friday february 22
Turning the Page had the opportunity to conduct an interview with Robert Olmstead, author of Coal Black Horse, Cincinnati’s 2008 On the Same Page novel for adults. We asked Mr. Olmstead some general questions, because we wouldn’t want to include spoilers for those of you who haven’t yet read this gripping tale of a young boy seeking his father across the landscape of the Civil War.
But once you have read Coal Black Horse, be sure to bring your own questions to the book-signing with Mr. Olmstead at the Main Library on Sunday, February 24, or to one of the other events at which he’ll appear. Meanwhile, check out the official Web site for the book.
TTP: Where did you get the inspiration for Coal Black Horse?
RO: In the 1980’s I was living in Pennsylvania not far from Gettysburg. Visiting the battlefield for the first time was a powerful experience. I didn’t know that much about the Civil War, just the usual stuff. So living there, walking that ground, it is my way that I wanted to know as much as I could. And of course everything I learned simply made me all the more curious to learn even more.
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tuesday august 07
The winners of the career-making Eisner Awards were announced the last weekend in July at Comic-Con 2007 in San Diego. These awards, named for legendary innovator Will Eisner, are determined by a panel of five judges; this year, they included librarian Robin Brenner, creator of the excellent reader’s advisory site No Flying No Tights.
In addition to the winners listed below, check out the nominee list for more great graphic reading.
Best Graphic Album – New: American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang. See my post about this first graphic novel nominated for a National Book Award.
Best Graphic Album – Reprint: Absolute DC: The New Frontier, by Darwyn Cooke. The Library has the original edition.
Best Reality-Based Work: Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. See Jennifer’s post.
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friday may 25
Cincinnati has a wonderful tradition of welcoming spring and summer with magnificent singing – first the May Festival, held during two May weekends, then the opera season with four productions in June and July.
This tradition has a very long history! The May Festival, established in 1873, is the oldest continuous choral festival in the Western hemisphere. Music Hall was built to house it. Cincinnati Opera, founded in 1920, is the second-oldest opera company in the United States.
The Library will join the celebration this year by unveiling treasures from the Cincinnati Opera Archives, which were entrusted to the Art & Music Department last year. The exhibit Highlights from the Cincinnati Opera Archives, on view in the department from June 13 through September 2, will showcase photographs of the many legendary stars who performed with the company, along with historic programs, posters, scrapbooks, and other documents.
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wednesday may 02
If you haven’t yet seen the Andrew Wyeth exhibition at the Cincinnati Art Museum, make time for a visit during this last week! The collection, loaned by the Marunuma Art Park, consists of 114 watercolors and drawings that lovingly capture the life and seaside Maine home of Christina and Alvaro Olson.
The independent Christina, who had an undiagnosed degenerative disease, refused all help but that of Alvaro, her brother. She preferred to crawl and drag her body through her increasingly dilapidated home and grounds rather than use a wheelchair.
Hence the posture and power of her reaching figure in Christina’s World (1948), Wyeth’s most famous work and one of the best-known works of American art. Christina’s World belongs to the Museum of Modern Art and does not travel because of the fragility of the tempera paint Wyeth used. But this exhibit features 10 studies, such as early compositional notations, detail studies, and the final watercolor sketch.
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tuesday march 27
No “Irish History Month” would be complete without a tribute to the Easter Rising, the 1916 rebellion against Great Britain that failed, but sparked the astonishing victory of the War of Independence (1919-1921). William Butler Yeats, a contemporary, was the first writer to make great literature of the story. His poem “Easter, 1916” commemorates the 16 rebel leaders whose executions roused the country to revolution:
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Among recent literary accounts are two superb novels by award-winning writers: Jamie O'Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys (2001) and Roddy Doyle’s A Star Called Henry (1999), which follows the story through the revolution and the subsequent civil war. The approaches of these native Dubliners couldn’t be less similar.
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thursday march 15
I’ll be after the wearin’ o’ the green in this space during March, which makes a fine Irish History Month. It’s not just the St. Patrick’s Day that’s in it; rain and spring air recall the Emerald Isle, so fertile that the Sassenach (English, or “Saxons”) kept it “the most distressful country that ever yet was seen.” Bad as it could be to have a thriving neighbor, it was even worse for Protestant England to have Catholic harbors next door from which other Papist countries could (and did) try to launch invasions.
