SEASON 21
EXHIBITIONS
September 2024 - August 2025
On September 26th and 27th Manifest celebrates the opening of our 500th exhibition
produced in our Woodburn Avenue galleries in East Walnut Hills.
This exhibition season is financially assisted by a grant from the Ohio Arts Council, and
by many individual donors across the country and beyond who support Manifest's Annual Fund.
You can donate here to help keep our nonprofit programming growing!
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Download to save or print the entire See Grand Jury Award finalists and winners here. |
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| November 8 - December 6, 2024 |
Ticketed Preview - Annual Fund Benefit |
main gallery
CONTAINER Clay is moulded to make a vessel, but the utility of the vessel lies in the space where there is nothing. Thus, taking advantage of what is, we recognize the utility of what is not. A container inspires a myriad of reactions, from the exhilaration of opening a surprise present, to the swelling trepidation while winding a jack-in-the-box. Varying widely in size and shape, these objects are defined first by their function and further by their contents, and ultimately by our interaction with them—the act of placing into or removing something from within. Often, but not always, containers are everyday objects, plentiful and readily overlooked for their contents. Emphasis is placed on the treasure within. What secrets might be kept secured, contained, or protected? Where does a container land at the intersections between craft, art, and design? How can we explore its capacity to hold, transport, or protect? CONTAINER is an exhibit about holding including images and objects that acknowledge containers of various types not just for their function, but for their meaning. For this exhibit 116 artists submitted 343 works from 34 states, Washington D.C. and 5 countries, including Canada, China, England, Netherlands, and the United States. Twenty works by the following 13 artists from 10 states and Canada were selected by a blind jury process for presentation in the gallery and the Manifest Exhibition Annual publication. Presenting works by: Travis Apel Curtiss Brock Katherine Cox Palli Davene Davis Samantha Haring Katie Hudnall Noah Lagle Yevgeniya Mikhailik Cat Quattrociocchi John Richardson Jaye Schlesinger Jesse Torres-Medina
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Katie Hudnall
John Richardson
Jaye Schlesinger
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drawing room
Nurturing Shadows: Weiting Wei (b.1984) is a Chinese-born artist who currently lives and works in Columbus, OH. She received her Bachelor of Education from Fujian Huanan Women’s Vocational College in China and her MFA from Columbus College of Art & Design in Columbus, OH.
Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, including exhibitions at Yellowstone Art Museum, MT, San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts, TX, Evansville Museum, IN, Zanesville Museum, OH, McConnell Art Center, Ohio Craft Museum, Cultural Arts Center and China. Of her work the artist states: "My identity as a mother and caregiver is intertwined with my role as an artist. Understanding the behavior of materials and using processes akin to domestic tasks fosters a sense of familiarity with forms and muscle memory. This enables me to engage with the nuances of the materials, their responsiveness to my hands, and the fusion of clay shaping and the use of kitchen tools in my creative process. My work traverses the domestic realm through the use of tools and themes centered around pregnancy, children, and motherhood, interwoven with memories and traditions from my life in China. In my recent artworks, I draw inspiration from the natural forms of organisms and integrate them into sculptures crafted from polymer clay. By capturing the dynamic shapes and intricate details of nature, rooted in my childhood memories, I convey the diverse emotions and states experienced by women during their journey of growth. My artworks invite viewers to explore the hidden complexities within the monochromatic surfaces.” This exhibition was selected from among 164 proposals submitted in consideration for Manifest’s 21st season.
