SEASON 23 EXHIBITIONS
September 2026 - August 2027
In September of 2026 Manifest celebrated the opening of its 567th exhibition
produced in our Woodburn Avenue galleries in East Walnut Hills, Cincinnati, Ohio.
This is a historic season for our artist-run organization, marking twenty-three years
in our original location as Manifest prepares for the next chapter in a new permanent home.
This exhibition season is financially assisted by a grant from the Ohio Arts Council, and
by many individual donors across the country and beyond who support Manifest's Annual Fund.
You can donate here to help keep our nonprofit programming growing!
| November 6 - December 4, 2026 |
Ticketed Preview - Annual Fund Benefit |
main gallery
COUNTERFORM Things happen. Good and bad, large and small, events occur and demand something of us. Our responses to what happens shape the major arcs of our lives. A counterform is a shape defined by what surrounds it—the space that exists only because something else acted first. Reactions range from impulsive acts of defiance against authority to sustained communal resistance and organized campaigns for change. They are the second attempts after an experiment or failure, where we apply what the first attempt taught us. Some reactions are so dependable—like vinegar meeting baking soda, fizzing into water and carbon dioxide—that they become foundations for larger plans. COUNTERFORM is an exhibition about the shape, size, and proportion of our responses: to culture, to form, to action, to an extended hand, to conversation, to intentions. In the aftermath of change, what do we choose to do next? For this exhibit 54 artists submitted 162 works from 18 states and 5 countries, including Canada, China, Greece, South Korea, and the United States. Thirteen works by the following 10 artists from 6 states and China were selected by a blind jury process for presentation in the gallery and the Manifest Exhibition Annual publication. We are pleased to present works by: Ken Hochberg Mary Hood Catherine Jacobi Jacob Jordan Sarah Krepp David Lobdell Shereen Lobdell Jian Ma Amelia Morris Mary Nees
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Mary Hood
Catherine Jacobi
Sarah Krepp
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drawing room + parallel space
VISAGE As we noted when Manifest last approached the theme of portraiture, eight years ago, technology has accelerated our retreat into the head, encouraging 'portraiture' on a mass scale through social networks and their flood of selfies. Facial recognition tools sort our photos of friends and family by face. Zoom calls fix our attention on the front of the human head. A premium has been placed on visual identity. The center of our humanity has coalesced into the mind, behind the face. When we think of one another, we begin, almost always, with the face. Recognition matters. Throughout art history, the artist's ability to capture not only a likeness but the character, even the spirit, of the subject has defined entire careers. The portrait remains one of art's most enduring and demanding subjects: a negotiation between observation and interpretation, between who the subject is and what the artist sees. With this in mind, we again invited artists to submit works that address the portrait. All interpretations and explorations were welcome—traditional and non-traditional approaches in any media, self-portraits or portraits of others, singular figures or groups. For this exhibit 163 artists submitted 546 works from 34 states and 10 countries, including Bulgaria, Canada, Colombia, England, France, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Poland, and the United States. Twenty-four works by the following 20 artists from 12 states, Canada, and Poland were selected by a blind jury process for presentation in the gallery and the Manifest Exhibition Annual publication. We are pleased to present works by: Kate Brockman Jeanne Ciravolo Kim Comstock Steven DaLuz Gaela Erwin Kelly Franklin Milena Guberinic Miles Hall Steven Hudson RD Mitchell Bill Murphy Peggy Nichols Molly Marie Nuzzo Eric Penington Justin Elliot Poole Michele Taber Ira Upin Derek Wilkinson Karolina Zakharova
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Jeanne Ciravolo
Michele Taber
Steven Hudson
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central gallery + north gallery
HYPERVIEW What is the smallest you’ve ever felt? Given that we perceive everything through the senses of our own bodies, it takes a lot to pull us out of ourselves, to decenter our particular perceptions from the middle of the universe. The views of earth from space and the scattering of galaxies in deep-field images may be the most significant illustrations of our smallness in the face of everything that exists. Aside from the size of the universe itself, there is plenty within it that reinforces the hierarchy of scale: the sublime expanse of the oceans, gigantic ecological timescales, lumbering machinery requiring squealing brakes, incomprehensible storms swirling on gas giants, the heaving body of a large predator, the sheer number of insects on earth. Even these direct pictures of the universe, however, are hard to fully grasp; the scale of everything slips out of comprehension. We can only hold them in pieces, and not in their enormous entirety. Scaling down then to our comprehension of