“They are going, going, going, and we cannot bid them stay.” My ancestors came to America over the past 300 years of increasing crisis in the homeland. The most fortunate ones were 18th-century refugees from the anti-Catholic penal laws. The Meade family and Stephen Moylan (first president of The Friendly Sons of Saint Patrick) fought alongside George Washington. Thomas Riley, one of the “wild geese” who found work as mercenaries, arrived in Lafayette’s Irish regiment to whack the Sassenach over here.
At the other extreme were my Toohey great-great-grandparents, who disembarked dead in New Orleans from a "coffin ship" during the Famine of the mid-19th century. In True History of the Kelly Gang, a Man Booker Prize-winning novel about the Australian outlaw Ned Kelly, Peter Carey makes a beautiful immigrant song out of the lives of the luckless exiles, especially in a passage that intones the names of convict ships like Homer’s catalogue of ships in the Iliad.
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saturday march 10
“One hundred nations descend upon us. The armies of all Asia. Funneled into this narrow corridor, their numbers count for nothing. They shatter with each advance.”
300, the film based on Frank Miller’s graphic novel about the 480 B.C. Battle of Thermopylae (“hot gates”), opened this week here and across the country. Typically for Miller, whose talents and concepts are equally extreme, the movie has drawn praise for its power, but also diatribes against its historical and (perceived) political content, as well as Miller’s trademark violence.
The book is certainly a fine example of Miller’s potent, “artful” storytelling, and the story itself can’t be told often enough. Stationing themselves in a narrow mountain pass, 300 Spartans faced certain death to hold the gigantic army of the Persian Empire at bay, enabling the Greek city-states to marshal their forces and eventually rebuff the invaders.
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friday march 09
Trenton Lee Stewart will discuss The Mysterious Benedict Society and sign copies at 7 p.m. on Monday at Joseph-Beth Booksellers and at 4 p.m. on Tuesday at the Blue Manatee Children’s Bookstore.
That’s big news for two reasons. The Mysterious Benedict Society has earned rave reviews as a new ‘tween adventure series. The book’s success is no surprise, since Trent is an excellent writer – an Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate and instructor who has published many short stories and a fine adult novel, Flood Summer.
He’s also a former Library employee, now living in his native Arkansas, and we’re thrilled to welcome him back in triumph. If you have to lose a great colleague, the best way is to a book advance.
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wednesday march 07
When you wonder how in the world Peter O’Toole missed winning an Academy Award for Lawrence of Arabia and then discover he lost to Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird, the famous gaps in Oscar honors seem less shocking. But – Rocky beating Taxi Driver? Best Picture and Best Director? Actually, Martin Scorsese wasn’t even nominated for directing Taxi Driver.
Oscar history is so full of surprises that it was painful to watch the aged O’Toole sitting among mere mortals at this year’s ceremony, hoping to end a record series of losses: seven fruitless nominations at the start of the evening, eight by the end. Fortunately, he had received an honorary award in 2002.
I saw the nearly four-hour Lawrence of Arabia four times during its initial run in 1963, when I was 13. Before I try to explain myself, some cover from Roger Ebert: “I've noticed that when people remember Lawrence of Arabia, they don't talk about the details of the plot. They get a certain look in their eye, as if they are remembering the whole experience, and have never quite been able to put it into words.”
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tuesday february 20
Few stories of African American triumphs in the arts are as moving as that of Marian Anderson’s 1939 concert at the Lincoln Memorial. Anderson, considered by many the greatest contralto of her time, was barred from using Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution, who owned the facility. In the widespread protest that followed, Eleanor Roosevelt and other prominent members resigned from the DAR, and Anderson performed instead at the memorial on Easter Sunday. A crowd of 75,000 attended the historic event.
Anderson, who died in 1993, went on to other trailblazing achievements, notably her 1955 debut as the first African American member of the Metropolitan Opera. Her successor in breaking barriers was the magnificent soprano Leontyne Price, the first African American to achieve an international reputation in opera and one of the finest of divas by any measure.
This Little Light of Mine: The Stories of Marian Anderson and Leontyne Price celebrates these two artists through the talents of soprano
Adrienne Danrich. The Cincinnati Opera will present performances tonight at
Memorial Hall and tomorrow night in the Harriet Tubman Theater of the
National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, both at 7 p.m. Touring programs are also available through February 23.
