FotoFocus Curated Exhibitions

September 9, 2022 – January 15, 2023

On the Line addresses a range of topics, spanning performance and the body, climate change, power, colonialism and identity, heritage, and territory. The works portray complex and contested relationships humans have with notions of environment, wilderness, nature, and place.

September 30, 2022 – February 12, 2023

Images on which to build, 1970s–1990s reveals how influential LGBTQ+ image cultures ignited processes of learning. The exhibition presents over a dozen artists and archivist collectives who documented and circulated work from alternative schools, demonstrations, dance clubs, slideshows, correspondences, and community-based archive projects of the late 20th century.

September 30, 2022 – September 24, 2023

For their first solo exhibition in the Midwest, New York-based artist Baseera Khan brings together new and recent collages, sculptures, and video, alongside a major sculptural commission that responds to the architecture of the museum and the artist’s identity.

October 1, 2022 – December 9, 2022

Ian Strange: Disturbed Home is a survey of the artist’s architectural interventions, including photographic and filmic interpretations of those structural works. 

October 1, 2022 – December 9, 2022

This site-specific installation offers further dimension to Ian Strange’s longstanding engagement with ideas of home and domestic disturbance. 

September 30, 2022 – March 6, 2023

The exhibition considers the historic and contemporary role of visual arts in remembering legacies of slavery, its aftermath, and artists’ constant involvement with efforts to explore the possibilities of freedom.

September 29, 2022 – October 31, 2022

Crossing Neptune features archival works on the theme of water from the personal collection of artist Tony Oursler, exploring aquatic belief systems running from the most common to outlandishly bizarre.

September 29, 2022 – October 31, 2022

In this site-specific work, the auto is immobilized and repeatedly disembodied to form a large movie screen made from salvaged windshields. 

October 1, 2022 – January 28, 2023

The Carnegie brings together five curators working inside and outside of the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky region to select and develop projects based on linking artists across different geographies. 

September 30, 2022 – January 15, 2023

Artists John Edmonds, David Hartt, and poet Jason Allen-Paisant weave a site-specific dialogue on institutions and their collections, ways of knowing and telling stories, and ideas about nature and naturalness.

October 1, 2022 – January 15, 2023

On a farm in Loveland, Ohio, Nancy Ford Cones (1869–1962) created photographs that earned her a national reputation during a time when female artists struggled for recognition. Despite the praise they received during her lifetime, Cones’ works have been largely forgotten. This exhibition resurrects the gifted artist’s career.

October 14, 2022 – October 16, 2022

FotoFocus and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra present Sun Dogs. Named after an atmospheric optical phenomenon, the program features pairs of composers and filmmakers in collaboration, each offering a unique perspective of the natural world through short-format films fused with new music performed by the CSO.

August 26, 2022 – June 4, 2023

As civil strife, economic insecurity, and environmental crises proliferate, artists from across the globe explore the search for refuge—how, why, and where people need, seek, and create shelter.

September 30, 2022 – October 30, 2022

Hometown Heroes is a public art display featuring important Cincinnatians. J. Miles Wolf creates collages combining historic and contemporary photographs featuring significant locations to local heroes.

September 16, 2022 – November 6, 2022

Michael Coppage: American+ features new and ongoing lens-based projects exploring the negative archetypes and stark racial disparities still operating in the language and psychology of contemporary American culture.

September 28, 2022 – October 29, 2022

ALL FALLS DOWN presents photographs by Cincinnati artist William Howes and Lebanese artist Gregory Buchackjian, documenting the destructive effacement of the architectural heritage of their respective cities.

September 28, 2022 – October 29, 2022

The photographs by Raul Cañibano capture the people of Cuba in Havana and in the surrounding countryside.

October 7, 2022 – December 3, 2022

October 8, 2022 – October 16, 2022

Sifting through the estate of Norman Kattelman reveals his world, his history, and unpacks his legacy as a resident of Millionaires Row in Cincinnati, OH.

September 29, 2022 – October 31, 2022

The Art Academy of Cincinnati commissioned Robin Bell to create a site-specific projection installation on the Academy’s building at 1212 Jackson Street in Over-the-Rhine.

October 1, 2022 – December 9, 2022

This site-specific installation offers further dimension to Ian Strange’s longstanding engagement with ideas of home and domestic disturbance. 

September 30, 2022 – October 28, 2022

An installation by the women’s collective PhotograpHERS reimagines the natural environment through collage and time-based accumulation, incorporating botanical images submitted by student artists and the community.