largeness and smallness, we understand that our reaction to scale is caused by our perception of it. Physical scale inspires feelings of both protection and megalophobia. Perceptual scale permits us to take a long view of things, while also challenging our egos. Things of great scale humble us. They also inspire awe. What are the consequences of our awe? HYPERVIEW is an exhibition about scale, largeness, and vastness, both formal and conceptual. For this exhibit 58 artists submitted 177 works from 25 states and 4 countries, including China, Israel, Taiwan, and the United States. Fourteen works by the following 11 artists from 7 states, Canada, and Israel were selected by a blind jury process for presentation in the gallery and the Manifest Exhibition Annual publication. We are pleased to present works by: Benjamin Bellamacina Tom Crawford Tianyuan Fang Christianna Kreiss Marina Batel Levitan Caroline Maxwell Rosalyn Richards Amy Schissel Ying-Fang Shen Ira Upin Nathan Wright
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Amy Schissel
Tianyuan Fang
Ying-Fang Shen
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| December 11, 2026 - January 8, 2027 |
Ticketed Preview - Annual Fund Benefit: |
| January 22 - February 19, 2027 | Ticketed Preview - Annual Fund Benefit: |
| March 5 - April 2, 2027 |
Ticketed Preview - Annual Fund Benefit: |
| April 16 - May 14, 2027 |
Ticketed Preview - Annual Fund Benefit: |
| May 28 - June 25, 2027 |
Ticketed Preview - Annual Fund Benefit: |
| July 9 - August 6, 2027 |
Ticketed Preview - Annual Fund Benefit: |
| August 13 - September 10, 2027 SEASON 23 FINALÉ |
Ticketed Preview - Annual Fund Benefit: |
——— END OF SEASON 23 ———
THANK YOU!
PREVIOUS SEASON 23 EXHIBITS:
Season 23 Launch |
Ticketed Preview - Annual Fund Benefit |
main gallery
THE SWEEP OF TIME: How does the photographic moment relate to what persists—in time, in meaning, in us? Photography holds two things at once: the instant, and what endures beyond it. Marcus Aurelius wrote of contemplating "the sweep of time" as a way to ease the weight of present concerns—to find orientation not in the turbulence of the moment, but in the longer arcs of history, memory, and continuity. The Sweep of Time: Beyond the Horizon took that idea as its premise and invited lens-based artists to share works that explore it. The horizon here is not a boundary. It is an opening—a threshold between what is immediate and what persists, between the visible and what lies just beyond seeing. Works considered by our jury and ultimately included in this exhibition may address any subject, era, or form; what matters is not the topic but the orientation—a quality of expanded vision in which the image reaches past its own moment, holding the immediate and the enduring in the same frame. Such images resist the reactive pull of the present and invite the viewer to slow down, look further, and reconsider their own place within the unfolding of time. The Sweep of Time: Beyond the Horizon is presented as part of the 2026 FotoFocus Biennial, The Long View. In a moment of persistent turbulence, this exhibition affirms art's role as a stabilizing force—one that fosters clarity, patience, and a deeper sense of orientation within time. Support for this exhibition was provided by FotoFocus. For this exhibit 104 artists submitted 374 works from 27 states and 4 countries, including Canada, England, Israel, and the United States. Fifteen works by the following 10 artists from 7 states were selected by a blind jury process for presentation in the gallery and the Manifest Exhibition Annual publication. We are pleased to present works by: Dylan Bannister Margaret Day Margo Geddes Carol Henry Patricia Howard Chuck Miller Birgit Rudel PJ Sturdevant Werner Sun Crystal Tursich
A FotoFocus Biennial
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Patricia Howard
Birgit Rudel
PJ Sturdevant
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drawing room - solo exhibit
UNBUILT TERRAIN Patrick D. Wilson is an Associate Professor of Sculpture at Western Michigan University's Frostic School of Art. He holds a BA from Gustavus Adolphus College and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, where he later served on the visiting faculty. Wilson's multidisciplinary practice employs sculpture, photography, and digital media to investigate urban development, futurism, and the relationship between technological and social change. Wilson has exhibited nationally and internationally at institutions and venues including the Treasure Hill Artist Village in Taipei, Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing, SFMOMA Artists Gallery, the Sharjah Art Museum in the UAE, the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art, the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, NASA Ames Research Center, and the Stanford Art Gallery. He has permanent public works at the University of Minnesota Crookston, the Mall of America, and Buffalo Creek Art Center in Nevada. Wilson's work is grounded in place-based research. In 2012, he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to China. He has been an artist in residence at the Swatch Art Peace Hotel, Joshua Tree Highlands Artist Residency, the Buffalo Creek Art Center in Nevada, Penland School of Craft in North Carolina, Agder Kunstsenter in Norway, and Treasure Hill Artist Village in Taiwan.