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parallel space + central gallery
ALTARPIECES An altar is a place for worship, for ritual, for sacrifice. While functionally a table, an altar is holier in intent—the difference comes from dedication. Objects on an altar are carefully arranged and used for sacred purpose. An object placed on an altar becomes an icon. The objects in a still life are similarly arranged, imbued with meaning by artistic intent. If a still life is an altarpiece, to what deity is it dedicated? The act of dedication takes many forms. Walls of generational family photos are dedicated places for remembrance, as are roadside shrines, and places of pilgrimage. Bedroom mirror and locker door collages serve as tributes to something the maker holds dear. Taken further from the physical realm, a form of altar might occur as an online fan blog extolling the virtues of celebrated figures past or present representing ideals for private aspiration, or as odes and poems written to a lover, to nature, to a place, an idea. For this exhibit we asked artists around the world at what point does such devotional practice, often quite personal, become art? At what point does generating special objects or images made as a form of dedication become a conduit for a higher idea to be shared with a public audience? What do we enshrine through the making of art? ALTARPIECES is an exhibit of artworks about purposeful arrangement, ritual, still life, altars, shrines, odes, eulogies, offerings, decorations, and dedications. For this exhibit 149 artists submitted 437 works from 37 states, Washington D.C. and 5 countries, including Canada, England, Norther Ireland, Spain, and the United States. Eighteen works by the following 13 artists from 10 states and Northern Ireland were selected by a blind jury process for presentation in the gallery and the Manifest Exhibition Annual publication.
Presenting works by: Michelle Bennett Rachel Bensimon Whitney Blue Todd Fox Stephen Johnston Jonathan Kusnerek Hui Chi Lee Jeanette May Todd McDonald Sangun Park Ron Richmond Rebecca Woodward
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Rachel Bensimon
Jonathan Kusnerek
Sangun Park
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north gallery
THIRD PLACES Where do we go when we are not at home? The place that isn’t where we live, nor where we labor, is known as a “Third Place”. In a third place, we are not beholden to the same roles and responsibilities that generally define us. In a third place we are at leisure; we can sit, eat, play, talk, drink, and otherwise engage in activities with other people. This includes such spaces as restaurants, parks, skating rinks, museums, malls, bars, coffee shops, churches, and libraries. They are forums, social platforms, and MRPGs. Third places provide the opportunity to build relationships and engage with people outside our immediate sphere. They are places of learning, relaxation, and they are places of potential conflict. We crave a third place for its variety, the friction and company of other people, for newness, for change and exchange, for information, beauty, companionship. The alternative is isolation, a repeated pattern sealing us away from other people and from the larger world. How do artists represent this important personal and social catalyst? THIRD PLACES shares works of art that are about or which symbolize or depict the places we go when we are not at home and not at labor. For this exhibit 43 artists submitted 126 works from 19 states and Canada. Nine works by the following 9 artists from 5 states were selected by a blind jury process for presentation in the gallery and the Manifest Exhibition Annual publication. Presenting works by: Dean Brown Jason Coatney Sally Gil Jaclyn Gordyan Ruoxi Hua Emma Reynolds Jessica Summers Izel Vargas Renae Wang
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Emma Reynolds
Jessica Summers
Dean Brown
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| December 13, 2024 - January 10, 2025 |
Ticketed Preview - Annual Fund Benefit: |
| January 24 - February 21, 2025 |
Ticketed Preview - Annual Fund Benefit: |
| March 7 - April 4, 2025 |
Ticketed Preview - Annual Fund Benefit: |
| April 18 - May 16, 2025 | Ticketed Preview - Annual Fund Benefit: |
| May 30 - June 27, 2025 |
Ticketed Preview - Annual Fund Benefit: |
| July 11 - August 8, 2025 |
Ticketed Preview - Annual Fund Benefit: |
| August 15 - September 12, 2025 SEASON 21 FINALÉ! |
Ticketed Preview - Annual Fund Benefit: |
——— END OF SEASON 21 ———
THANK YOU!
PREVIOUS SEASON 21 EXHIBITS:
Season 21 Launch |
Ticketed Preview - Annual Fund Benefit |
main gallery
CORPUS A FotoFocus Biennial Participating Venue Exhibit and Manifest's 500th Exhibition Produced Since January 2005! Another Manifest participating project in the FotoFocus Biennial is our PICK IT UP, TURN IT OVER experimental photography workshop and the showcase of resulting works on view at the historic campus of Manifest Drawing Center at 3464 Central Parkway in Clifton.
