walks, family outings, and community events, experiencing the images in changing natural light, across multiple visits, and over several weeks. The large-scale format amplifies the intimacy of each photographer’s vision, sparking conversation, contemplation, and connection across generations.

Artists: Alane Shoemaker, Alex Dahl, Allen Jerome, Annie Anglin, Ashley Fitzpatric, Austin Young, Beth McDaniel, Bev Seibert, Bill Puthoff, Brad Wilkens, Bridget Papagianidis, Candace Cook, Caroline Kerby, Charles D. Edwards, Christopher Gordy, Cliff Warnken, Craig Margolis, Craig Rouse, Daniel Rovekamp, David McDiarmid, David Rucker, Eric Spivey, Glen J. Kindness, Gloria Jeanne Dunlap, Greg Buening, Immanuel Spivey, Jack McDaniel, Jason Reynolds, Jennifer Haralamos, Jenny Pansing, Jodi Kessler, Joey Ghory, Johan de Roos, John Blom, John William Berten, Kalee Knight, Karla Balskus, Kat Rakel-Ferguson, Kelly Katzer, Kelly R. Brunarski, Ken Tarter, Kimberly Cornuelle-Marks, Laura Ghory, Leona Messer, Linda Gephart Susman, Lindsey Young, Lisa Senter, MarDee Moon, Mark M. Smith, Martha O. Carmody, Mary Karen Fox, Mary Winifred Bennett, Michael Rank, Patricia McElroy Higgins, Rachel Balent, Rick Lingo, Roxanne Engle, Russell E. McMahon, Samantha Young, Sandy Kay Garrison, Steve Berke, Steve Culver, Steven Anneken, Susan Clausi de Roos, Susan Milinkovich, Terri LeSaint-Keller, Terry Pansing

Juror: Carolyn Teepen

Cost: Free to the Public

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In A Life Worth Living, Rhys Watkins explores shifting perceptions through a body of unaltered photographs that move between expansive views and intimate detail. By refusing to crop, retouch, or digitally manipulate, he treats the photographic image as a record of sustained attention rather than an object to be revised after the fact.

The exhibition is organized through complementary groupings of images that place macro and micro perspectives in direct dialogue. One emphasizes context, spatial continuity, and the larger visual field in which subjects appear, while the other focuses on texture, surface, and overlooked details with remarkable intensity. Shown together, these works create a measured movement between distance and closeness, encouraging viewers to consider how meaning shifts according to vantage point, duration, and scale. By preserving the integrity of the captured image, Watkins presents observation itself as both method and ethic. A Life Worth Living is not only an exhibition of photographs, but also an inquiry into how seeing produces meaning, suggesting that perception is never fully fixed, but rather continually deepened through patience, relational awareness, and the repeated act of looking again.

Artists: Rhys Watkins

Cost: Free to the Public

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When Extraction Becomes Form It Speaks in Borrowed Tongues marks the first solo museum exhibition of Sammy Baloji’s work in the United States. A Congolese artist based in Brussels, Belgium, his work highlights his ongoing research into the material, formal, and symbolic traces of colonialism and extractive economies in Western architecture and the decorative arts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Exploring the historical connections between Europe, Central Africa, and the Atlantic world, this series presents architecture as a field shaped not only by design, but also by imperial histories, global trade, and systems of representation.

Through a dynamic selection of works and collaborations, this exhibition brings these often-overlooked histories into focus, inviting audiences to see architecture in new ways and to consider how its histories continue to shape the present. By making visible the colonial conditions embedded within these structures and objects, the exhibition opens space for critical reflection, dialogue, and new ways of thinking about architecture’s past, present, and future.

Artists: Sammy Baloji

With Julieta González (curator)

Cost: Exhibition: Free to the Public. Film: One screening free for Pass Holders. General admission: $12 adults; $8 venue members; $9 seniors; $6 students

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This exhibition pairs 13 cityscapes taken by Daniel J. (Danny) Ransohoff, an acclaimed mid-20th-century social documentarian who captured evolving views of Cincinnati from the 1950s through the ’70s, with current images of the same locations taken by University of Cincinnati students. By pairing images of the same location taken 50–70 years apart, the exhibition covers not a long distance, but a long span of time. Ransohoff’s photographs were taken during a period of urban decline and shifting neighborhood demographics. His images reveal families, children, storefronts, stoops, and streetscapes that speak to both the resilience and the challenges of the community at that time. In the present day, University of Cincinnati public history undergraduate students revisit Ransohoff’s sites, photographing the same locations from his archive.

By taking a “second look” at these sites, students find a new understanding of Cincinnati’s past and present. Their images reveal what has endured and what has changed, whether through restoration, abandonment, demolition, or new use. Viewed side by side, the paired photographs highlight the seeming permanence of brick and stone alongside the inevitability of change in architecture, culture, and community life. Student-generated text helps fill in the historical narrative. Through these images, curator Anne Delano Steinert and her students remind audiences that cities are living archives. What remains, what disappears, and what emerges all tell stories about the people whose lives and legacies continue to shape Cincinnati across generations.

Artists: Austin Carr, Avery Carter, Connor Herman, Daniel Ransohoff, Matt Enneking

With Anne Delano Steinert (curator)

Cost: Free to the Public

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Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Stacy Kranitz premieres her newest body of work, Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down. Featuring more than 75 photographs drawn from historical archives and Kranitz’s own images, the exhibition demonstrates how Appalachia has been seen and misseen across generations. The result is a complex portrait of a region shaped by myth, exploitation, resilience, and the uneasy tension between representation and reality.

