The Docentitos Academy trains youths ages 9–12 years to be Weston Art Gallery docents.
During this fun-filled, two-week summer camp, students meet the artists and go behind the scenes of exhibitions to learn the inspiration and installation work that goes into creating a show. Daily activities include classes, artist talks, tours of the Aronoff Center’s Theaters, Museum visits, installation and studio visits, and a final project. Upon graduating, students lead tours of the gallery’s summer exhibitions.
The 2026 summer session will explore:
Zachary Armstrong: Encaustic House
Zachary Armstrong’s Encaustic House is an all-enveloping installation that meditates on the American childhood in all of its wonder, isolation, hope and trauma. At the center of this spatial experience is a life-sized house whose roof, walls, ceilings and floors are made up of large, bolted together encaustic (pigmented wax medium in canvas) paintings. The exterior of the house is a direct 3-dimensional rendering of a doll house thar was a small, quiet but consistent presence in Armstrong’s childhood. The Interior walls/paintings of the house are complex, chaotic visual experiences that are dense with art historical references, personal anecdotes, collective cultural memory and dark and humorous contemporary Americana.
Overall, the installation is arranged like a display at the French art salons in the 17th-20th century: with a massive quantity of works. For Armstrong there is irony and conflict in today’s society where goods are regularly reproduced and sold in abundance, except for in the art world, where an object’s uniqueness is valued.
Bridgette Bogle: Bad Boundaries
Bridgette Bogle stretches, pads, paints, and secures a variety of domestic materials into three-dimensional works that are sometimes free-standing and sometimes displayed on the wall. These soft pieces echo the pliable shapes of the human body, while also referencing objects of household care and coziness like cushions and bedding. Pillows, like the maternal body, are associated with softness and comfort but also signify ideas of overabundance, suffocation, and smothering. In these works, fabric stands in as a metaphor for motherhood and family life. Many of these pieces suggest aspects of Bogle's own body and experience.
A broader implication in Bogle's work connects with ideas of craft, ingenuity, and repurposing done primarily by women within the anonymous context of family life and "women's work" throughout history. But Bogle's practice also draws from more recent "craft" traditions, including the artists of Gee's Bend and others such as Ed Rossbach, Rosemarie Trockel, Andrea Zittel, and Igshaan Adams. Bogle is part a lineage of artists who use personal and signature approaches to textiles and fabrics to bring to light issues of labor and identity that are intertwined with modern textile production. Her work illustrates that fabric and sewing are a quintessential link between lived experience and art.
Aaron Coleman: Sentinels
Aaron Coleman’s studio practice comprises an amalgam of processes to create works that address how mundane and seemingly anodyne artifacts embody the complex and pervasive history of race/racism and class/classicism in the United States. Found objects and materials are juxtaposed releasing uncomfortable truths and suppressed stories that are both personal and political. His creative production is grounded in a critical analysis of authoritarian systems of information, control, and power, focusing on how religion, science and anthropology contribute to and sustain race and class-based oppression.
In the series of wall mounted and floor based sculptural assemblages under the moniker “Sentinels”, Coleman uses a grounding of large, extricated sections of basketball courts harvested from defunct recreation centers from a once thriving black cultural and business community in central Indianapolis, his hometown. Atop the gym floor foundation, Coleman uses other found objects from abandoned houses and derelict buildings in central Indianapolis to make structures that are deeply informed by the long African tradition of mask making. These eight foot high “sentinels” surround viewers in a manner that is both protective and menacing. They are keepers of a collective history and harbingers of an uncertain present and future.
Docentitos 2026 Schedule:
Application Deadline: May 22, 2026 - Please see below to download an application
Personal Interview Date: TBD
Orientation with Docentitos and Families: Tuesday, June 16 from 6–7 pm
Docentitos Academy Session Dates
(Students must attend ALL dates below):
1st Day: Saturday, June 20 from 10 am–3 pm
1st Week: Monday, June 22 through Friday, June 26 from 9 am–3 pm
2nd Week: Monday, June 29 through Thursday, July 2 from 9 am–3 pm
Graduation/Opening Night:
Friday, July 3 from 6–8 pm
For more information, contact the Weston Art Gallery at
(513) 977-4165 or westonartgallery@cincinnatiarts.org
Sponsors: A.M. Kinney III, and Skyline Chili