East/Central Neighborhood Spotlight: Three Itineraries for Oct. 27

There are more than 90—count ’em, more than 90—FotoFocus projects at museums and galleries across the region this Biennial. We know, it can be daunting.

Sot here at The Lens, we want to help you navigate the shows scattered around town. Today, we’re talking about what’s happening in central and eastern parts of the Cincinnati region.

Without further ado, here are three itineraries to choose from on the East/Central Neighborhood Spotlight Day, Saturday, October 27. All you need is an open mind, some time and an appetite for art.

1. Embed in Methods

These days, we all have a powerful camera in our hands. Smart phones do the work for us, and often we just point and snap. But how about engaging with images made with more rigor?

Miller Gallery, the oldest art gallery in Cincinnati, has been representing contemporary and traditional artists from all over the world since 1960. That includes Tyler Shields, a Los Angeles-based artist who may be best known for his risqué photos of actress Lindsay Lohan, where she’s some sort of vampire, wielding a knife and covered in blood.

Shields is showing Past the Present, an exhibition using what is known as the dye transfer process “to produce an unparalleled colored image that is the absolute finest quality in color printing,” according to the show description. Shields attempts to create the largest dye transfer print ever made.

The Eastman Kodak Company stopped making the film required to make a dye transfer print in 1991. Within three years, the company did away with all dye transfer materials, so it’s something of a lost art. Even more impressive: Shields made the images with the exact machine used by famous fashion photographer Irving Penn, who popularized dye transfers.

See Shields’ work at Miller Gallery on Saturday, Oct. 27, noon to 5 p.m.

Before or after, take in another age-old form of photography at Xavier University. One of the two shows at Xavier’s A.B. Cohen Center is PJ Sturdevant: Remembering 1975–1980, which employs the Bromoil method.

“Bromoil was one of the favorite and beloved processes of the pictorialists and salon exhibition photographers during the first half of the 20th-century. No exhibition of the pictorialist photographic arts was without lovely, soft, and painterly Bromoil prints. These prints were handcrafted and produced using brushes and lithographic ink making each print unique,” according to the show description.

Xavier is holding a closing reception on Oct. 27 from 2–4 p.m.

2. Get Acquainted with Academe

Got a kid interested in art? Is it time for a college visit? Maybe. Or maybe it’s just for you,  interested in meeting the people behind the galleries at our local universities.

No matter the case, make your way to Xavier for the Sturdevant show, then stop in the second show Flyover Country.

This juried exhibition features local artists “illuminating America’s interior regions, an often-overlooked bastion of cultural, social, political, and economic vitality,” according to the show’s description.

It is curated by Local Eyes, a group of five Cincinnati photographers: Helen Adams, Jymi Bolden, Melvin Grier, Samantha Grier, and Ann Segal.

Want more? Head across town to University of Cincinnati Clermont where New World: Refugees and Immigrants Photograph the Experience of a New Life in America is on display.

A special viewing will be held on Neighborhood Day, Oct. 27, from 9–4 p.m.

3. Stay Central

Want to keep it fairly simple? Here are two shows in close proximity that promise to deliver.

First, swing by the Cincinnati Art Museum, which presents Life: Gillian Wearing—the region’s first major exhibition of the British conceptual artist, who is “best known for documenting strangers’ thoughts and confessions through film and photography, as well as re-presenting herself as other artists or family members through the use of masks and elaborate staging,” according to the show description.

Her work “is widely regarded as being among the most significant artistic statements of our time.” Wearing was elected as a lifetime member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2007, and her work is in the collections of London’s Tate Britain Museum and New York City’s Guggenheim Museum among others. Her statue of the suffragist Millicent Fawcett stands on London’s Parliament Square.

The Cincinnati Art Museum is open Saturday, Oct. 27 from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Before or after, swing through the Mary Ran Gallery in Hyde Park. Mary Ran Gallery represents some of Cincinnati’s most famous artists, including Charlie Harper and Frank Duvenek.

For the FotoFocus show Time, Space, and Place: Photographs from the Archives is just that: an “experience of diverse artists at different time periods and locations, sharing their personal viewpoints and providing glimpses into the past—preserved slices of life and time, flashes of memory.”

Mary Ran Gallery is open Saturdays from noon to 3 p.m.

For all of the east, central, and other FotoFocus offerings, visit the See Art page on the FotoFocus Biennial site.