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thursday february 08
The next lecture in the Library’s weekly Black History Month series will be “Cincinnati’s Black Community in the Pre-Civil War Era,” presented by Nikki Marie Taylor (Saturday, February 10, 2:00 in the Huenefeld Tower Room). Professor Taylor, who recently joined the University of Cincinnati Department of History, is the author of Frontiers of Freedom: Cincinnati's Black Community, 1802-1868.
Frontiers of Freedom is a study of the determination, resourcefulness, and resilience of African American settlers in this Mason-Dixon border town, as notorious for racism – often violent – as it was distinguished by the work of abolitionists and Underground Railroad conductors, including Harriet Beecher Stowe and Levi Coffin.
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tuesday february 06
The Sundance Film Festival closed in Park City, Utah, on January 28, releasing onto the market a great many fine independent movies, to judge by the number that won at least one award. The festival, produced by Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute, screens 125 dramatic and documentary feature films and more than 70 short films each year.
The Grand Jury Prize winners were the documentary Manda Balla (“Send a Bullet”), the first feature film directed by Jason Kohn, and the drama Padre Nuestro (“Our Father”), a Spanish-language film by first-time writer/director – and Fort Wright, Ky. native – Christopher Zalla.
Padre Nuestro follows the struggles of a Mexican boy to reach New York City and find the father he has never met, bearing as sole proof of his identity a locket and letter from his deceased mother. Manda Balla is a portrait of contemporary Brazil, focusing on its diversity, socioeconomic extremes, and a growing culture of violence and corruption.
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saturday january 06
This weekend is your last chance to see the Cincinnati Art Museum’s exhibition Waking Dreams – Experience the Enchantment, a gorgeous collection of major works by Pre-Raphaelite artists Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, John Everett Millais, and many others.
The drawings and numerous lush paintings abundantly demonstrate the mission of these 19th-century artists: to bring candid emotion and vitality back into English art, which they believed had become rigid and derivative. They wished to return to what they saw as the aesthetic values of the late Middle Ages and 14th century – before Raphael. The show also includes fine objects, from furniture to jewelry, as examples of the movement’s emphasis on creative craftsmanship of the highest quality.
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friday december 29
After the April 2003 fall of Baghdad to U.S. forces, the world was horrified to learn that the Iraq Museum had been looted. The museum housed an enormous collection of Mesopotamian artifacts, and therefore the most ancient creations of human civilization. I remember a friend crying over the presumed loss of the wide-eyed worshipper (votive) figures , the Golden Lyre of Ur, and the pair of exquisite Ram in the Thicket statues, fabricated of gold, silver, lapis lazuli, copper, shell, and red limestone.
These are among the oldest Mesopotamian treasures, the 5,000-year-old legacy of the Sumerians, who gave us writing. Among the writings feared missing were the Code of Hammurabi, the best preserved among early bodies of law, and the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the first surviving works of literature and still a great read.
A News Hour interview in July with reserves Marine Colonel Matthew Bogdanos, who had been charged with recovering the treasures, seemed to offer some hope, simply because Bogdanos made such a powerful impression. An assistant district attorney with a master’s degree in Classics, he himself seemed to exemplify civilization through a remarkable combination of idealism and resolution. Toward the end of the interview, Bogdanos was asked about his prospects for success. He replied with an almost laconic serenity:
“I'm a Marine. I expect to recover these items, no matter how long it takes…. To those who have taken the items, I urge them to listen to their conscience and their sense of duty in returning those items. And to those who need to be guided by emotions other than those, my message is simple: We will find you, no matter how long it takes and no matter where you are, we will find you, and we will recover this property.”
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thursday december 21
The wonderful documentary Ballets Russes is now at the Library, after a too-brief stint on the big screen here last summer. The film recounts the glories and “ballet battles” of the two troupes of dancers, originally all Russian émigrés, who toured the world for decades during the mid-twentieth century. These companies brought ballet to regions where it had never been seen before, particularly in the Americas and Australia.
A 2000 reunion of former Ballet Russe members in New Orleans gave Emmy Award-winning filmmakers Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine an opportunity to capture their accounts of this pioneering period in ballet history. The film combines these candid, affectionate, moving, and often humorous interviews with precious glimpses of legendary works and performers.