September 30, 2022 – October 28, 2022

The artists Migiwa Orimo, Sayler/Morris, and Dana Stirling challenge the way we construct narratives around the changing societal and personal relationships between humans and nature.

October 1, 2022 – December 9, 2022

Ian Strange: Disturbed Home is a survey of the artist’s architectural interventions, including photographic and filmic interpretations of those structural works. 

September 9, 2022 – November 4, 2022

This group exhibition of photographs expresses artistic perceptions of the impact attributed to the 2020 pandemic.

September 5, 2022 – December 30, 2022

The Perspectives is a photo-based, mixed-media mural celebrating Black iconography, culture, and joy. This public artwork is informed by photographic records from Walnut Hills residents.

October 17, 2022 – December 17, 2022

Young artists reflect on their individual stories during a specific period of time, culminating in a multimedia display.

October 7, 2022 – October 21, 2022

Ryan Hill: A Thousand Words… features images documenting land development sites, art and music festivals, and consumerism with contextual information that gives greater meaning to the imagery.

October 8, 2022 – November 26, 2022

Diego Leclery investigates notions of the avant-garde by positioning his practice into an uncategorizable discipline. His work at BasketShop documents his year-long attempt to exhaust every known art practice.

September 30, 2022 – October 30, 2022

Faces of the Deep is an exhibition of underwater photographs taken by the husband-and-wife team, John and Martha Lange.

September 29, 2022 – October 31, 2022

In this site-specific work, the auto is immobilized and repeatedly disembodied to form a large movie screen made from salvaged windshields. 

October 1, 2022 – January 28, 2023

The Carnegie brings together five curators working inside and outside of the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky region to select and develop projects based on linking artists across different geographies. 

October 1, 2022 – December 31, 2022

City Under Exposure highlights photographs from the Cincinnati Public Library’s collection documenting natural disasters. These records are illuminated through unique soundtracks, creating experiences that bring extraordinary moments into the personal.

September 30, 2022 – January 15, 2023

Artists John Edmonds, David Hartt, and poet Jason Allen-Paisant weave a site-specific dialogue on institutions and their collections, ways of knowing and telling stories, and ideas about nature and naturalness.

October 1, 2022 – October 31, 2022

Cincinnati Museum Center shares historic newsreels and media from the Cincinnati History Library & Archives. Clips include footage from the 1930s onward,  shown in the recently restored Newsreel Theater.

September 29, 2022 – October 30, 2022

Critical Connection explores the many layers of nature’s diversity and the need to protect the system that holds those layers together.

October 27, 2022 – January 29, 2023

J. Miles Wolf trains his lens on buildings and streetscapes documenting the contributions of Jewish Cincinnatians in all walks of life in 33 photographs that combine historical and contemporary perspectives.

October 14, 2022 – October 16, 2022

FotoFocus and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra present Sun Dogs. Named after an atmospheric optical phenomenon, the program features pairs of composers and filmmakers in collaboration, each offering a unique perspective of the natural world through short-format films fused with new music performed by the CSO.

September 30, 2022 – November 12, 2022

It Is What lt Is (​​Subject to Change) is an exhibition of five artists’ videos. Participating artists are Diana Duncan Holmes, Russel Johnson, Mark Patsfall, Charles Woodman and Alice Pixley Young.

September 30, 2022 – October 21, 2022

CCAC presents Still New York, a body of work by internationally-exhibited artist Logan Hicks that investigates the visual impact of pandemic lockdowns on New York City.

September 15, 2022 – October 28, 2022

Two pioneering moments, the Voyager Golden Record and Powers of Ten, serve as the nexus for a collection of works that take on the challenge of recording our world.

June 5, 2022 – February 19, 2023

Columbus Museum of Art is pleased to announce the exhibition I Hear America Singing: Contemporary Photography from America on view at the Pizzuti Collection.

September 30, 2022 – September 24, 2023

For their first solo exhibition in the Midwest, New York-based artist Baseera Khan brings together new and recent collages, sculptures, and video, alongside a major sculptural commission that responds to the architecture of the museum and the artist’s identity.

September 30, 2022 – February 12, 2023

Images on which to build, 1970s–1990s reveals how influential LGBTQ+ image cultures ignited processes of learning. The exhibition presents over a dozen artists and archivist collectives who documented and circulated work from alternative schools, demonstrations, dance clubs, slideshows, correspondences, and community-based archive projects of the late 20th century.

