Solway Gallery:  Shifting focus from the 20th century to now  

It is a small change. But there is something momentous about it, too.

In a recent email promoting his gallery’s current exhibition, Michael Solway said that the show “will be the final exhibition as the Carl Solway Gallery.”

 The gallery itself is not going away. Rather, it is transitioning into a new name. By the end of the summer, it will be known simply as “Solway Gallery.” They won‘t even have to change the URL of their website – solwaygallery.com.

So why the change? Carl Solway, the influential gallerist who began his career in his stepfather’s Findlay Market furniture store in the 1950s, died of cancer in 2020. Late in July, Michael Solway will become the gallery’s sole proprietor.

Effectively, Michael had been directing much of the gallery operations since he returned to Cincinnati in 2011 after working in Los Angeles for more than a decade. This name change will formalize that role.

“I didn’t want to use ‘closing,’ ” said Michael Solway. “Because we’re not closing. We’ll still be in the same location. And certain artists that you’ve seen here in the past will still be here. But it will be different.”

Much of that is because the art market itself has changed. Corporate art collections are now a much smaller part of the business than they were at the end of the last century. The same with the “collecting community,” said Solway. “It’s not what it was in the ’80s or ’90s.”

But there is something more substantive about the change. Carl Solway may have dealt in art. But his business was built around the relationships he developed with artists. Relationships with collectors were essential, too, but what he loved more than anything else was spending time in studios talking with artists. He loved to tell the story about the friendship he developed over a chessboard with noted musician John Cage back in the late 1960s.

Michael Solway’s way of interacting with artists is much the same as his father’s. It is the relationships with artists that are important. And Michael is developing relationships with a new generation of artists. The majority of the artists Carl Solway dealt with are no longer living.

“My roots are still in 20th-century art,” Michael told Movers & Makers in 2016. “But more and more of the art that we’re representing now is 21st-century art. Art that is being produced right now and reflects the things going on around us.”

All the more reason we should pay careful attention to the current exhibition, “ARCHIVES: Carl Solway Gallery 1962-2023,” which runs through July 14. It is a retrospective of the more than 60 years that the gallery served the collectors of our region. But “retrospective” makes it sound dry and clinical, like a Wikipedia list of “artists shown by the Carl Solway Gallery.” And this exhibition is anything but that.

As he was sorting through the business and personal records after his father’s death, Michael came upon a treasure trove of correspondence, sketches and ephemera chronicling the more mundane aspects of gallery life. But like photos and letters in your grandparents’ attics, the passage of time has invested these odds and ends with sometimes profound significance.

There are letters, sometimes no more than a few scratched-down notes, from art-world luminaries such as Buckminster Fuller, Helen Frankenthaler and Louise Nevelson.

There are a handful of greetings penned by various artists on the occasion of Cage’s 75th birthday. There is Yoko Ono’s “Ode to John Cage,” which begins “I remember John as a good cook. He was kind enough to invite my three husbands for summer.” And Takehisa Kosugi’s “75 for John Cage,” an oddly mesmerizing arrangement of 75 symbols – +, – and . – in neat rows on a folded piece of paper. And Mieko Shioni’s “Homage to John Cage,” printed on a small card which tells the bearer to “Take this card with you and make a performance which will transform the card into a mirror reflecting sunbeams toward John Cage.”

There is also an early work by Korean-American video artist Nam June Paik, with whom Carl Solway enjoyed a long and productive creative partnership. With Solway’s help, Cincinnati became a center for fabricating Paik’s works.

It’s a deliciously personal collection of what Michael Solway called “ephemera.” But if you have even the remotest interest in the history of 20th-century art, it is also an intimate chronicle of the second half of the century when New York was the center of the art universe. And thanks to Carl Solway, as this exhibition demonstrates, Cincinnati became a small but significant piece
of that universe.

‘ARCHIVES: Solway Gallery 1962-2023’ 

Through July 14. Tuesday-Friday:
9 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday: by appointment, Carl Solway Gallery, 424 Findlay St.

513-621-0069, www.solwaygallery.com