Cincinnati Art Museum

Whitfield Lovell: Passages
March 1–May 26, 2024
Western & Southern Galleries (Galleries 232 and 233)
Ticketed. Free for Members.
Adult tickets: $12 in-person, $10 online
Seniors, college students and children 6–17 years: $8 in person, $6 online
Children 5 years & under: free

See the exhibition for free on Thursday nights from 5–8 p.m.; Tuesdays throughout April; and during Art After Dark on April 26 from 5–9 p.m.

Whitfield Lovell: Passages urges viewers to contemplate the ordinary lives and extraordinary journeys of the African American experience, while raising universal questions about identity, memory, and America’s collective heritage. More than 80 evocative multisensory installations, conté crayon drawings, and assemblages comprise this most comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s work to date.

Born in the Bronx, Lovell, a 2007 MacArthur Fellowship recipient, creates exquisite drawings, finding inspiration in photographs of unidentified African Americans taken between the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights Movement. He creates assemblages by pairing his drawings—on paper or salvaged wood boards—with found objects, many weathered by the passage of time. Some of Lovell’s assemblages appear in his larger installations, while others he presents as symbolic and enigmatic stand-alone tableaux. Works from his acclaimed Kin series evolve into his more recent productions, The Reds and Card Pieces.

Two of Lovell’s experiential installations, Deep River and Visitation: The Richmond Project, are brought together here for the first time. The monumental Deep River (2013) combines video projections, sound, drawings, and everyday objects. Documenting the perilous journey freedom seekers took by crossing the Tennessee River during the Civil War, Deep River addresses the struggle for freedom and its inherent themes of abandonment, death, life, and hope. At the same time, it invites viewers to consider the larger human quest for equality and the pursuit of a better life—matters that transcend time and geography. Visitation: The Richmond Project (2001) is a profound homage to the country’s first major Black entrepreneurial community. In this emotive installation, the artist pays tributes to the lives, names, and faces of the people of Jackson Ward in Richmond, Viriginia. Lovell explains, “the installations are about memory and heritage, and the markings that the past has made—and continues to make—on who we are.”

Free Admission

Woo Chong Yung 吳仲熊 (1898–1989), also known in the United States as C.Y. Woo, was a highly accomplished painter, calligrapher, and poet from Shanghai. From the 1920s to 1949, Woo was at the center of China’s cultural world, recognized in the art circles of both Shanghai and Beijing. Faced with political persecution in the 1960s, Woo migrated to Columbus, Ohio right before the Cultural Revolution. Once in the United States, Woo became an active presence in the local community, teaching classes in Chinese painting and martial arts and contributing his talents to local arts councils and ethnic festivals in Columbus and central Ohio. By the end of his life, he had essentially become a living legend in Columbus.

From Shanghai to Ohio: Woo Chong Yung (1898–1989) features 88 works, including painting and calligraphy, carved seals, and a Taiji sword drawn from the collections of the Cincinnati Art Museum and The Frank Museum of Art at Otterbein University. Few of these paintings have ever been published or publicly displayed. Woo’s lifetime body of work illustrates how his remarkable experiences of emigrating from China and becoming an American utterly transformed and reshaped both his life and painti

Do you love to read? Love art? Join librarians from the Public Library and Hamilton County and CAM staff for this bi-monthly book club. See the Story combines works of fiction & non-fiction by authors from around the world with work from the museum’s collection.

Free. Reservations not required.

Join us in celebrating Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) Heritage Month and our latest exhibition From Shanghai to Ohio: Woo Chong Yung! Enjoy music from DJ Hi David, traditional Chinese performances and art-making activities, cash bars, food for purchase, and a photobooth provided by Framester. #ArtAfterDarkCincy

Parking is limited. Please arrive early or consider using a rideshare service. If museum parking lots are full, consider offsite parking in Eden Park and throughout Mount Adams.

If you need accessibility accommodations, please contact us in advance at access@cincyart.org.

Members: Free
General public: $20
Students: $5
Reservations required. Reservations will open one month before the event. Limited tickets available.

Join us for a special presentation by Adrienne L. Childs, PhD, esteemed independent scholar, art historian, and curator celebrating the opening of the exhibition, Rodin | Response: FIELD Family Secrets. Dr. Childs will draw on her deep experience exploring the connections between the birth of modernism and contemporary art—across lines of culture, race, gender, and power structures—to address the underpinnings of this exhibition. Her talk examines the contemporary artistic and curatorial practice of response: how artists interpret, expand, and reorder the history of art.

*Please note: Museum lectures will take place in Gallery 105 during the renovation of the lower level.

About the Guest Speaker:
Adrienne L. Childs is an independent scholar, art historian, and curator. She is Senior Consulting Curator at The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. Her current book project is an exploration of Black figures in European decorative arts entitled Ornamental Blackness: The Black Figure in European Decorative Arts, forthcoming from Yale University Press. She recently co-curated The Colour of Anxiety: Race, Sexuality and Disorder in Victorian Sculpture at The Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, England. She was the guest curator of Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition at The Phillips Collection in Washington DC, 2020.

In April 2022 the High Museum of Art awarded Childs the 2022 Driskell Prize in recognition of her contribution to African American art and art history.