September 9, 2022 – January 15, 2023

On the Line addresses a range of topics, spanning performance and the body, climate change, power, colonialism and identity, heritage, and territory. The works portray complex and contested relationships humans have with notions of environment, wilderness, nature, and place.

September 30, 2022 – February 11, 2023

The exhibition offers poignant meditations on the city of Columbus, Ohio, highlighting not only its histories of redlining, but its communities that continue to thrive, and, most importantly, demonstrate love.

September 11, 2022 – November 20, 2022

An exhibition of works by photojournalist Paul Briol documenting the built and natural environment during the early 20th century that continues to inform Cincinnati’s sense of place, identity, and community.

September 1, 2022 – October 31, 2022

New Tides highlights works concerned with the ebb and flow of social, political, and artistic trends and how these tropes and themes can return with differing focus and intensity.

October 15, 2022 – January 15, 2023

This touring exhibition, organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, brings together highlights from David Levinthal’s fascinating photographs of toys as a way to examine American stories.

October 2, 2022 – October 16, 2022

Photographers and conservationists Cristina Mittermeier and Paul Nicklen use captivating imagery to start a conversation about ecosystems and connections between humans and nature as they travel around the globe.

October 2, 2022 – November 1, 2022

The World Around Them presents over 75 photographs from professional and amateur photographers capturing the world around them.

October 1, 2022 – October 31, 2022

This exhibition presents lens-based artworks by Mohammed Kazem (Dubai) and Cristiana de Marchi (Dubai/Beirut), and features FLAG studio artists in response to artworks exhibited by Kazem and de Marchi.

October 8, 2022 – November 4, 2022

Acknowledge Reveal Disclose, curated by Michael Wilson, features portrait photographs by a highly energized community of picture-makers from across the region. 

October 8, 2022 – January 6, 2023

Our planet is a curious place. A group of contemporary photographers respond with distinctive, if not idiosyncratic, landscape and nature photographs that surprise and delight the viewer.

October 8, 2022 – January 6, 2023

Five photographers make creative choices that affect and illuminate their subjects, shedding light on who we are and how we see humanity.

October 9, 2022 – November 13, 2022

This exhibition consists of five local photographers who volunteer their time and talent to the Flashes of Hope program by photographing children who are battling cancer and related illnesses.

October 6, 2022 – November 7, 2022

A two-part exhibition of historic prints of extreme weather conditions and a public art exhibition on buildings in Northside, Clifton, and Camp Washington.

October 14, 2022 – October 16, 2022

The Hughes Project 2.0 is a collaboration between Hughes STEM High School students and UC-CCM Theatre Design & Production students to project artwork onto the façade of the historic Hughes High School building.

September 30, 2022 – December 31, 2022

Alternative selections from submissions to PhotOH: Photographers in the Heartland at Miami University Art Museum, surveying contemporary Ohio photography, collected for Iris by the exhibition’s co-curator William Messer.

September 24, 2022 – November 12, 2022

Examining the effects of consumption, collection, and what is discarded, What’s Left Behind is a juried group show that reflects on the record humans are leaving for future generations.

September 30, 2022 – November 19, 2022

Visions of Nature across Time and Place features nature photographs spanning more than a century by photographers Curtis Gates Lloyd, Rick Conner, and TJ Vissing.

September 30, 2022 – October 28, 2022

Inspired by an infamous Mark Twain quote about Cincinnati, Caroline Bell and Elisa Fay explore the regional evolution of both climate and culture from a Midwestern perspective.

September 30, 2022 – October 28, 2022

The Overstory explores the concept of forests, woodlands, and wood as documented through photography and other lens-based approaches to visual art.

October 8, 2022 – October 23, 2022

Yonder encourages people to reconsider what defines their understanding of their visible surroundings and to creatively imagine what lies beyond that awareness of the world.

September 29, 2022 – October 31, 2022

Using images and objects loaned from the Cincinnati Museum Center, the exhibition explores the Cincinnati-based work, life, and experience of James Presley Ball.

August 23, 2022 – December 10, 2022

PhotOH is co-curated by Miami University Art Museum Curator of Exhibitions Jason E. Shaiman and Cincinnati-based independent curator William Messer. This invitational exhibition surveys the work of photographers throughout Ohio.