Not so many years ago, we stopped touching photographs. While print media and brick-and-mortar galleries exist, our common, everyday experience with the photograph has drastically shifted from the handling of 4” x 6” prints from the drugstore to scrolling through brilliant digital images shining out from our screens. These photographs are easily created, manipulated, and shared, but at a cultural level it cost us the sense of intimacy, of preciousness, that comes with holding an image that has dimension and weight. We lost the expectation that images do not “go out” when we turn our phones off. Has this also affected how we as a culture relate to each other? This exhibit aims to examine that photograph that does not turn off. It reminds us that a photograph exists in the world, accumulating the history that sticks to all things that take up space. It showcases the photograph that is touched, that has more than one side, that expands and bends into three dimensions, that is flipped through, that is printed onto something that had a history before it became a surface. You can touch a photograph with your fingers. You cannot touch an electronic digital image at all—you only touch the plastic container that pretends to be a photo. CORPUS called to artists for photographic-based works that re-engage the body, acknowledge their place in the physical world, and explore the impacts of choice of surface, volume, texture, material, and presentation methods on the experience of the image itself—the spirit in the body of the art. This exhibit aims to reveal the literal backstory, or other sides of what has become a sideless visual phenomenon, giving the photo back its body. Support for this FotoFocus Biennial 2024 exhibition was provided by FotoFocus. For this exhibit 72 artists submitted 233 works from 27 states, Washington D.C. and Germany. Sixteen works by the following 12 artists from 9 states were selected by a blind jury process for presentation in the gallery and the Manifest Exhibition Annual publication. Presenting works by: Dylan Bannister Sally Chapman Natalie Christensen and Jim Eyre Catherine Day Myles Dunigan Liz Barick Fall Karen Hillier Julie Mixon Amanda Musick Rachel Nemecek Carolyn Norton Kaylee Peters
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Julie Mixon
Carolyn Norton
Kaylee Peters
Liz Barick Fall
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drawing room
All I’ve Sung and Have Yet To Sing Michael Tittel earned a BFA in Photography from Ohio University in 1992. His work has appeared in Leica Magazine, Saveur, Conde Naste Traveler, Ain’t Bad and aCurator and he was a 2023 Best in Show Winner in the Communication’s Arts Photography Annual. His fine art photographs are held in private collections and Ohio University’s permanent collection. He currently teaches full-time at the School of the Arts at Northern Kentucky University. Of his work the artist states: "For forty years I’ve photographed habitually in the pursuit of honoring the people, and places of my life. I explore the existential precariousness of the landscape, and the sublime dimensions reached through portraiture. I often treat portraiture as still life and personify landscapes. To me they are equals in storytelling power. This work is part of an extended visual poem representing the more visceral moments between people and places in the Midwest. Like music, these photographs celebrate the mystery and wonder of shared experiences. Without the visual grandeur of a place like the American desert or the northern latitudes of Iceland, the camera must evoke drama in other ways. These forced image combinations reveal evocative new contexts and non-obvious qualities: a mysteriousness prescribed by Ohio Valley light, a new sense of weight and form, and a startling respect for the subjects, human or otherwise. Themes of love, solitude, and the memories or people we fear losing are presented here like short love songs. A formal photographic treatment draws attention to what might have been too obvious to notice. These realistic images take on new fictional life in their designed sequencing, which often places one or more images against each other, giving rise to new visual phrases. In this work, one is reminded of the subtle magic that photography delivers and the moments it so effectively honors.” This exhibition was selected from among 164 proposals submitted in consideration for Manifest’s 21st season.
