Carl Solway Gallery’s Archives Exhibition Reveals Six Decades of Art & Ephemera

BY MACKENZIE MANLEY

The Carl Solway Gallery’s current exhibition, Archives, highlights ephemera, sculpture and drawings from its 61-year history, functioning as a tribute to the work of the late gallerist Carl Solway and the artists he loved.

Archives: Carl Solway Gallery 19622023 is broken up into multiple parts, says Michael Solway, Carl’s son. When Michael returned to Cincinnati in 2011 after living in California for 13 years, he began quietly sorting through files of active and inactive artists, where he found documents, letters and gallery announcements dating back to as early as the 1960s.

“I started compiling this ephemera that I felt was very precious that needed to be preserved,” says Michael. “I started to make binders and put them in archival sleeves and began to make more comprehensive archival selections that at some point would really help determine the history of the gallery.”

Archives brings together multiple iterations of the gallery and the artistcurator relationships that formed throughout the decades. That history goes back to Cincinnati’s one-time Flair Gallery, which Carl opened in 1962 alongside his then-wife Gail, Michael’s mother. Michael says that space was the beginning of his father’s relationships with artists like John Cage and Buckminster Fuller. As cited on the Solway Gallery’s artist’s page for Cage, Carl said this of their friendship: “No one was more influential in helping shape both my personal life and professional career than John Cage. His thinking influenced and expanded the nature of music, dance, painting and our perception of both art and life.”

It’s fitting, then, that one of the first works gallery-goers encounter in the exhibit is Cage’s “Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel,” a nod to French painter Marcel Duchamp. The work consists of eight layers of translucent plexiglass with a brown tint, each printed with fragmented words and numbers.

“Cage was influential in introducing the gallery to other artists,” says Michael. “And that really is kind of a thread of what I’ve laid out is that it really is about the relationships of the artists that were involved with the gallery in 61 years.”

Other artists Carl worked with include Harry Bertoia, Helen Frankenthaler, Sam Gilliam, Ann Hamilton, Richard Hamilton, Charlotte Moorman, Claes Oldenburg, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, George Rickey, Mark Rothko, Saul Steinberg, Paul Stier, Joan Snyder, Andy Warhol and more.

While the whole show functions as an archive of the gallery’s history, within the show is what Michael is calling the Fuller Archive and the Nam June Paik Archive. Of the latter, visitors will see Paik’s sculpture “I Make Mistake after Mistake, but it always comes out Positive,” a conglomeration of vintage televisions, video cameras and other equipment arranged to be a body a la Transformers. The TVs display warped, moving imagery. Stare into the robot’s static and you may find yourself transfixed.

Nearby is a vitrine with arranged photographs of Paik and his work, both in color and in black and white, and other materials, including a postcard advertising the opening of the Carl Solway Gallery’s 1988 exhibition Metrobot. That show marked the unveiling of Paik’s first monumental public sculpture, the still-standing (and now iconic) “Metrobot” installed outside of the Contemporary Arts Center.

“When you say archives, it’s really a different kind of experience,” says Michael. “It requires somebody to take their time. You can’t come through and look at the archive and spin through it; you have to, in some way, take it all in and then decide what it all means. There’s a gestalt to the situation.”

If you walk through the exhibition multiple times, something new may catch your eye with each turn, whether it’s Warhol’s Pete Rose prints, a watercolor-and-ink piece by Keith Kleespies featuring Mickey Mouse’s beloved pooch, Pluto, or “An Ode to Cage,” as written (and signed) by Yoko Ono.

Archives also marks the gallery’s last show before it transitions from Carl Solway Gallery to The Solway Gallery. Located on 424 Findlay Street since the ‘90s, the gallery is housed in the Solway Building, so Michael says the transition feels natural.

The first show under the new name will open on September 21. Titled Tree Conscious, Michael describes it as a group show formed around the idea of trees as a symbolic, spiritual subject.

Archives: Carl Solway Gallery 1962-2023 runs through July 14 at the Solway Building, 424 Findlay Street, Over-the-Rhine. Info: solwaygallery.com.