August 23, 2022 – December 10, 2022

In 1964, Steve Schapiro captured the historic Freedom Summer Project in Oxford, OH and in Mississippi. Highlighted are 17 of these photographs from the Miami University Art Museum’s permanent collection.

September 29, 2022 – October 31, 2022

Crossing Neptune features archival works on the theme of water from the personal collection of artist Tony Oursler, exploring aquatic belief systems running from the most common to outlandishly bizarre.

October 6, 2022 – November 12, 2022

On Top of the World features the unique views of Issac Wright from his tallest climbs, 900 feet and above.

September 26, 2022 – October 28, 2022

Ruth Adams and Deborah Orloff create a dialogue about human society through the artists’ overlapping interests in how we remember the past.

September 26, 2022 – October 28, 2022

The Mount Community was posed with the question, “How do we record our lives?” Then tasked with the challenge of creating a “Snapshot” to say “Look—I’m here!”

September 30, 2022 – March 6, 2023

The exhibition considers the historic and contemporary role of visual arts in remembering legacies of slavery, its aftermath, and artists’ constant involvement with efforts to explore the possibilities of freedom.

September 29, 2022 – November 4, 2022

This is Kentucky: Past, Present, Future is a collection of photographic work exploring the Commonwealth of Kentucky from various perspectives, time-periods, and voices.

October 8, 2022 – November 5, 2022

Strangers in a Strange Land represents images of the lifelong work of visionary artists from Alabama to Washington State, between 2010 and 2021. Together, these eccentrics represent their unique environs.

September 29, 2022 – March 31, 2023

From the cutting room floor to the handheld camcorder enthusiast, Billy Colbert finds ways to obtain never-before-published, moving portraits of Black Americans, which he then weaves together to create compelling narratives.

September 27, 2022 – March 31, 2023

Utilizing original photography printed on vinyl and paired with human-scale sculptural forms, Susan Ferrari Rowley’s installations shed light on our world’s potential downward spiral, specifically related to natural environments.

September 29, 2022 – October 7, 2022

What isn’t transformed, transfers. Explore the effects of disturbances. Humanity mirrors nature through succession, resiliency, and adaptation. We search for what nature has to teach about hope in this film.

October 1, 2022 – November 5, 2022

The photographs included in Patrick Wack: DUST document the plight of the Uyghur people over the course of his four-year tour of the Xinjiang province in China.

October 1, 2022 – November 5, 2022

The photographs of A Woman Named Vera examine the many aspects of Tiffany Sutton’s mother.

October 8, 2022 – November 12, 2022

PORTALS is a photo and light-based installation that seeks to reorient one’s experience of the world. Both sublime and mundane imagery collide in a color-changing environment.

October 3, 2022 – November 12, 2022

During the COVID-19 pandemic, social media is the conduit for Darren Lee Miller and Ivette Spradlin to connect with their subjects, reaching out to arrange photographic portrait sessions.

August 29, 2022 – October 30, 2022

FORWARD! is a reverse time capsule full of postcards from the edge of Tomorrowland!

October 7, 2022 – December 1, 2022

Critical Distance is a juried exhibition of the Society for Photographic Education, an international, member-based nonprofit that is a leading forum for fostering understanding of photography in all its forms.

September 30, 2022 – November 1, 2022

Recording Cincinnati World features the photography of Cincinnati-area photographer, Alice Cusson (1906–1971). Cusson’s images present an eerie Cincinnati of the past captured in extraordinary, yet everyday, images.

October 7, 2022 – October 30, 2022

The ‘time-stamp’ photos in Mature capture moments preceding the transformation of the Stair House.

September 24, 2022 – November 5, 2022

Mysteries and Magic highlights the photographic work of Carol Golemboski, whose haunting imagery of old objects blends drawing and photography in ambiguous and provocative ways.

October 8, 2022 – October 29, 2022

Bodies of Sand, Desert Rhythms explores the play of light, shape, and movement while providing the viewer a beautiful sense of warmth, isolation, solitude, and quiet drama.

October 1, 2022 – January 15, 2023

On a farm in Loveland, Ohio, Nancy Ford Cones (1869–1962) created photographs that earned her a national reputation during a time when female artists struggled for recognition. Despite the praise they received during her lifetime, Cones’ works have been largely forgotten. This exhibition resurrects the gifted artist’s career.

September 16, 2022 – December 24, 2022

Amy Powell presents hundreds of images she has gathered from Instagram, all mapped within the Dayton area and chosen because of their composition, absurdity, poignancy, and visually compelling qualities.

