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Watching Communist movies at the Wex
In early June, I slid into my seat in the theater at Wexner Center for the Arts just as a bearded speaker concluded his introduction. “I’d like to welcome someone from the Cohen Collection. After the screening, you can ask him how he smuggled the film into the U.S.,” he said, and paused. “Or actually, maybe don’t talk to him about it.”
Tributes pour in for late Columbus musician Michael Christian
Michael Christian’s Red Velvet Letdown bandmates described him as an intensely private person in a late 2022 interview, making it likely he would be discomforted by the extensive public outpouring that has followed in the wake of his death becoming public on Sunday. In the past couple of days,...
Brandon Doup moves beyond abstraction with ‘Perspectives’
In curating the exhibit “Perspectives,” which opens at All People Arts on Thursday, Aug. 8, painter Brandon Doup knew that he wanted to feature portrait and figurative work by a range of central Ohio artists, and that he wanted each of these images to tell a deeper story.
What JD Vance gets wrong about Appalachia
I was listening to Demon Copperhead on audiobook when my phone chimed with a notification that Donald Trump had chosen Ohio Sen. JD Vance as his running mate. In Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver tells the story of Damon (who comes to be known as Demon) from childhood through young adulthood in Lee County, Virginia. The fictional Demon shares many experiences in common with Vance, whose memoir, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, recounts his early life growing up in suburban Ohio and Appalachian Kentucky.
Nashville musician Katy Kirby uncovers the meaning in ‘Blue Raspberry’
When Nashville musician Katy Kirby started work on the tunes that would become Blue Raspberry, released in January, she initially viewed it as a songwriting exercise, penning a series of intimate verses centered on what was then a fictional female romantic partner. “I was just writing using she/her pronouns as...
Matthew Erman explores cults, small town ennui in ‘Loving, Ohio’
Matthew Erman wrote the first five pages of what would eventually become Loving, Ohio as a standalone around 2018. At the time, there was no artist attached. And he initially didn’t view the short as the introduction to a larger narrative. “I just remember sitting down and the whole...
Alek Shabazz brings her inner world to vivid life
Columbus artist Alek Shabazz said she has always lived in her own head, sharing how her boss recently gifted her with a pair of socks printed with the phrase “I’m overthinking.”. “And that’s me to a T,” Shabazz said, and laughed. “I am such a deep thinker, and...
Jeffrey Smalldon chronicles his life with serial killers in ‘That Beast Was Not Me’
The first time Jeffrey Smalldon sat in a prison visiting room opposite serial killer John Wayne Gacy, he spent a chunk of their conversation wishing he could escape to the bathroom. “About 45 minutes ago, a moderate urge to pee started becoming something more urgent,” Smalldon writes in That Beast...
Ohio voter purge strikes more than 75 Columbus residents experiencing homelessness
In early June, Secretary of State Frank LaRose released a list of 158,857 inactive Ohio voters who were at risk of having their voter registration canceled ahead of the upcoming presidential election – a number that accounts for roughly 2 percent of registered voters in the state. Ohio’s “use...
Time and pressure help Diamond Young unearth vulnerability, beauty in her canvases
Early in Diamond Young’s time at CCAD, she took a more fantastical approach to creation, filling her paintings with superhero-esque figures situated in otherworldly backdrops. “For one of my paintings, I remember I created a storm of clouds with almost a rainbow-type vibe to it,” Young said in late...
Khalivius won’t stop with ‘Red Light’
Khalivius is used to traversing middle ground. In high school, the musician said, he tended to occupy that space between divergent groups, never entirely at home in any particular social circle. And in creating, he’s become increasingly torn between writing and recording raps – a form that served as his earliest introduction to music – and staking out new ground as an R&B singer, which has become more of a focus over the last year.
Local Politics: Same cruelties plague the new James A. Karnes Corrections Center
Children who have a parent incarcerated in Franklin County will not see their parent in person until release. This is true for the Jackson Pike Corrections Center and for the new James A. Karnes Corrections Center. As of May 28, people incarcerated in Franklin County also cannot hold a piece of mail sent to them by their family – or anyone else. Mail is scanned and sent as an electronic attachment to a message in the facility’s app.
Ajanaé Dawkins addresses heavy questions in ‘No One Teaches Us How to Be Daughters’
Around 2016, Ajanaé Dawkins sat down and recorded an interview with her great grandmother as the elder neared the end of her life. “I knew she was dying. She had lung cancer and another form of cancer, so her time was limited,” Dawkins said in late July at Urban Arts Space, where her debut exhibition, “No One Teaches Us How to Be Daughters,” will remain on view through August 3. “So, I sat with her … in the rehabilitation center and asked her a lot of questions.”
Fust continues the search at Nelsonville Music Festival
A feeling of wanderlust permeates Genevieve, the excellent 2023 album by roots-oriented North Carolina band Fust, which arrives populated by characters who set out for the West Coast, make late night, starlit drives in cars cursed with busted odometers, and hold tight to concerns that even in new towns they’ll continue to be the same troubled people.
Artists Against Apartheid launch exhibition to highlight Palestinian resilience
When Artists Against Apartheid staged a one-night-only exhibition at the Citadel in December, much of the art displayed at the time was more “descriptive” of the horrors unfolding in Gaza amid Israel’s ongoing assault, according to Columbus illustrator and organizer Shenby G. But for a new exhibition...
Printmaker Felicity Gunn centers the cycle of life
Though printmaker Felicity Gunn grew up in the Short North area, the inspiration for her artwork often comes from more remote locales, featuring abandoned Nelsonville houses reclaimed by nature and overgrown, wooded trails located somewhere off the Blue Ridge Parkway outside of Asheville, North Carolina. In a mid-July interview at...
EDwen watches it all fall apart
When EDwen started work on what would become Confessions of a Capricorn, he was in the early stages of a new relationship, envisioning the album as one that would capture the heart-fluttering bloom of a fresh romance taking root. This idea is reflected in slinky, R&B-tinged songs such as “Go”...
Magnetic Love: Nathaniel Jordan worked tirelessly until his death to distribute naloxone to Black Ohioans
To truly meet people where they’re at, Nathaniel Jordan II once told me, “You come with love. You come with an open heart. And you come with a mind of helping. And that spirit that you generate, it illuminates from you. It’s almost like a magnet.”. It...
The Fossil Record hopes to give some permanence to life’s more ephemeral moments
Rachel Scott started work on the songs that would become the Fossil Record’s debut album, Together We’re a Modern Person, seven years ago, with the initial writing taking place in the six months of maternity leave that followed the birth of her first son. At the time, Scott...
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