Updates from the PAR-Projects blog...

This past July, Jonathan Sears — Executive Director of Cincinnati-based PAR-Projects — found himself traveling halfway across the country to Kansas City to meet with a diverse collection of artists. The reason? He was tapped to help plan a regional conference that's convening hundreds of arts-leaders to help strengthen the connectivity of artist-run initiatives located throughout The Midwest. Aptly named MdW  (pronounced "Midway") , this group of artists, like him, lead creative spaces across The Midwest. And while a segment of the coalition toured PAR-Projects back in April (2024), this was officially his first in-person meeting with the MdW arts coalition. So how did all of this come about? As Jonathan notes, in April of 2024, when a large group of artists showed up for a tour,  an odd level of comfort & conversation was achieved while exploring the 15,000 square foot expansion space of the PAR-Project Campus. At the

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  If you Blinked too hard you may have missed it. With the help of organizations like ArtsWave, Greater Cincinnati Foundation, and The Carol Ann & Ralph V. Haile, Jr. Foundation, both civic and cultural leaders are creating powerhouse experiences. Our town's symphony is thriving. Our major museums are producing nationally recognized exhibitions. Even our ballet and playhouses are making headlines. Cincinnati is doing BIG things! Then there's us. Over at PAR-Projects, we don't make much noise. Why not?...  Well... until now, we were still waiting our turn in line. There's a whole lot of fast action clutter out there. But in the same breath, there's a lot of fizzling out as well. Because of the latter, our goals have simply been to keep our head down, keep working, and be the best we can be. The cool thing is we've never changed our mission and we've always held ourselves to the highest of standards — press or no press. We too have BIG things to accomplish...

Elena Masrour was born on May 5, 1990 in Tehran, Iran. She received her BFA in Fabric & Textile Design from Tehran University of Art in 2013 and received her Master of Fine Arts in Painting from Kansas State University in 2022. She currently lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio where she is a visiting faculty-in-residence at the Cleveland Institute of Art.   Masrour was interested in art from a young age, especially as a legacy artist. She recalls being ten years old and attempting to copy a self-portrait her grandfather completed, to her grandfather’s great amusement. In high school, she was afforded the opportunity to take several elective drawing classes and soon realized that artist was to be her path in life. At Tehran University of Art, Masrour initially studied fashion design. However, she encountered great difficulties in the field, finding few real opportunities for creative enterprise due to the strict dress code enforced by the Irian government. She recalls a experienc...

What's in a photo? As the old saying goes, ‘a picture is worth a thousand words.’  This is still true in today’s galleries as artists work to maintain the delicate balance between self, story, and subject as they attempt to share untold stories and perspectives with the world. I had the wonderful opportunity to interview Raymond Thompson, Jr., an artist disguised as a photojournalist, whose project “Appalachian Ghosts” is on display in the Gallery @Studeo-PAR through July 2022. We chatted candidly about how he sojourns this path using his background in journalism to root his work creating subjective archives of the Black experience in American history. On his journey to photojournalism: “When I started school I wanted to be a biologist… something practical… so I stumbled through trying to find something super practical.  But Northern Virginia Community College had a photography class.  So I started taking those darkroom classes and it was like ‘ooh this is cool.’ I fell i...

Most of our conversations, at least the most memorable ones, happened over lunch. Soup and salad; that's what we did. We chatted about which fresh vegetables from the garden made it into that day's lunch and we chatted about techniques that were perfected for that day’s soup. “Remember Jonathan, always save a little of your stock for the next batch. That’s how the French do it. It keeps your flavors alive — balanced.” The Dr. Driskell I knew was a humble man — an artist of media and an artist of life. And while we hung out in his Hyattsville studio from time to time, woodblock printing and encaustics weren’t really my thing, so our connections were much more about finding ways to live and breath as an artist. From time to time, he’d give me a lead on some art finds — a rare Romare Bearden for example — but really, most chats of ours were just about life. Still, he knew I was an obsessive maker in the digital media/sculpture realm, so from time to time he’d make sure to note tha...