September 16, 2022 – December 24, 2022

James Nares’ mesmerizing sixty-one-minute video, filmed in New York in 2011 as a love letter to Nares’ adoptive home, Street slows the clamor of the city to hypnotic effect.

September 16, 2022 – December 24, 2022

Teju Cole’s photographs and writings are culled from his seemingly ceaseless travels around the globe. They counter our sense of the vastness of the world with intimacy and quiet wonder.

September 2, 2022 – October 29, 2022

Eyewitness seeks to explore the difficult past as well as the transition to a hopeful future for Dayton and the Miami Valley.

October 6, 2022 – October 27, 2022

This film series provides factual, scientific and practical information about hurricanes, explores their metaphorical associations and artistic/poetic representations, and evokes what it is like to experience them sensorially.

September 24, 2022 – December 3, 2022

The dramatic photographs of glaciers included in Glacial Melt before Our Very Eyes were taken by Tom Lowell, Eric Hatch, Tom Pope, and Fred Haaser.

September 12, 2022 – October 21, 2022

ImageOhio is a juried exhibition of lens-based art including photography, new media, film and video, celebrating its 22nd year. Artists’ work incorporates the theme of a changing world.

October 8, 2022 – November 18, 2022

The Maidens’ year-long Summit Hotel residency centers on the idea of the hotel as a romantic site. Through photography and immersive media, the Maidens fantasize about the rivers nearby.

October 13, 2022 – November 3, 2022

The Homeplace introduces viewers to the African American hamlets in Kentucky’s Inner Bluegrass Region.

September 19, 2022 – December 15, 2022

Illuminated Landscapes includes new works of photo-based, illuminated sculpture and photography that explores our shifting world and loss of natural habitat.

October 6, 2022 – November 18, 2022

The photo-based, multimedia works in Pacific Concrete interrogate Guåhan (Guam) as a geo-political location while celebrating Pacific Islander culture and the artist’s role as the family archivist.

September 29, 2022 – October 25, 2022

Family. Matter. brings together several disparate but connected bodies of photographic work by artist Beth Chucker in order to question and celebrate motherhood, childhood, and states in between.

October 7, 2022 – November 23, 2022

Makateewa Dreamscape is an expansive exhibition of diverse artists considering historic, present, and future possibilities of our impact on the world, specifically through the lens of the Mill Creek Basin.

September 30, 2022 – November 12, 2022

Guennadi and Sasha Maslov illuminate the prevailing uncertainty of individual lives, their Ukraine, our world, past history, and future expectations

September 30, 2022 – November 12, 2022

Tina Gutierrez extrapolates the photographic record discovered at 1666 Bruce Ave: a disruption of content and linear time furthered by Larry Brown’s narrative about what is seen and unseen, found and unfound.

September 24, 2022 – November 5, 2022

Photography and Tenderness explores how photographers use tenderness as a radical tool to confront the racist and colonial gaze of photography.

September 16, 2022 – December 30, 2022

This major exhibition of Carlos Motta’s multimedia work explores issues of radical otherness, colonialism, democracy, LGBTQIA+ subjectivity, and activism alongside the premiere of a sound installation about renaming Columbus, Ohio.

October 27, 2022 – October 31, 2022

Unorthodocs is a film festival devoted to the possibilities of creative nonfiction filmmaking. Vanishing Acts is a diaristic visual interpretation of domestic light patterns by Ohio artist Suzanne Silver.

August 26, 2022 – November 1, 2022

The exhibition focuses on documentary photographs highlighting a variety of global subjects. The images provide a glimpse into remarkable people, places, and events from the late 1950s to the present.

August 26, 2022 – November 1, 2022

Light, shadow, and color produce the atmospheric characteristics of Jay Hoops’ Polaroid photographs. Her images create a unique and poetic vision of the physical and mental spaces she occupied.

October 1, 2022 – October 28, 2022

WE, the Women’s Caucus of SPE, have a collective story to share—a story about bringing life to our struggles, repairing damaged connections, and finding strength in solidarity and isolation.

October 1, 2022 – December 10, 2022

A Record Of Disuse is a collection of photographic prints featuring objects that were once functional. Worn, discarded, unrecognizable, the viewer may imagine what the original function could have been.

October 1, 2022 – October 30, 2022

Using photography to raise awareness for the effects of climate change on animal species, i.imagine teen photographers exhibit beautiful images of endangered species currently living at the Cincinnati Zoo.