Echoes of Plein Air: Cincinnati Reimagined

Echoes of Plein Air: Cincinnati Reimagined brings together six contemporary Cincinnati artists in an exhibition that examines the relationship between the city's artistic past and its changing landscape. Curated by AJ Gianopoulos, the exhibition challenged Nate Flanagan, Brad Davis, Ellina Chetverikova, Pam Folsom, Tony Lipps, and Richard Luschek to blindly select a historical painting depicting Cincinnati during its Golden Age of art. Each artist then returned to the location represented in their assigned painting to create a new work informed by the historical composition, the present-day landscape, and their own artistic practice. The resulting paintings establish a dialogue across generations, exploring how artists interpret familiar places through different visual languages and historical circumstances.

More than a century separates many of the original paintings from their contemporary interpretations. During that time, Cincinnati's landscape has undergone significant transformations. Buildings have disappeared, streets have been reconfigured, trees have matured or been removed, and once-familiar viewpoints have become inaccessible. These changes presented the participating artists with both physical and pictorial challenges, forcing them to reconsider compositions developed by their predecessors in landscapes that no longer exist as originally depicted. Rather than simply reconstruct the past, each artist confronts what remains, what has changed, and what has been lost. Echoes of Plein Air considers how paintings preserve particular moments in a city's history while demonstrating that landscape painting records not only a place, but also the perspective of the artist who interprets it.