The Lens

This exhibition 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. Presenting the swell of ideas, explorations, and concerns of emerging photographers from within the Midwest, the exhibition demonstrates how they see, process, and contextualize the recurrence and reemergence of social, political, and artistic trends in their own practices that establishes a new World Record. This exhibition serves as an artistic interpretation of world events/records from the perspective of emerging artists from across the Midwest. New Tides Continue reading New Tides

For more than forty years, on a small riverside farm in Loveland, Ohio, Nancy Ford Cones (1869–1962) created photographs that earned her a national reputation during a time when female artists continued to struggle for recognition. Despite the praise they received during her lifetime, Cones’ imaginative and exquisitely crafted works were largely forgotten after her death. This exhibition resurrects the gifted artist’s career and contributions to the field of photography. Between about 1900 and 1939, Cones made thousands of photographs that featured country life, fantastical visions, and literary characters, employing the help of neighbors, friends, and family who posed in costume... Continue reading Craft and Camera: The Art of Nancy Ford Cones

Natural World is an expansive collaboration between visual artists David Hartt (Canadian, lives/works Philadelphia, b. 1967) and John Edmonds (American, lives/works New York, b. 1989), poet Jason Allen-Paisant, and curator Nathaniel M. Stein. In new photographs, textiles, sculptures, site-specific installations, and an artist-designed publication, the collaborators reflect on relationships between identity, institutions and their collections, ways of knowing and telling stories, and ideas about nature and naturalness. Their overlapping dialogues with the museum’s collections suggest that we learn—and can unlearn—what we perceive to be natural about the ideas and worlds we make and inhabit. Edmonds’s project, Father’s Jewels Continue reading Natural World

Imaging practices within LGBTQ+ movements of the late 20th century ignited processes of learning. Alternative schools, photography workshops, demonstrations, dance clubs, slideshows, and community-based archive projects produced and distributed images throughout North America, though the context of this photography’s collective emergence is often lost. Continue reading Images on which to build, 1970s–1990s

Baseera Khan shifts seamlessly between media to explore the interconnectedness of capital, politics, and the body. Their work in video, photography, sculpture, and performance creates spaces of reprieve, beauty, and safety, while also critiquing power structures and knowledge systems that systematically exclude or misrepresent marginalized populations. For their first solo exhibition in the Midwest, Khan brings together new and recent collages, sculptures, and video, alongside a major new commission that responds to architectural signifiers of power. Monumental in scale, Painful Arc (Shoulder-High) (2022), features a classical Islamic arch clad with custom pictographic paneling inscribed with loaded cultural... Continue reading Baseera Khan: Weight on History