The story of two Iraqi brothers who escaped from Baghdad in early 2002 becomes a vehicle for British-born, NY-based artist Jane Benson to explore the social reverberations caused by geo-cultural separation.

When Njideka Akunyili (b.1983) left Lagos for the U.S. at age 16 she detoured from her initial plan to be a doctor to pursue painting and fulfill the urge to tell another side of Nigeria’s story. “America has a lot of people talking about how Nigeria doesn’t,” she says. “Often people have a singular view about Nigeria and Africa. But problems of misrepresentation happen when people tell your story for you.” To posit a pronounced, but hybridized voice she fuses painting, drawing, collage and the use of transfers – a typically Western printing process that involves transferring ink from photographs using solvent. Akunyili Cosby builds up the transfer images of popular culture to reference traditional African textiles, creating quilt-like pieces that speak to post-colonial identities and traditions being pieced together. Her first paintings navigated the domestic landscape of life with her new American husband and intimate scenes of their wedding and home. The Predecessors mines deeper into Akunyili Cosby’s past, collecting portraits of her Nigerian family in a range of domestic settings. This exhibition will unite this seminal series for the first time, bringing together individual pieces from London, Johannesburg, New York and Los Angeles to celebrate a formative body in an artist’s rapidly emerging voice.

DPMT7 is a Cincinnati-based architecture/design collective led by Vincent Sansalone of the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning along with Ryan Ball, Kory Beighle, Sean Cottengim, Nicholas Germann, Whitney Hamaker, and Joseph Kinzelman. In their first major gallery exhibition, DPMT7 will transform both levels of the Weston Art Gallery in an architectural intervention that reimagines the urban landscape. What is the role of Architecture (“A” for emphasis) in a world of entropy? In this world, architecture is neither the physical object of stone upon stone, nor the spatial voids formed by the stone upon stone; it is the armature of the in-between and the framework of a yet unanswered question of history. 

Noel Anderson is a Louisville, KY-born artist and a professor at the University of Cincinnati, presently working in New York City. He is known for complex investigations into the evolving make-up of black male identity translated through a variety of textiles – from old rugs to digitally produced tapestries.

Andrea Bowers is an Ohio-born, Los Angeles-based artist who works at the provocative, often disruptive intersection of art-making, social justice and political activism. Raised in Wilmington, Ohio in what she calls, "an apolitical Republican family," Bowers looks to (and participates in) civil disobedience as a lens to explore contemporary causes including women’s, gay & trans rights, immigration, environmental protection and labor relations.

For more than forty years, Michael Scheurer (Cincinnati, OH) has refined his inimitable collage style influenced as much by the Surrealists and Cubists as whatever odd or antique paper, illustrations, handwritings, or fabric he uncovers in his unending quest for inspiration. Scheurer’s work, sometimes intricate, sometimes bold, defies convention in both subject matter and raw material. Signature Scheurer features works from each decade of this prolific artist’s masterful career along with new selections and a series of large-scale murals, artist-designed wallpaper, and collages transferred to handwoven carpets.

Nate Ricciuto (Columbus, OH) explores the various ways that representations of the natural world are encoded with and shaped by human aspirations and desires. He engages with everyday objects and ad hoc approaches to create spaces where imagination and perception become both tactile and fluid. Making use of the very public aspect of the Weston’s street-level gallery—its high visibility from the street—in The Curiosity Motive, Ricciuto constructs a dioramic landscape that may be observed either from outside or inside depending on the viewer. In collapsing and amplifying the distance between image and spectator, the diorama becomes an illusory space where the objective picture is revealed as another unreality.

View extraordinary examples of art created by self-taught or minimally trained artists between 1800 and 1925. The exhibition features more than 60 works. 

Iconic costumes from “a galaxy far, far away” are presented in the Smithsonian traveling exhibition Star Wars™ and the Power of Costume. The exhibition will open at Cincinnati Museum Center on May 25, 2017. 

This exhibition introduces Japanese samurai culture and arts from the 16th–19th centuries. The 130 warrior-related objects are selected from the collections of the Cincinnati Art Museum and Gary Grose, a local collector. 

The Cincinnati Art Museum’s Howard and Caroline Porter Collection is the largest repository of the woodcuts of Kosaka Gajin outside the family in Tokyo, Japan. This exhibition celebrates his prints capturing the beauty of Japan’s landscape and architectural monuments in a way that is totally modern in its individualized expression, not unlike the era’s action painting in the West. This exhibition of his later woodcuts will be the first solo exhibition of the artist’s work in the United States.