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tuesday december 12
Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese has made history as the first graphic novel nominated for a National Book Award. Although it didn’t win, the book joins Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus as a graphic novel honored by a major awards organization outside the comics industry.
Yang’s art is charming and beautifully full-colored by Lark Pien. The book’s multi-thread narrative relates three clever, absorbing tales: the adventures of the legendary Monkey King, the struggles of a Chinese-American boy to fit in at school, and the trials of a European-American boy shamed by his visiting Chinese cousin, who is a study in racist clichés.
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wednesday november 15
Seven paintings, including a Cézanne masterwork, were stolen from art collector Michael Bakwin’s home in 1978. Bakwin recovered the Cézanne, Bouilloire et Fruits, more than 20 years later, when a corporation offered it for sale and a suspicious Lloyd’s of London underwriter called the Art Loss Register. But soon after, Bakwin was forced to sell Bouilloire et Fruits – for more than $30 million – simply because he could never maintain enough security to prevent another theft. He eventually regained four more of his paintings, but two remain missing.
This story from Museum of the Missing: A History of Art Theft illustrates both the good and the bad news about the current situation. The good news is the Art Loss Register, a London-based organization that maintains a database of stolen works. Since its creation in 1991, the Art Loss Register has done much to compensate for light trade regulation, inadequate governmental resources, and low motivation to identify or report suspect provenance.
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wednesday october 25
The winners of the Ignatz Awards – named for Krazy Kat’s nemesis mouse in the George Herriman strip – were announced on October 14 at the 2006 Small Press Expo in Baltimore. The mission of the annual event is “the exhibition of independent comic books and the discovery of new creative talent.” A panel of five cartoonists sets the ballot, and the attendees at SPX decide the winners.
Some of the Ignatz honorees will be familiar as winners or nominees from the Eisner and Harvey Awards given earlier this year (see my post about the Harvey Awards). It’s been a very good year for Alex Robinson, Andy Runton, and especially Charles Burns, whose legendary Black Hole collected all three prizes for best collection/graphic album.
Outstanding Anthology or Collection
Black Hole by Charles Burns
Castle Waiting by Linda Medley
Drawn and Quarterly Showcase #3
The Push Man and Other Stories by Yoshihiro Tatsumi
Squirrel Mother by Megan Kelso
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tuesday october 17
Globalization is one of the most exciting developments in contemporary comics, with increasing numbers of foreign-language strips and books being translated into English, and not just from the huge Japanese manga market. Imported European comics are bringing us a wonderful diversity of art and storytelling.
Naturally, some of this diversity is due to different traditions, but a broader range of content and styles is also typical of Continental “bandes dessinées” (“drawn strips”). Since the 1960s, Franco-Belgian (French-language) cartoonists have led Europe in producing comics across all genres for all ages and classes. Thanks to a broad readership, practitioners of “the ninth art” enjoy the freedom, time, and financial security to develop more complex stories and sophisticated art, such as fully painted panels.
In addition, like foreign films, it’s usually the most successful work that’s exported. Most of the writers and artists noted in this post are award winners.
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wednesday september 27
In a recent post, I headed a list of milestones in modern comics history with Will Eisner’s 1978 A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories. The pioneering writer, artist, publisher, and teacher for whom the Eisner Awards are named marketed this collection of adult tales as a “graphic novel.”
A few months before his death in January 2005, Eisner decided to republish his landmark work together with two other collections set on the mythical New York tenement street that reflects his childhood home. The Contract with God Trilogy: Life on Dropsie Avenue includes the stories of A Life Force, written in 1983, and Dropsie Avenue from 1995, both new to the Library with this omnibus volume.
While A Contract with God and A Life Force portray the world of the 1930s, Dropsie Avenue traces the changes in the neighborhood, especially the succession of ethnic groups, since 1870, when “still there were farms in the Bronx.”
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tuesday september 12
The 2006 winners of the Harvey Awards were announced Saturday during the Baltimore Comic-Con. Named for Harvey Kurtzman, who is best known for founding, writing, and illustrating MAD magazine, the Harveys have great prestige as the only awards voted exclusively by comic book professionals.
Here’s a list of the nominees, with winners in boldface. Congratulations to Carol Tyler, Cincinnati resident and Library program participant, whose Late Bloomer was nominated in the category Best Graphic Album – Previously Published Material.
