Islands Are Not Forever

The Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery

January 30 - March 15, 2026

650 Walnut Street

Cincinnati, Ohio

The Cincinnati Arts Association’s Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery in the Aronoff Center for the Arts is elated to announce the exhibition John Brooks: Islands Are Not Forever, a series of large-scale drawings that are installed as an immersive environment.

Islands Are Not Forever holds a mirror to the bewildering complexity of an anachronistic depiction of time and history – both personal and collective. Brooks’ on-going, large scale drawing project yields a panoramic landscape inhabited by film stars, artists, and friends, adorned with both personal and cultural motifs, locales, and artistic innuendos. His subjects are selected from ruminations on history and current events, past personal and shared experiences or drawn from the flux of life. They are arranged in an ongoing stream of recollection in a range from forceful to dreamlike with some figures and ideas in confronting postures that demand attention and others that drift softly upon the paper, the way an image is summoned from behind closed eyelids.

Collectively the installation of these 28 drawings (there are now 33 to date... and counting) address the notion of “Queer Time” - the concept among certain aestheticians and philosophers that suggests that any deviation from historical or individual linearity inherently alludes to a queer perspective and sensibility.

John Brooks intends to continue making these drawings for the rest of his life. In that sense, Islands Are Not Forever is an incomplete cycle, a list of ingredients without instructions. Its force is born not only from visual richness, but from its function as a collective mnemonic device, an invitation to the beholder to sit in reverence, to make a connection, to follow the path forward, or back.