Manifest Gallery recently added two new galleries, which is a 66 percent increase. It now has a total of five galleries of art for its visitors to enjoy—Main Gallery, Drawing Room, Parallel Space, Central Gallery and North Gallery. The “new” Manifest is celebrating its expansion on Friday, November 8 with a free, public reception from 6 to 9 p.m., coinciding with the monthly Walk on Woodburn event.
The Main and North Galleries face the street, and the entrance to Manifest is through the Main Gallery at 2727 Woodburn Ave. Exhibits will vary in terms of how many galleries each occupies. For example, Fresh Paint will be presented in three galleries while Aquachrome is in two, and one will be flanked by the other so visitors will first experience the works in Fresh Paint, then Aquachrome, then Fresh Paint again.
“We’ll rarely have all five spaces dedicated to one exhibit because we find that offering a variety of exhibits in combination, including routine solo exhibits, enhances visitor experience,” says Jason Franz, Manifest’s executive director. “Having all five galleries will make the experience from room to room more like a museum or a film—time-based, sequential and hopefully dramatic.”
This season, Manifest is also evolving its exhibition catalog publication process from a small color catalog per exhibit, for a total of nine each year, to one large hardcover book that documents the entire season, including every work and artist involved during the year. The Manifest Exhibition Annual is the fourth annual publication that the Manifest Press publishes (others are the International Drawing Annual, the International Painting Annual and the International Photography Annual).
“The expansion allows for 25 percent more exhibits this year,” Franz says. “We want to bring the world to Cincinnati and represent Cincinnati to the world one work of art at a time.”
Manifest will also showcase a new exhibition program, Regional Showcase Series, which will be shown three or four times per year. The exhibit contains works of art by artists who live in Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana.
In addition to the gallery, Manifest is also behind other initiatives like the
Drawing Lab, a studio program that is supported by a grant from the
Ohio Arts Council. The Drawing Lab, located at the
Manifest Drawing Center in Madisonville, is free to high school and college students, but is open to everyone, from novice to professional, for a nominal membership fee.
“We’re not just an art gallery, but also a nonprofit,” Franz says. “We’re intended to be a small, bite-sized, museum-like experience of excellent and varied contemporary art from a wide geographical radius that anyone can take in with a short stroll through the galleries, after dinner or during a visit to the neighborhood. We hope they leave with something more than they arrived with—a sense of wonder for or awareness of what creative people work hard to make in the world.”
By Caitlin Koenig
Follow Caitlin on Twitter
Enjoy this story?
Sign up for free solutions-based reporting in your inbox each week.