Of his work Wilson states, in part: Unbuilt Terrain is a selection of work spanning more than a decade of investigation at the intersection of photography, sculpture, and digital mediation. During this time, I have employed place-based photographic research, 3D modeling, virtual reality, digital rendering, and sculptural fabrication processes to transform photographic information into physical form. Together, these media function not simply as tools of representation, but as a framework for imagining experiences of place and understanding the physical, social, and political forces shaping the spaces that surround us.
This exhibition was assembled from among 188 proposals submitted for Manifest’s 23rd season. Solo and two-person exhibitions are selected through Manifest’s curatorial review process, led by the Executive Director and Chief Curator, and developed in collaboration with the exhibition coordinator.
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parallel space - solo exhibit
Reading Fast to Catch the Jerry Birchfield (b. 1985) lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned a BFA in Photography from the Cleveland Institute of Art and an MFA from Cornell University. He is an artist, a Full-Time Lecturer in photography at Case Western Reserve University, and the founder of Field Studio. Birchfield is a recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, a think[box] Faculty Fellowship from CWRU, and an Artist Forward Fund award from SPACES. Through Field Studio, he photographed exhibitions for the FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art catalogs and completed a large-scale photography project for inclusion in Art in Nature: Rowdy Meadow Sculpture Park published earlier this year. Solo exhibitions include A Pale, A Post, A Boundary at Devening Projects in Chicago; Jerry Birchfield: Asleep in the Dust at the Akron Art Museum; and Stagger When Seeing Visions organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art at the Transformer Station. His work has been included in group exhibitions at Abattoir, the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, 2731 Prospect, Reinberger Gallery, and SPACES in Cleveland; Riffe Gallery and ROYGBIV in Columbus; the Print Center in Philadelphia; Schema Projects and Foley Gallery in New York; and the Los Angeles Center of Photography. His work is included in the collections of the Akron Art Museum, Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland Museum of Art, CWRU Putnam Collection, and University Hospitals and has appeared in the Akron Beacon Journal, The Columbus Dispatch, Der Greif, I Like Your Work, and The Plain Dealer.
Of his work Birchfield states, in part: Back and fill is a term that refers to a series of small movements used to maneuver a sailboat through a narrow area. It is also an idiom that refers to the act of reneging on a previous statement or promise. The phrase is appropriate here for describing both the production and operation of my work, as each depends on a series of small oscillating shifts. I use a variety of techniques, materials and processes including film and digital photography, darkroom processes, inkjet printing, print making, drawing, sculpture, installation, books, and collaborative performance. Materials are swept up, poured out, assembled, rearranged, staged, photographed, traced, cut, encased, built up, torn down, stripped back, excavated from and reabsorbed by detritus, leftovers and castoffs generated by events within the studio. Though the works move across materials and processes, they remain deeply rooted in a concern for the multilayered operation of images and the roles of the components that make them perceptible including representation, materiality, and spectatorship. Works invite viewers to trace the source of their origin and the processes by which they were made, purporting that this mental tracing is as pertinent as the image-objects themselves. As the work maneuvers through narrow spaces and reneges on previous statements, sense must be made of its parts, allowing positions of understanding to be acknowledged then reaffirmed or changed.
