In New York, under the stage name Patti Astor, she became a club habitué and Queen of the Downtown Screen. She was a star of some of the underground No Wave films of the late 1970s/early 1980s that helped spark New York’s grungy and wildly creative East Village arts scene.  

Patti Smith's Contemporary Arts Center exhibition and concert, The Coral Sea, opens May 18 — also the date of her Memorial Hall performance.  It is a remembrance of and tribute to her close c  

Both Smith and Mapplethorpe found their place, of course, and became famous — she as a quintessential alternative-rocker and he as one of the country’s top fine-art photographers.   

One national arts trend which Cincinnati lags behind is the rediscovery of silent movies — especially the public screening of them to live musical accompaniment.   “I would say there’s  

One national arts trend which Cincinnati lags behind is the rediscovery of silent movies — especially the public screening of them to live musical accompaniment.
  

In 2009, after Cincinnati Magazine ran a story about a virtually unknown but magnificent early Modernist home in Woodlawn that was endangered, I drove over to see it. Or, rather, I tried.
  

The huge stone quarries that hide in the landscapes of Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky are strange things, monsters of ruggedly carved-out negative space that — when abandoned and filled with water — attract illicit swimmers and divers.
  

In advance of last year’s FotoFocus festival, probably the largest photography-related event in Cincinnati’s history, I asked James Crump — the festival’s co-chair and then chief curator/curator-at-large at Cincinnati Art Museum — if there wasn’t an unspoken spirit hovering over the proceedings: Robert Mapplethorpe.  

The story of Alejandro Escovedo’s rise from years of toiling in an Austin, Texas, Punk-tinged Roots Rock band, True Believers, to become (at age 62) one of Americana’s most recognized and exciting  

Like former bandmate Alejandro Escovedo, Jon Dee Graham has also developed another side, another strength, in the eight solo albums he’s been releasing since 1997’s Escape From Monster Island. He’s a forcefully evocative singer/songwriter whose deeply gruff, soulful voice is reminiscent of Tom Waits.