Curator of American Art at the Columbus Museum of Art Melissa Wolfe was curious, “What is that legacy that the contemporary Columbus art world draws from, and grows on?  What is its past?

Sometimes those things [artists] are known and sometimes, as this show has proven sometimes it’s not so well known.” What Wolfe is hinting at is a treasure trove of artistic gems to discover in the exhibition.

“While there are those “cornerstone artists I knew, and most people are going to know [like] George Bellows, and Emerson Burkhart but not everyone,” says Wolfe. You can also find works by familiar names Roy Lichtenstein, Roman Johnson, Elijah Pierce, or Alice Schille.

Whether any of these names are familiar to you or not, Wolfe has spread out a buffet of artists to pique your interest into what the artistic culture in Columbus was long before we know it as it is today.

The long threads that run through the diverse exhibition are the communities that cobbled together Columbus’s burgeoning art world.  Wolfe considers Columbus’s relative size as a city in comparison to larger art meccas such as New York City or Los Angeles. In those larger cities, supposes Wolfe, the communities don’t have to inter-mingle or “read the same newspapers, or show in the same shows.”

Here in our “unassuming, midwestern city” is a large enough base of artists to create an interesting mix of artists and communities but small enough to engender camaraderie and support of one’s fellow artists.

In the wonderful biographies that accompany each artist in the exhibition, you can learn about the strands that connect all of these artists together. Wolfe “installed artists next to each other who had relationships so you can get the story.  Even if you don’t get the relationship in the art work, you get the human story, and the narrative story, and the story of community.”  You can find out who taught who, who shared a studio or went to go hang out with Bellows in Woodstock, or distinguish a connection all on your own.

The variety of this show is truly at the heart of it.

“The show includes sculpture, and ceramics, and cartoons, and prints, and pastels, and oil, and folk artists, and academic artists,” smiles Wolfe, after taking a quick breath.  ”I really tried to get a sense of the mix because one of the hallmarks of the city is this really integrated mix of these artists.”

100 Years of Art is on view at the Riffe Gallery from January 26th to April 15th. Visit their website for hours and information.

Printmaker Sidney Chafetz has seen a lot of the world in his 89 years. He came of age during the Great Depression, saw ground combat in World War II and taught at the Ohio State University for the nearly four politically charged decades spanning the Civil Rights Era and the early Reagan years.

As an artist, Chafetz couldn’t ignore the upheaval around him. So instead, he picked up his chisel and went to work.

“I was discouraged by the role of politics in everyday life, where instead of working for the public good, people were looking for individual advantage,” Chafetz said. ”Politics has changed, but still those old problems of politics working for their own advantage rather than public welfare and good are still around us. So I’ve had to comment on that.”

An exhibition of Chafetz’s prints from the earliest days of his career to today is on display at the Columbus Museum of Art through September 23.

“Sid turns 90 next year and so (the exhibition) was on the cusp of this new era,” said Columbus Museum of Art curator Melissa Wolfe. ”He was a phenomenal printmaker very early in his career.  He had also created a new series that had not been on display at the museum yet: his (George W.) Bush series, a new political engagement for him. And I wanted to show him as continuing to be an incredibly engaged printmaker. So (the exhibition) runs all the way from the ’40s up until today and covers pretty much every one of his major themes that he’s known for.”

Through those themes, Chafetz’s artwork tells the tales of one who has lived. Trenchant commentary on political corruption, expressions of horrified indignation over the Holocaust and biting satire of academic hypocrisy beam like lasers through an assured printmaking technique and straight into viewers’ minds and souls. The social resonance of Chafetz’s work also has earned his prints places in some of the world’s most prestigious art collections.

But although the social criticism in Chafetz’s prints often cuts like a chisel to the bone, the artist’s philosophical bottom line informs every print he makes: “human beings count, politics counts, kindness counts.”

Shared Intelligence, an exhibit at the Columbus Museum of Art, explores the dynamic ways visual artists have been inspired by and used the photograph.

“Painting and photography are normally thought of as [being] in war with each other,” said Melissa Wolfe, curator of American art at CMA. “This show sort of suggests that maybe it’s more of a discussion.”

The exhibition of more than 75 paintings and photographs focuses on the work of American painters for whom the photograph has been essential to the development of their work, such as Thomas Eakins, Frederic Remington, Charles Sheeler, Georgia O’Keeffe, Norman Rockwell, Andy Warhol, and contemporary artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Chuck Close, David Hockney and Sherrie Levine.

“Both media, painting and photography, draw on each other and draw on all kinds of innovations and of conventions from each one of them to become better painting and to become more interesting photography,”  Wolfe said.

Major works by such ground-breaking photographers as Eadweard Muybridge, Alfred Stieglitz, Man Ray, Edward Weston, Walker Evans and Margaret Bourke-White will also be included.

“In the romantic notion of an artist, an artist is always inventing things out of their head,” said Jonathan Weinberg, Ph.D, who is an art historian, artist and curator.

Because of this romantic vision, photography is sometimes seen as a shortcut. But he said the artists who do photography will be the first to point out how time consuming it really is.

“It takes a lot of work to make these images even if they seem like you could do them yourself,” Weinberg said.

But in the end, the final image is what’s important, he said.

“It doesn’t matter how you make the image, it’s what you finally get in the image in the picture,” Weinberg said. “And any means to do that is fair game.”

Shared Intelligence is on view at the Columbus Museum of Art from Feb. 4 through April 24.

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• Columbus Museum of Art (CMA)
• Exhibit Review | Columbus Museum of Art: Exhibit focuses on painters who were inspired by photos (Columbus Dispatch)