This exhibition was assembled from among 188 proposals submitted for Manifest’s 23rd season. Solo and two-person exhibitions are selected through Manifest’s curatorial review process, led by the Executive Director and Chief Curator, and developed in collaboration with the exhibition coordinator. |
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central gallery - solo exhibit
Between Views Paho Mann was born in 1978 on his parents' homestead near Snowflake, Arizona. In 1992 he moved with his family to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where in 2001 he received a BFA from the University of New Mexico. He received his MFA from Arizona State University in 2007. Currently, Mann lives and works in Dallas, Texas, where he is a Professor of Studio Art at the University of North Texas. Paho Mann's work is represented by Galleri Urbane in Dallas, TX. Mann has had work included in exhibitions at the Arizona State University Art Museum (Tempe, AZ), Tucson Museum of Art (Tucson, AZ), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN), and the Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh, PA), among others. His work is included in the collections of the Tucson Museum of Art, the Museum at Texas Tech University, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, and the City of Phoenix Public Art Program.
Of his work Mann states, in part: My work investigates the evolving relationships between photography, technology, and perception. I present large-scale photographic prints that emerge from a dialogue between traditional still-life arrangements and the unseen mechanisms of computer vision. The resulting images are carefully constructed tableaus of broken cameras, outdated consumer electronics, flowers, and digitally rendered objects, photographed extensively and transformed into 3D models through photogrammetry software. During this process, I extract and manipulate the ephemeral data - intermediate visualizations that software uses to calculate depth and form - before they are discarded. Through this process, the photographs explore not only the fluid boundary between human and machine vision but also the instability of representation in a time of rapid technological change... The work presents photography as an evolving language - one that not only records but also interprets, distorts, and speculates - offering viewers a space to reflect on their own relationship to technology, image-making, and the constructed realities we inhabit.
This exhibition was assembled from among 188 proposals submitted for Manifest’s 23rd season. Solo and two-person exhibitions are selected through Manifest’s curatorial review process, led by the Executive Director and Chief Curator, and developed in collaboration with the exhibition coordinator.
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north gallery - solo exhibit
An Entanglement of Space and Time Ricardo Barros is a photographer, writer, curator, and filmmaker. His works are in the permanent collections of eleven museums, including the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Art of São Paulo, and the Museum of Image and Sound, also in São Paulo, Brazil. In 2004, Barros published Facing Sculpture: A Portfolio of Portraits, Sculpture and Related Ideas, a book of portraiture that also addresses contemporary sculpture. Magdalena Abakanowicz, one of the sculptors portrayed, called it "a work beyond categories." He was awarded a Fellowship in Photography by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts in 1984 and 2021. He also received The Present Tense Prize in 2024 from ArtsWorcester for "work that shows new practices, artistic risk-taking, and excellence in execution." Ricardo Barros lives in Fitchburg, Massachusetts.
Of his work Barros states: A flattened 360-degree panorama is like a prism that refracts light. We can't actually see sunlight. We see what the sunlight illuminates. But if you hold a prism to the sunlight, it refracts and separates the different wavelengths. We see different colors. And so it is with these photographs. They refract unseen observations. Through distorted topography and a compressed sense of time, they gift insight into things we thought we already knew.
This exhibition was assembled from among 188 proposals submitted for Manifest’s 23rd season. Solo and two-person exhibitions are selected through Manifest’s curatorial review process, led by the Executive Director and Chief Curator, and developed in collaboration with the exhibition coordinator.
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Manifest is supported by sustainability funding from
the Ohio Arts Council, and through the generous direct contributions of hundreds of individual supporters and private foundations who care deeply about Manifest's mission for the visual arts. |
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