Fringe vets Four Humors Theater is focused on laughter, and it seems likely that not only will their 'April Fools' search for and find the object of their desire, but so will the audience.   

When David and Barbara Day cast a clear eye on the city, what they see are things the rest of us can no longer find. In Vanishing Cincinnati, an exhibition of the Days’ handcrafted prints, present time dissolves. The #49 streetcar cruises through Eden Park, the art deco Greyhound bus terminal still stands at Fifth and Sycamore streets and steamboats are docked at the foot of Mount Adams. The prints, from the Days’ pen-and-ink drawings touched with color wash, are meticulously detailed and perhaps more telling than a photograph would be. Through June 6 at the Fifth Street Gallery.  

Get on the bus! Reserve a spot by Wednesday, May 27 on the Emery Legacy Tour Bus, which leaves May 30 to survey the architectural legacy of the Emery family in Cincinnati. Sponsored by Betts House and the Mercantile Library, the bus leaves Betts House at 9 a.m. for a tour of all things Emery. Downtown landmarks include Emery Theatre, Carew Tower/Netherland Plaza Hotel complex and the Mercantile Library Building.Attendance is limited to 35.  

Bigger is not necessarily better, and cooperation might ace competition among arts organizations in our changing culture, according to Diane E. Ragsdale of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, who spoke to an audience of art professionals and supporters at the University of Cincinnati May 6. She urged arts organizations to recognize that "we have a society in which the arts have become marginal" — big attendance numbers might not equal big impact.  

What happens when talented teenagers are teamed with design professionals and asked to interpret “green” concepts in billboard-like format? Plenty happens, as can be seen in The Outdoor Museum, or TOM, in Eden Park now through May 31.  

Manifest Gallery’s fifth annual Rites of Passage exhibition suggests that tomorrow’s artists are fascinated by people: their presence, their shadowy absence and even by their accouterments. For this lively and diverse gathering of soon-to-be or recent art-school graduates, the gallery presents 24 works by 14 artists from nine states, culled from over 700 works submitted from nearly 60 institutions. Tuesday-Saturday through May 15.  

It’s a big weekend at InkTank as the literary mainstay explores the American Dream with a 7:30 p.m. Final Friday reading by Larry Smith of Cleveland-based Bottom Dog Press, along with local Bottom Dog poets, and two simultaneous writers’ workshops from 10 a.m. to noon Saturday. Friday admission is $5 (free to InkTank members); workshop entry is $10 or $30 including InkTank membership.  

Manifest Gallery delights in throwing out an idea and seeing what it might reel in. The current show explores a concept that's as old as art but has been unfashionable in recent years: storytelling.  

Sign up now if you want a place in the Taft Museum’s Art in the Afternoon program of springtime visits with artists, which begins April 5.  

Manifest Gallery delights in throwing out an idea and seeing what it might reel in. The current show explores a concept that's as old as art but has been unfashionable in recent years: storytelling.