Best Graphic Album - Original
Combat Zone by Karl Zinsmeister (Marvel Comics)
The Lone and Level Sands by A. David Lewis (Caption Box) – on order
Night Fisher by R. Kikuo Johnson (Fantagraphics Books) – on order
Tricked by Alex Robinson (Top Shelf)
Wimbledon Green by Seth (Drawn & Quarterly)
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Most of the leading comics professionals created moving tributes to the events of September 11, 2001. Their work is collected in three anthologies – 9-11: The World’s Finest Comic Book Artists and Writers Tell Stories to Remember, 9-11: Artists Respond, and 9-11 Emergency Relief. In addition, The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón will be at the Library very soon.
But the most cogent and intimate graphic treatment, In the Shadow of No Towers, comes from Art Spiegelman -- appropriately, since Spiegelman is the author of another powerful study of the human spirit grappling with ultimate darkness. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale uses the cat-and-mouse cartoon tradition to tell the story of his parents’ sufferings and heroism during the Holocaust.
An equally significant credential is the fact that In the Shadow of No Towers is also a survivor’s tale: Spiegelman and his family witnessed the destruction of the World Trade Center from their Lower Manhattan neighborhood, and were among the crowds fleeing its collapse.
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saturday september 02
Much of the discussion focused on Monday’s celebration is likely to address the decline of “the folks who brought you the weekend” – the labor movement. Two 2001 books called Three Strikes make appropriate Labor Day reading, since one recalls the heyday of the movement and the other its current crisis in the face of globalization, deregulation, and corporate consolidation. But both books “look backward to look forward.”
Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls, and the Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century is a “critical tribute to labor’s past,” recounting three struggles from the first half of the twentieth century, in part “to see if there are any lessons” for today’s workers. The diversity of the movement is emphasized: Howard Zinn relates the Colorado coal strike of 1913-1914; Dana Frank details the Woolworth’s salesgirls’1937 sit-down at Detroit’s largest store; and Robin Kelley explores the American Federation of Musicians’ response to technological replacement in the 1930s.
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friday august 25
Curious about graphic novels but haven’t taken the plunge yet? Wondering what all the fuss is about? The short answer is – comics are a lot more interesting than they used to be.
The creative explosion of “the ninth art” in the U.S. market began during the 1970s and produced one milestone after another during the next decade. Here’s a sample:
Mainstream comics veteran Will Eisner created A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories (1978), a collection of powerful tales about immigrant life in New York that he called a “graphic novel” to distinguish it from traditional comics.
Underground comix artist Art Spiegelman founded the cutting-edge journal Raw (1980), where he serialized Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, a complex, very moving account of his parents’ Holocaust experiences, which in book form won a Pulitzer Prize (1993).
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saturday august 19
The circus is coming to town for a three-week-plus run from August 24 to September 17. Cirque du Soleil (“Circus of the Sun”) will premiere here with 33 performances of Quidam, its flagship touring show, inside a 78-foot-tall blue and yellow Grand Chapiteau (Big Top) on the riverfront.
The Montreal-based company’s sophisticated transformation of the circus even delights the post-Dumbo generations. (Seinfeld’s Kramer isn’t the only baby boomer afraid of clowns.) Cirque du Soleil combines the best traditions – acrobatics and, uh, clowns, but no animals or freaks! – with acting, singing, and dancing. The hallmarks of their spectacles are edgy creativity and impeccable professionalism.
If (if?!) you like what you see under the Chapiteau, or prefer watching death-defying feats from the couch, the Library has many Cirque du Soleil videorecordings, as well as books and CDs (list below), with more on the way. Traditionalists should also explore our collection of Strobridge & Co. circus posters and two-volume set of photographs of the Cincinnati Art Museum’s Strobridge collection. The Cincinnati-based company, an international leader in lithography, created these posters from around 1890 to 1920 for many troupes, including Barnum & Bailey, Ringling Brothers, and W.W. Cole.
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friday august 04
The ballet season in Cincinnati is about to kick off, beginning on August 12 with the annual Gala of International Ballet Stars, produced by ballet tech ohio performing arts association. Then Cincinnati Ballet launches its series of six performances with the New Works Festival on September 28.
