In the Mary R. Schiff Library Dialogues with Artists

At this event you will have an opportunity to hear two artists to articulate an answer to the question “Why do you make art and how does this determine your connection to your audience?”, as well as see up close their work. This popular event, now in its sixth year, moved to Thursday’s evenings, as the museum stays open till 8 p.m.

Informal conversation with artists is encouraged. Wine and cheese served. Free. Reservations not required.

Upcoming dates: 

January 17, 2019 | 6:30–7:30 p.m.

Calcagno Cullen

Calcagno Cullen is a socially-engaged artist, arts administrator, curator, and educator. After receiving her MFA at the University of Cincinnati in 2007 she moved to San Francisco, where she served as the Education Associate for School and Teacher Programs at SFMOMA and Gallery Director for Adobe Books Backroom Gallery. After return to Cincinnati in 2014 with the goal of developing community and fostering positive social change through contemporary art, she co-founded, with her husband, Geoffrey Cullen, Wave Pool, a gallery, socially engaged residency program, studio, and community space. Cal’s life mission is to create empathy and understanding through art. She has found that being multi-disciplinary and open to all mediums and avenues to success allows her research, artistic practice, and life on the whole to be much richer and more fruitful as a result.

Geoffrey "Skip" Cullen

Geoffrey "Skip" Cullen is a conceptual artist currently working in Cincinnati. His work has covered a range of subjects including Geometric Formalism, Absurdity, and Economic Systems. Cullen has shown his work widely throughout the US, including having work in New York, Miami, Chicago, and San Francisco. Cullen is also one member of a four-part artist collective named Slapface. The group continually finds new ways to engage the public using large scale, colorful, and absurd art installations commenting on advertising and marketing in capitalism. He is a founding member of the Adobe Books, and Arts Cooperative in San Francisco and Wave Pool, Contemporary Art Fulfillment Center in Cincinnati. He currently works as the Exhibitions Director at Visionaries and Voices, a non-profit inclusive arts organization that provides creative, professional, and educational opportunities.

March 21, 2019 | 6:30–7:30 pm

Heather Jones

Heather Jones is an artist, designer, and educator whose work questions and pushes traditional conceptions of both quilt making and painting. A native Cincinnatian, Heather studied art history at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Art, Architecture, and Planning, earning both a Bachelors of Arts and Masters of Arts (ABT). She teaches quilting and design workshops across the country, offers online classes through Creativebug.com, and has appeared on PBS’s Quilting Arts TV and Fresh Quilting. She is a three-time winner of the Project Modern Quilt Design competition and a two-time finalist for the Martha Stewart American Made Awards. Her work has been exhibited locally, nationally and internationally. Heather’s first book, Quilt Local: Finding Inspiration in the Everyday was released in October 2015. Heather’s work has been featured in numerous books and magazines, and online publications, among them Martha Stewart Living and Modern Quilting Magazine.

Heather is drawn to fabric, to its familiarity, its inherent qualities of saturated color and textural luminosity, and its invitation to be touched. She is interested in the historical and socio-political relationship between women and textiles. Through her work she explores the relationship between gender, place, time, and culture, as a way of connecting with her Euro-Appalachian ancestors and their ancestral homes. She currently lives just outside the city on a small farm with her husband and two young children.

Jeffrey Cortland Jones

Jeffrey Cortland Jones is a painter, curator, and Professor of Art at the University of Dayton where he heads the Painting program. He received a Masters of Fine Art from the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Art, Architecture, and Planning and a Bachelors of Fine Arts from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, both in Painting and Drawing. Jeffrey’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally over 150 times since 2010. , and has been written about numerous publications, such as the Wall Street Journal, Art LTD magazine, and New American Paintings, among others.

Jeffrey Cortland Jones describes painting as a physical activity and a material practice, rather than a narrative tool. His most iconic works feature strong geometric compositions, and light colors—for this, he has jokingly acquired the reputation of being a painter who paints white. Jones also extends his studio practice to the street, where he paints large-scale versions of his color block explorations.

In addition to making work, Jeffrey also actively curates exhibitions at a number of galleries and alternative spaces, including DIVISIBLE, a project space he co-founded in 2014.