YES is one of several recent additions to Over-the-Rhine’s gallery district along Main Street, which is being invigorated with a new wave of DIY energy. Along with the print studio and store Static Age, the design collection Losantiville, the clay studio MUD on Main and the Final Friday PopShops — one-night-only bazaars that show up in empty properties — Main Street’s galleries are becoming more geared towards affordable, accessible art and design.  

I moved to Cincinnati a little over eight years ago. Now I’m moving to Chicago to return to academia and to give myself a much-needed span of time to turn inward and concentrate on improving my art and my writing.  

Emily Hanako Momohara opens a new exhibition Islands, this Friday at PAC Gallery in East Walnut Hills. These works are based in the artist’s recent trip to Okinawa, Japan, to research her family history, where she discovered that many of the stories passed among her relatives were shaped and embellished by the teller. They aren’t fantasies, per say, as much as fragmented, alternative readings.  

As early as 1880, drag queens performing in Over-the-Rhine dance halls are mentioned in The Cincinnati Enquirer. It’s auspicious, then, that The Cabaret, a drag performance venue opened earlier this year, revives that OTR history by setting up shop in the same building as Below Zero Lounge on Walnut Street.  

The concept of "art as activism" is not a new one, but because the effects of art on society can be difficult to quantify, the conversation can sometimes be slippery and elusive. Enter Saad Ghosn, a local artist and activist who exhibits, curates and writes about art in ways that clearly examines the themes of peace and social justice.  

Thunder-Sky Inc.'s current exhibition Hard Knocks: Art Without Art School features the work of 30 artists who, as the gallery explains, "could not go, did not go, chose not to go to, and/or dropped out of art school." Nearly 120 works are presented densely in a salon style installation that overwhelms the mind.  

This Friday the Art Academy of Cincinnati opens In Context, an exhibition of work by the school's four graduating artists in the Master of Arts in Art Education program. Adrian Vance Hawk, Jonathan Juravich, Lisa Kelley-Gerton and Kate Ungrund are art teachers by day, and their time in this graduate program has allowed them to develop their own work as contributors to contemporary art culture.  

The Contemporary Arts Center has been hosting One Night: One Craft, a wildly popular crafts night on Monday nights all summer long. Each week, local artisans do demonstrations of crafts projects and those in attendance can try their hands at it. Some weeks, the space has been at capacity. Next Monday the CAC welcomes Joel Armor and Joe Civitello, who will be talking about traditional and non-traditional woodworking techniques.  

John Coplans: Photographs 1984-2000, on view at the West End’s Carl Solway Gallery through Aug. 13, offers viewers the opportunity to revisit photographs that set a new standard for the use of one’s body in making art and also allows us to consider Coplans’ work in the context of his multifarious careers. The black-and-white photographs on view cover a span of nearly two decades until the artist’s death in 2003.  

For a sexy summer day trip, get over to Columbus to see the Wexner Center for the Arts’s trio of erotically charged exhibitions before they come down on July 31. One of the three exhibits, Double Sexus, brings together work by Louise Bourgeois and Hans Bellmer. Sculptures, drawings and prints from their respective careers have been curated into sections based on themes taken from such literary figures as Henry Miller and Georges Bataille.