The keynote is dazzling variety! Ballet lovers in the tri-state will be able to discover the work of many brilliant choreographers through programs of short pieces, and we'll see a mix of classics and newer compositions, including modern dance.
The Fifth Annual Gala of International Ballet Stars will showcase 18 dancers from 10 major companies representing 11 nations. These companies include Russia’s legendary Kirov Ballet, Dance Theatre of Harlem, The National Ballet of Canada, and the Royal Swedish Ballet.
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friday july 28
If you haven’t seen Making a Legacy, Living the Legacy at the Cincinnati Art Museum, this weekend is your last chance!
Sunday is the final day for this exhibition of the work of five African American artists from the tri-state area, each using a different medium. The result is a very rich show – Joyce Young paintings, Melvin Grier photographs, Carolyn Mazloomi quilts, Ellen Price prints, and a Thom Phelps installation. Making a Legacy was mounted by guest curator Thom Shaw, another local African American artist.
More of Grier’s photographs and an interview with him can be seen in the video Bearing Witness: Melvin Grier. Prints by Shaw and Price are included in Cincinnati Portfolio III: A Porfolio of Ten Prints. And be sure to explore the beautiful work in Mazloomi’s book Spirits of the Cloth: Contemporary African American Quilts.
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The conflict between Israel, the Palestinians, and now Lebanon has accelerated with terrible speed since June 10, when Hamas ended the current truce after blasts allegedly from Israeli artillery killed and injured Palestinian families on a Gaza beach. Hamas retaliated with the June 25 killing of two Israeli soldiers and the capture of a third. In a surprise move of solidarity, Hezbollah followed suit on July 12, crossing the border from Lebanon to kill three Israeli soldiers and capture two others.
Hezbollah’s entry into the conflict prompted Israeli Army Chief of Staff Lieutenant-General Dan Halutz to threaten that the Israeli military would “turn back the clock in Lebanon by 20 years” if the soldiers were not returned. In addition to the daily news reports, a vision of what that would mean can be gained through Robert Fisk’s 1990 bestseller, Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon.
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thursday july 20
The June sale of Gustav Klimt's ravishing 1907 portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, a Viennese society lady, brought a record-breaking price of (reportedly) $135 million, primarily from Ronald S. Lauder, the cosmetics magnate, philanthropist, and art collector. Lauder acquired Adele Bloch-Bauer I for the Neue Galerie New York, a small museum he co-founded in 2001 to exhibit early 20th century German and Austrian art. The Neue Galerie unveiled the painting on July 13 along with four other Klimt works on loan from the Bloch-Bauer heirs, including the second portrait of Adele from 1912.
The sale also brought long-delayed justice for the Bloch-Bauer family. Led by Adele’s 90-year-old niece, Maria Altmann, they won back the paintings just this year from the Austrian government. Austria had refused to return the property that the Nazi regime confiscated after Adele’s widower, Ferdinand, fled in 1938 to escape the fate of six million other European Jews.
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wednesday july 12
C
omics fans and music lovers alike cherished the biographical cartoon strips that Justin Green created for Pulse, a magazine produced by Tower Records until 2002. Happily, the gems Green created for a decade were published the following year in Musical Legends: The Collected Comics from Pulse Magazine.
Himself a legend among cartoonists, Green brought his famous sense of irony and a passion for music to anecdotes about an enormous range of musicians. Both characteristics are apparent right from the start, in Green’s introduction to the collection:
“It was my father's spirit that instigated this cartoon project. I'd done an illustration depicting him personally telling Frank Sinatra to Shut Up! in a Vegas nightclub setting. 'The Chairman' had the nerve to revel with his cronies while my father's lifelong friend, the great Dixieland banjo player and singer Clancy Hayes, had to play over their noise. It was called 'Great Moments in Alcoholism.'"
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monday june 19
Artists aren’t generally known for business savvy, but if you’re serious about getting your work out there and taking it as far as you can, then marketing, accounting, and the law will have a big impact on your otherwise creative life.
Several staff members at the Library – themselves artists and artisans – have developed the Artist Resource Guide: Books and Web Resources for the Working Artist to help budding Vincents become their own Theos. The Guide collects a wide range of titles and links on one convenient web page, which will be updated periodically.