Childs co-curated The Black Figure in the European Imaginary at the Rollins Art Museum at Rollins College in 2017. She is co-editor of the volume essays Blacks and Blackness in European Art of the Long Nineteenth Century, Routledge. She also contributed an essay on art and activism to Volume V, part II of The Image of the Black in Western Art edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and David Bindman.

As former curator at the David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, she curated many exhibitions including Her Story: Lithographs by Margo Humphrey; Arabesque: The Art of Stephanie Pogue; Creative Spirit: The Art of David C. Driskell and Tradition Redefined: The Larry and Brenda Thompson Collection of African American Art.

Childs holds a BA from Georgetown University, an MBA from Howard University, and a PhD in the History of Art from the University of Maryland. Learn more at adriennelchilds.com.

Rodin | Response: FIELD Family Secrets is organized by the Cincinnati Art Museum in collaboration with Supermrin and the School of Art, University of Cincinnati, and with the generous support of Iris Cantor.

Sponsored by the Harold C. Schott Foundation.

Image credit: Auguste Rodin (French, 1840–1917), Jacques de Wissant (detail), 1885–86, cast 1989, bronze, h. 83 7/8 in. (223.2 cm), Courtesy of Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Foundation, Photo Addison Doty.

Free Admission

Four full-scale, bronze figures by renowned sculptor Auguste Rodin (French, 1840–1917) will be on view at the Cincinnati Art Museum (CAM) this summer. Alongside them, visitors will see the culmination of a research and creative project led by artist and educator Supermrin that involved contemporary artists, University of Cincinnati (UC) undergraduates, and the breadth of CAM’s collections. Rodin | Response: FIELD family secrets will run June 14–September 8, 2024.

Rodin conceived the statues in the 1880s as part of The Burghers of Calais. One of the artist’s most revered and recognizable works, the monument commemorates six leading citizens of Calais who offered their lives to save their city in the mid-1300s.

These monumental bronzes provided the starting point for a semester-long journey of study, conversation, critique, and creation that took place across several courses at UC’s School of Art. The project was shaped through FIELD, Supermrin’s (Mrin Aggarwal) decolonial bio-art practice. The group worked to respond to Rodin’s accomplishments in sculpture and the complex history of France and its colonies at the turn of the 20th century, exploring the afterlives of modernism and colonialism through the art of today.

Rodin | Response: FIELD Family Secrets is organized by the Cincinnati Art Museum in collaboration with Supermrin and the School of Art, University of Cincinnati, and with the participation of the Iris Cantor Collection. The exhibition is sponsored by the Harold C. Schott Foundation.

Reservations required. Capacity is limited.
Members: $7
General public: $15
Tickets will be available for purchase one month prior to the event.

Join us for a gallery chat and yoga flow in Gallery 229. This class is accessible to participants of all levels and abilities, and various modifications will be offered.

Guests must bring their own yoga mats.

Water bottles are not allowed in the galleries.

In celebration of hip hop’s remarkable, decades-long impact and influence on society, the Cincinnati Art Museum (CAM) will host the groundbreaking exhibition The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century, on view from June 28–September 29, 2024.

The multimedia exhibition showcases more than 90 works of art by some of today’s most important and celebrated artists–such as Banksy, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Roberto Lugo, Carrie Mae Weems, Mark Bradford, William Cordova, Hassan Hajjaj and Hank Willis Thomas–and fashion brands, with looks from Chanel, Gucci, Cross Colours, Vivienne Westwood and Virgil Abloh’s collections for Louis Vuitton. A range of music ephemera will also be on display.

Discovering Ansel Adams
September 27, 2024–January 19, 2025
The Thomas R. Schiff Gallery (Gallery 234 & 235)
Ticketed. Free for Members. Save $2 when purchasing tickets online.
Adult tickets: $12 in-person, $10 online
Seniors, college students and children 6–17 years: $8 in person, $6 online
Children 5 years & under: free

See the exhibition for free on Thursday nights from 5–8 p.m. and during Art After Dark on September 27 and October 25 from 5–9 p.m. FotoFocus passport holders have free entry from September 27–October 31.

Premiering at the Cincinnati Art Museum, Discovering Ansel Adams provides an unprecedented exploration of the early career of Ansel Adams (1902–1984), demonstrating how, between 1916 and the 1940s, Adams developed from a 14-year-old tourist with a camera into America’s most celebrated photographer. Drawn from the definitive Adams collection at the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, the exhibition brings together approximately 80 virtuosic photographs with unique ephemera including the artist’s handwritten correspondence, snapshots, personal possessions, and photographic working materials. Featured works range from small, one-of-a-kind photographs from Adams’s teenage years to jaw-dropping mural-sized prints of his most iconic mature views. Join the artist on his journey from teenage musician to young mountaineer, as he makes his first pictures at Yosemite, experiences the American Southwest, learns how to communicate with a broad national audience, and undertakes an epic quest to photograph America’s national parks. Along the way, discover how Ansel Adams became Ansel Adams.

Founded in 1975 by the President of University of Arizona and Ansel Adams, the Center for Creative Photography is one of the world’s finest institutions for the study of the history of photography, and a singularly important archive for Ansel Adams studies. Discovering Ansel Adams presents a rare opportunity to encounter the CCP’s Ansel Adams collection outside of Arizona.