Last year, the Taft Museum of Art embarked on a new series of exhibitions called Keystone Contemporary. The goal is that each exhibition would feature one local emerging artist who's been invited to respond (directly or abstractly) to the Taft's collection, the historical house, its interior décor or perhaps even other special exhibitions on view at the museum. Local artist Kristine Donnelly has installed the latest example.  

Kristine Donnelly is a local installation artist who works with printmaking and cut paper to create highly ornamental tableau from basic materials. She's the latest artist chosen by the Taft Museum of Art to participate in the Keystone Contemporary series.  

Rick Mallette’s wall drawings are the hyperactive cousins of the prehistoric cave paintings at Lascaux. They are bodily and sci-fi doodles crowded into whirring, bobbing visions across the walls of galleries. For SeeSawSeen at the Contemporary Arts Center’s UnMuseum, Mallette has pushed the work further, offering two grand works — one in invisible ink and the other painted with combinations of red and blue lines that jump out when viewed with 3-D glasses.  

Mark Harris has returned to painting for his new exhibition 'Morning Star' at Country Club gallery, opening this Friday with a reception from 7-9 pm. Harris has invented a sidelong relationship to these paintings (and a series of accompanying drawings) that are more conceptual project than romantic studio practice. Using Dick Fairfield's 1970 book 'Modern Utopian: Communes, U.S.A.' as source material for his series of large-scale works.  

News that a great artist has died always raises the stakes for me; the responsibility of creating moving art and important discussions surrounding it is more immense, because there is one less innovator sharing the weight. Thom Shaw — one of Cincinnati's best known and most admired contemporary artists — passed away on July 6, 2010, due to complications from diabetes.  

Museum Gallery/Gallery Museum's next exhibition, 'Non-Zero Sum,' features one of the collective’s own members, Reid Radcliffe, alongside Jeremy Flick, an artist who now lives in Maryland but studied at the University of Cincinnati. For several years, Flick has been working with the patterning found inside security envelopes, isolating these blue grids, plaids and checks to be seen in a lineage of pattern painting and other tropes in abstract painting’s history.  

Food and art have interesting commonalities in the way they are carefully prepared, the way they affect our senses and, perhaps most of all, the attention we pay to them when we find them strikingly beautiful. Because of the actions associated with cooking and eating, food lends itself to performance. This is just what the local performance art group Pones Inc. has done with its most recent work, Rub, Dredge, Fry (Repeat).  

Many in Cincinnati probably don't realize the number of multi-taskers in our corner of the art world that keep things interesting. One such local hero is Bill Ross, who opens 'Paradise,' a survey exhibition at 1305 Gallery on this Final Friday. In Ross' confectionary paintings, animals play out enigmatic or even twisted dramas. Often cute and cuddly, Ross' creatures seem capable of veering into the demented and dangerous.  

The breakaway reality show 'RuPaul's Drag Race' has garnered untold numbers of new fans of drag, and this summer Leapin Lizard has been the destination to see these beloved queens in person in their Freak Show Exploded series. This weekend the sweetest, funniest and arguably most original of all of our favorite Drag Race stars, Pandora Boxx, takes the spotlight along with the finest local drag entertainers.  

When not showing the late Raymond Thunder-Sky's "outsider art" oeuvre, the gallery named for him aims to promote expressive work in the same spirit, regardless of the artist's background: self-taught, art-school graduates, with or without diagnosed disabilities. The current show features Antonio Adams and Tony Dotson, neither of whom have any formal art training.