The Dayton Art Institute celebrated Dayton icon Curtis Barnes, Sr.
Credit: Hannah Kasper
Credit: Hannah Kasper
The retrospective “Curtis Barnes, Sr., Dayton Icon” celebrated Barnes as a prolific, versatile painter and beloved Sinclair Community College educator whose career deeply shaped the Dayton art community.
His bold, richly textured work — ranging from portraits and still lifes to abstractions, mask imagery, neighborhood scenes, and self-portraits — reflected a life rooted in identity, heritage, and everyday community.
Through hundreds of paintings, often created under humble conditions in his basement studio, he documented family, friends, and his neighborhood. Coinciding with the 90th anniversary of his birth, the exhibition not only honored his artistic vision but also highlighted his legacy as co-founder of the African American Visual Artists Guild, and underscored how his influence helped nurture future generations of artists in the region.
Jamie Wyeth: Unsettled
The paintings and artifacts in “Jamie Wyeth: Unsettled” were drawn from museums and private collections across the country, organized by the Brandywine Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, Penn.
A third-generation artist in America’s famous Wyeth art dynasty, “Unsettled” covered the younger Wyeth’s career by looking at the theme of unsettling images favored by the painter. “Strange and creepy”, according to DAI curator Jerry Smith.
Wyeth’s dreamlike portraits, supernatural worlds, and disturbing spaces fit right in with anxiety-driven “Stranger Things”-obsessed American pop culture.
Two standout exhibitions took place at the Kettering Health Gallery at Rosewood Arts Center
Credit: Hannah Kasper
Credit: Hannah Kasper
“In the Farthest Reaches” showcased monumental pastel drawings by Ghislaine and Lando Fremaux-Valdez, Texan artists whose work boldly explores anatomical imagery and layered figurative compositions rooted in personal, medical, and mythological themes. The couple’s collaborative process of drawing “shoulder to shoulder” lent a dreamlike, painterly quality to the drawings.
Inviting contemplative viewing rather than shock, the installation asked the viewer to slow down and consider the body’s vulnerability rather than simply reacting to its graphic nature. With nods to Renaissance traditions, the pieces re-imagined classical and biblical scenes using the artists themselves as models.
The result was a merging of personal intimacy, art-historical references, and a contemporary exploration of identity, pain, love, and physical experience.
Credit: Contributed
Credit: Contributed
Morgan Craig’s show of large-scale oil paintings depicting abandoned factories, diners, and other derelict interiors were striking visual meditations on the human cost of economic change. His work contrasted luminous color with inky darkness to evoke a haunting, melancholic sense of place, once full of life but now silent.
The paintings conveyed not just physical abandonment, but a haunting sense of lost livelihoods, communities and social promise. By referencing real post-industrial sites — some near Dayton — and drawing on philosophical and critical theories of capitalism and social decline, Craig’s paintings functioned as social commentary, spotlighting how economic transformation can reshape communities and erase collective memory. The result was an evocative visual reckoning of the Rustbelt.
Blue House Gallery showed work of incarcerated artist
Credit: Contributed
Credit: Contributed
The Returning Artists Guild (RAG), co-founded by formerly incarcerated artists Aimee Wissman and Kamisha Thomas, curated a show by currently jailed artist Joy Hoop at The Blue House Gallery, offering a rare public glimpse of art created behind bars.
Hoop’s mixed-media pieces, made from found and discarded materials such as recycled cardboard, fabric, and trash sourced in prison, transformed modest resources into tactile sculptures and collaged canvases rich with color, texture and symbolism. Grids and repeating patterns evoked themes of confinement, time, and resilience.
With all proceeds from sales going directly to Hoop, and financial support from the Blue House and Montgomery County, the show reflected RAG’s mission — to support incarcerated and formerly incarcerated artists through access, visibility and fair compensation.
Dana Wiley Gallery
Credit: Contributed
Credit: Contributed
Front Street-based Dana Wiley Gallery presented a show of stunning oil paintings by Wright State art professor Jeremy Long.
The exhibition showed a glimpse at Long’s process. Painting methodically, the artist creates several small sequential studies to figure out the composition and subject for a larger piece. These studies were on display alongside their resulting canvases, symbiotic “sister paintings”.
With a sort of structured chaos to the work, zones of color and clever planes fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. Cubist-inspired and “architectonic” in its geometry, each figure in “The Concert” was portrayed from a slightly different point of view.
“I don’t want somebody to come up close and feel like they’re wasting their time. I like having the painting turned into something that feels empathetic to whoever is looking at it by way of the handling,” said Long.
Wiley opened her commercial gallery in 2019, where she hosts five shows a year. Exhibitions are open to the public during First Fridays and Third Sundays, and are otherwise worth scheduling an appointment for viewing.
Dayton Society of Artists
Credit: Contributed
Credit: Contributed
A collaborate alliance of artists since 1938, the Dayton Society of Artists celebrated its 85th Anniversary in 2023. The gallery and artist studios are based in a historic house in St. Anne’s Hill, and host several member and juried exhibitions throughout the year.
Credit: Contributed
Credit: Contributed
Highlights included “The Future of Female”, guest curated by Seattle-based gallerist McLean Emenegger, focused on the ideals, hopes, and experiences of women-identifying artists, and a special exhibition of charcoal works by Dayton art phenom James Pate.
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