More than 60 years after President Lyndon B. Johnson launched the War on Poverty, Appalachia remains a place where poverty is both deeply entrenched and persistently misrepresented. The initiative was partly shaped by Harry M. Caudill’s 1963 book Night Comes to the Cumberlands, which exposed the exploitation of Appalachian land and labor by coal companies. While Caudill initially framed the “mountaineer” as a victim of industrial greed, he later adopted troubling eugenic ideas, claiming poverty was hereditary and advocating sterilization programs. This shift reveals how the mythology of the mountaineer has evolved, from self-reliant frontiersman to victim blamed for systemic hardship.

Photography has played a key role in shaping these narratives, from early portraits of homesteaders to propaganda, government documentation, and media coverage during the War on Poverty. Over the past decade, Kranitz has built close relationships within Appalachian communities. Her images challenge viewers to confront how photographs can both reveal and distort lived experience, urging a reconsideration of Appalachia and of photography’s power and limits in shaping cultural understanding.

Artists: Stacy Kranitz

With Heather Jones (curator)

Cost: Free to the Public

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The Long Lives We Carry brings together the work of American photojournalist Gordon Baer (1940–2019) and Slovak photographer Jano Rečo (b. 1948) in a poignant study of aging, care, and the fragile dignity of human life at its end. Baer, a longtime Cincinnati-based photographer, was known for his sensitive documentation of those often overlooked by society. His deeply personal photographs of his dying Aunt Beck and his images from nursing homes in Ohio bear witness to lives frequently hidden from public view. These works capture fleeting gestures of tenderness alongside the stark realities of institutional neglect.

In the early 1980s, Rečo produced Seniors Home as part of a larger photographic cycle examining social welfare institutions in Bohemia. Created through close personal contact with residents, the series moves beyond bureaucratic documentation to expose the emotional complexities of aging in institutional care: community and loneliness, resilience and resignation.

Presented together, Baer and Rečo’s photographs reveal striking parallels across national and political contexts in how societies see, support, and sequester the elderly. Their images invite viewers to consider aging as a universal human condition—one shaped by systems of care, yet profoundly intimate. By placing these works in dialogue, The Long Lives We Carry asks audiences to look closely at lives often pushed to the margins.

Artists: Gordon Baer, Jano Rečo

With Saad Ghosn (curator)

Cost: Free to the Public

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A juried exhibition, The Sweep of Time, Beyond the Horizon emphasizes photography’s unique ability to hold two things at once: the instant and what endures beyond it. The horizon, central to the exhibition, functions as both a literal subject and a symbolic threshold—an opening into broader contexts of time, memory, and continuity. In this way, distance and perspective become the focus while also welcoming works that consider temporal scale and duration, creating a space where history and the future coexist. Some works attend to memory and generational connection, while others imagine what lies ahead. Together, they place the present moment within a wider trajectory.

The Sweep of Time, Beyond the Horizon offers a way of seeing that resists the urgency of the immediate. By presenting diverse lens-based works that embody continuity and expanded vision, the exhibition fosters reflection, patience, and a deeper sense of orientation within time.

Artists: Birgit Rudel, Carol Henry, Chuck Miller, Crystal Tursich, Dylan Bannister, Margaret Day, Margo Geddes, Patricia Howard, PJ Sturdevant, Werner Sun

Cost: Free to the Public

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What are the costs and consequences of allegiance? This We Believe explores the power and evolution of belief systems—religious, political, economic—and how adherence to and rejection of these ideologies has influenced our current global culture of divisiveness and polarization. From imagery of disillusionment and protest, to revelations of historical complexity and visions of transcending binary definitions of identity, the artworks featured question and critique unalloyed allegiance to creed or country.

Artists: Carlos Aires, David Magnusson, Dread Scott, Hank Willis Thomas, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Lindsay McCrum, Mitch Epstein, Omar Victor Diop, Zhang Dali

Cost: Free to the Public

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Witness to the Journey: Matt Herron and the Deep South, 1965 presents a compelling selection of 28 black-and-white photographs by renowned civil rights photographer Matt Herron. This exhibition documents the historic Selma to Montgomery March for Voting Rights, a pivotal moment in American history that directly led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Herron’s images capture the spirit, struggle, and triumph of the marchers—ordinary citizens, activists, and leaders—who walked 54 miles over five days to demand justice. The photographs reveal the diversity of participants, the role of music and federal protection, and the emotional highs and lows of the journey. The exhibition concludes with images reflecting the immediate impact of the Voting Rights Act and the ongoing fight for voter equity. By revisiting these images in 2026, America’s 250th anniversary, the exhibition encourages reflection on how far we’ve come and how far we still must go.

Presented in the Freedom Center’s Skirball Gallery, the exhibition will be accompanied by Herron’s personal effects, including his leather camera bag and hip carrier, contextualizing the photographs and the broader Civil Rights Movement. Selected images are sourced from an exhibition originally curated by Herron and now part of the Freedom Center’s museum collection, offering a powerful lens into the moral arc of history and the enduring pursuit of justice.

Artists: Matt Herron

Cost: Free to Pass Holders in October, venue members, and children 2 and under. General admission: $19.50 adults; $17.50 seniors; $16.50 children 3–17.

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