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parallel space
Gain-of-Function Mark Armbruster lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland. He is a Lens based multi-media artist who creates art in reaction to climate change and human effects on the landscape. Mark received his BFA in photography from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1992, and an MS in Instructional Design and Technology from the University of Maryland in 2019. Mark has exhibited his photography in numerous group shows including in such venues as Klompching Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Giertz Gallery, Champaign, IL; The Crows Nest, Baltimore, MD; Artscape - B24, Baltimore MD; TouchStone Gallery, Washington D.C.; Silvermine Gallery, New Canaan, CT; Perspective Photo Gallery, Evanston, IL; The Print Center, Philadelphia, PA; Torpedo Factory, Alexandria, VA; Tamar Hendel Gallery, Silver Spring, MD; The Contemporary, Baltimore, MD, among others. His work has also been featured in F-Stop Magazine Issues #86 & #6 and Jpeg Magazine, Issue #4. Of his work the artist states: "These images are from an ongoing project titled Gain-of-Function. The series uses non-traditional landscape imagery that acts as a backdrop for painted graphs and charts representing data from studies on climate change and its effects on the environment. The landscapes are recognizable, taken from a vantage point that shows larger structures of globalized commerce, energy and natural resources, and industrialization at play in our own backyards. Visual data depicted by dots, lines, and complex patterns illustrates climate studies relevant to those environments and speaks to phenomena like temperature extremes, drought, wild fires, and much more. The artwork titles are derived from quotes of climate change denials by politicians and leaders from the past decade. They refer to the specific studies or climate issue represented in the images, while also selected for their satirical tone and sometimes tragic and idiotic brutality." This exhibition was selected from among 164 proposals submitted in consideration for Manifest’s 21st season.
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central gallery
The Aesthetics of Collapse Brooks Dierdorff is an artist exploring the ways media like photography and video shape our cultural imagination of environmental collapse. His work includes a range of methodologies such as photo-based sculptures, installation, video, appropriating images from commercial and archival sources, and experimental documentary filmmaking. His work serves as an interface between political, ecological, and artistic spheres. Of his work the artist states: "My work explores how photography shapes our ideas about nature, climate disasters, and environmental collapse. The Aesthetics of Collapse is based on photographs of recent natural and man-made disasters produced for the United States Geological Survey. In the series, select photographs from the USGS digital archive are recombined and cut into an assortment of non-rectilinear shapes, a process that involves both accumulation and destruction. This exhibition was selected from among 164 proposals submitted in consideration for Manifest’s 21st season.
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north gallery
LOST AND FOUND Objects do not die. Destroyed, broken, discarded, or otherwise at their end-of-use, they still have form and, therefore, potential. Through an alchemy-like process, artists can see discarded things for the essence they represent, as raw material, and re-shape it into new life. Such creative resourcefulness is often driven by necessity. For example, within the fiber arts, scraps are turned into quilts, and entire mending traditions developed around extending and beautifying the lives of garments. Sculptors and craftsmen will harvest wood from anywhere, and reshape it into new works of art, design, or utility. Others, by impulse or conscience, pursue assemblage, collage, and re-contextualization not only to be thrifty or ethical, but to push culture forward. We worry about the second life of our stuff. The level of guilt, however subliminal, has dramatically intensified the experience of modern life. The aesthetics of dystopic science fiction, where survivalists live in cities of refuse and pilot frankensteinian, rusting vehicles, reveal anxieties about the future use of the things people have made and cast-off. This expanding social lament over the possible future we are complicit in bringing about causes us to ask how can we use the already once used in order to avoid depleting the now understood limited resources at our disposal? How can we be productively creative without contributing to a larger systemic disaster? With artists, being a particularly sensitive and perceptive subset of society, and with art often serving in the role of a sentinel specie, this subject becomes not only one for serious or playful poetry, but also one of thoughtful hope and ingenuity. For this exhibit 159 artists submitted 493 works from 35 states, Washington D.C., Puerto Rico, and 7 countries, Canada, China, Denmark, England, Germany, Netherlands, and the United States. Nineteen works by the following 12 artists from 8 states, England, and Germany were selected by a blind jury process for presentation in the gallery and the Manifest Exhibition Annual publication. Presenting works by: Justin Behm Franklyn Campbell Victoria Fuller Veronika Krämer Susan Lenz Carolin Mueller Eric Penington Jori Phillips Bonnie Ralston Sabrina Rodrigues April Wright Larry Zdeb
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Victoria Fuller
Eric Penington
Bonnie Ralston
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Manifest is supported by sustainability funding from
the Ohio Arts Council, and through the generous direct contributions of hundreds of individual supporters and private foundations who care deeply about Manifest's mission for the visual arts. |
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