Venues

Herb Ritts: L.A. Style
Cincinnati Art Museum
October 6–December 30  
and
Doug + Mike Starn: Gravity of Light
Holy Cross Church at the Mount Adams Monastery
October 6–December 30

Exhibition Preview
Unveiling of Doug + Mike Starn: Gravity of Light
Holy Cross Church at the Mount Adams Monastery
Wednesday October 3, 5 pm–7 pm   

Public Book Signing
Paul Martineau for Herb Ritts: L.A. Style and Charles Churchward for Herb Ritts: The Golden Hour
Cincinnati Art Museum
Thursday October 4, 2 pm–3 pm

VIP Exhibition Opening
Herb Ritts: L. A. Style
Cincinnati Art Museum
Thursday October 4, 6 pm-8 pm
VIP tickets: $75.00 per person
 
Herb Ritts: L.A. Style
Cincinnati Art Museum
Curated by Paul Martineau for the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Organizing curator, James Crump, Chief Curator, Cincinnati Art Museum

Herb Ritts (1952–2002) revolutionized fashion photography, modernized the nude, and transformed celebrities into icons. Through hard work and a distinctive vision, he fashioned himself into one of the top photographers to emerge from the 1980s. Ritts' aesthetic incorporated facets of life in and around Los Angeles. He often made use of the bright California sunlight to produce bold contrasts, and his preference for outdoor locations such as the desert and the beach helped to separate his work from that of his New York-based peers. L.A. Style presents Ritts’ intimate portraiture, his modern yet classical treatment of the nude, and his innovative approach to fashion which brought him international acclaim and placed him securely within an American tradition of portrait and magazine photography that includes Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Irving Penn. Ritts’ images that bridged the gap between art and commerce are not only a testament to the power of his imagination and technical skill, but also the synergistic union between art, popular culture, and business that followed in the wake of the Pop Art movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

Doug + Mike Starn: Gravity of Light
Holy Cross Church at the Mount Adams Monastery
Organized by Chief Curator James Crump for the Cincinnati Art Museum and FOTOFOCUS

In Gravity of Light, an immersive installation by acclaimed contemporary artists Doug and Mike Starn at the Holy Cross Church in Mount Adams, an arc light is the sole illumination. “For more than two decades, the Starns have deftly explored what for many remain ineffable subjects,” said James Crump, Organizer and Chief Curator for the Cincinnati Art Museum. “The divinity of human existence and the phenomenology of light, perception, and enlightenment scratch only the surface of these artists’ aesthetic investigations. The Starns’ best works are concerned with earthly realities that suggest the impermanence of beauty.”

Central to this off-site installation at the Mount Adams Monastery is an open arc lamp, which burns like a candle with the brilliance and precise bright light that mimics the sun. Surrounding the arc light are artworks from five intertwined photographic bodies of work at a monumental scale whose subjects both emblematize and give witness to the dual character of light, namely its power to both give life and to destroy it. In one series, the silhouetted gnarled branches of a tree evoke the rhizomatic neuronal network of the mind. In another, desiccated leaves, recorded in filigreed detail, signal both decay and renewal. In yet another series, ill-fated moths are shown drawn to the light that will destroy them, their images pinned, momentarily, on photographic paper. Towering over Gravity of Light is an image of the eighth-century Buddhist monk Ganjin who, though blind, saw that black is filled with light: illumination comes from within. A portrait of an 18th-century alchemist’s experiment reveals the abstraction of the human body’s system of networks.

Equal parts sculpture, scientific experiment, and photography, Gravity of Light suspends the viewer in a chamber of sensorial and experiential discovery. Gravity of Light shows us we are all conductors: absorbers and emitters of the universe’s energy.

Concerned largely with chaos, interconnection and interdependence, time, and physics, Doug and Mike Starn defy categorization as artists, effectively combining traditionally separate disciplines such as photography, sculpture, architecture, and site-specific projects. Their sculptural installation Big Bambú created a sensation when it was mounted on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2010 and later by the Peggy Guggenheim Museum during the 2011 Venice Biennale. Gravity of Light is among the best examples that show the Starns’ hybrid and interdisciplinary approach to art making that cuts across media.

Located in scenic Eden Park, the Cincinnati Art Museum features an unparalleled art collection of more than 60,000 works spanning 6,000 years. In addition to displaying its own broad collection, the Art Museum also hosts several national and international traveling exhibitions each year.