Here are just a few of the books you'll find:
Living the Artist's Life: A Guide to Growing, Persevering, and Succeeding in the Art World by Paul Dorrell
How to Survive and Prosper As an Artist: Selling Yourself Without Selling Your Soul by Caroll Michels
Crafters' Internet Handbook: Research, Connect and Sell Your Work Online by Genevieve Crabe
Opportunities in Commercial Art and Graphic Design Careers by Barbara Gordon
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thursday june 08
The Cincinnati Opera's 2006 Summer Festival begins June 15, and aficionados are checking out books, librettos, and scores to enhance their enjoyment of this year's performances. If you haven't explored the Library's extensive collection, here's a list of titles for the 2006 season.
Tosca by Giacomo Puccini
Puccini: A Biography by Mary Jane Phillips-Matz
Puccini Without Excuses: A Refreshing Reassessment of the World's Most Popular Composer by William Berger
Tosca's Rome: The Play and the Opera in Historical Perspective by Susan Vandiver Nicassio
Giacomo Puccini, Tosca by Mosco Carner
Tosca: Opera in Three Acts (libretto)
Tosca: Melodramma in Tre Atti (full score)
Tosca: Opera in Three Acts (after the Play by Victorien Sardou) (vocal score)
Tosca: Melodramma in 3 Atti (miniature score)
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tuesday june 06
Metal clay is a wonderful option for jewelry makers who love silver and gold, but not metalsmithing techniques. If you work with beads or wire, you can use this relatively new medium to design and create your own metal beads, pendants, and other components, instead of having to use whatever is available on the market. And of course you can also produce rings, brooches, decorative objects, and any other items traditionally made by metalsmiths.
Introduced in the 1990s, metal clay consists of silver or gold particles, an organic binding material, and water. When the piece is fired, the binder and water disappear, leaving a solid metal form -- .999 fine silver or 22k to 24k gold. The two product lines, Precious Metal Clay and Art Clay, offer a variety of forms (lump, paste, syringe, “paper” sheets) and several formulas for firing at different temperatures with a kiln, torch, “hot pot,” or even the kitchen stove.
We recently built up our collection of metal clay instruction books, and more are on the way. These books are beautiful as well as helpful, showcasing many gorgeous designs – not always the case, alas, with even the best jewelry-making guides. The titles include:
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Carol Tyler has been a successful cartoonist since the 1980s, when the underground comix creators and their heirs were launching the alternative comics movement. However, for better and for worse, Tyler’s career was slowed to a crawl by family life and day jobs.
The positive side of Tyler’s detour -- apart from bringing her to live in Cincinnati -- is apparent in the rich story material from those domestic years, some of it released to the world just last year in Late Bloomer. This collection has earned Tyler the kind of acclaim she’s seen lavished for decades on her husband, Justin Green, one of the pioneers of the underground comix era. (More about Green in an upcoming post.) The latest rave comes from the pages of the most recent New York Times Sunday Book Review.
Fans of Late Bloomer include the very best comics creators, such as R. Crumb, Jim Woodring, Chris Ware, and Craig Thompson. According to Thompson: “Carol Tyler is a crucial voice for the medium. She’s lived so many roles – bohemian, artist, mother, teacher, Midwestern housewife, family historian – and imbues her work with all the wisdom of her experience. Poetic, her work is ornamented with detail, yet not flowery.”
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friday june 02
What can withstand the X-Men? Not even The Da Vinci Code, to judge by opening weekend stats for X-Men: The Last Stand. The third film based on the Marvel Comics series had the highest-grossing debut of the year so far, and the fourth-highest opening weekend ever (the top weekend spot belonging to another Marvel enterprise, Spider-Man).
Moviegoers and critics alike are raving about the film’s great blend of action, drama, and, well, a pretty darn weighty treatment of intolerance, and whether to combat it through violence or peaceful dialogue.
Fans of the comics will expect all this from an X-Men tale. The battling mutants have thrilled and moved readers since 1963, when superwriter Stan “The Man” Lee and superartist Jack “The King” Kirby created the highly diverse charter characters.
If X-Men: The Last Stand leaves you wanting more, the Library has the first two films, X-Men and X2: X-Men United, plus many bound editions of the comics. You can even start with the very first issues, collected in Marvel Masterworks Presents The X-Men: Reprinting the X-Men, Nos. 1-10.
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