If you are an orderly person, your first stop on descending the stairs to see the current installations in the Weston Art Gallery’s lower rooms will be the tiny viewing area just to the right of the staircase. There, Clara Crockett’s “Theatre Lilliputiens,” five brief films with a total running time of 20 minutes, prepare us for the world of her small, meticulous drawings.  

During the installation of her new show I surrender, dear at downtown’s Contemporary Arts Center, Moscow-born/New York-based artist Dasha Shishkin and I discussed a range of issues, including the possibility that she might be a witch.   

Peter Voshefski lived in Cincinnati before moving west to earn a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of New Mexico, and he returns to present one of the most intriguing and appealing exhibitions I've seen in Cincinnati lately. Aisle Gallery has been on a long winning streak of great one- and two-person exhibitions, and 'Dreams and Trees' continues it.   

“It’s a paradox — the beauty is so tragic,” Anna VanMatre says of the theme behind her latest series of graphite paintings, DeNatural Disaster.  

There are few exhibition spaces in Cincinnati as dependable and consistent in quality as Aisle Gallery. Its current exhibition, Almost Certain, features two series of abstract paintings by Jeffrey Cortland Jones and Paige Williams. Remarkably, this is the seventh time these two painters have shown together.   

Donald Sultan is considered a painter's painter. That means that, while not widely familiar to the general public, other artists and museums respect him for the influential originality of his vision and technique. The Contemporary Arts Center has just organized and opened a modestly sized show, 'The First Decade,' bringing together key paintings of Sultan's from the mid-1970s through the early 1980s. The exhibit, curated by Raphaela Platow, will be on display through May 17.  

Here are the 10 art shows that left the most impact on me in 2008, presented in no particular order and with regrets to the other fine exhibitions that just didn’t quite make this admittedly subjective list.