Exhibitions

Soft Steps

Over the summer, museum visitors joined Artist in Residence Anissa Pulcheon in making collaborative works of art exploring dreams

Emerging Architectural Perspectives

Student Projects from the School of Architecture and Interior Design at the University of Cincinnati in conjunction with the 20th Anniversary of the CAC’s Zaha Hadid designed building

Robert O'Neal: Open To All

The first museum retrospective of Cincinnati-based painter and activist, representing the rich histories of Cincinnati's Black communities

Luis Camnitzer: Monuments to Unknown Heroes

A series of posters to under-recognized heroes by more than 100 artists, expanding upon a call organized in the early days of the 2020 pandemic.

Baseera Khan: Weight on History

Addressing issues of access, cultural appropriation, and migration

The Children's Art Show

At the CAC, artists of all ages are celebrated. Big or small, everyone's art is important and the Community Gallery is a special place for creative work to be recognized.

Ecologies of Elsewhere

Harnessing the physical and symbolic properties of plants as ontological agents of healing and resilience, as well as markers of exploitation and extraction

Mary Flinker's Trip Show

Expressive collection of recent work from a beloved member of the CAC community.

Through Her Eyes: Mama Representation Project

Through Her Eyes: Mama Representation is a multimedia explorative project centering the unique experiences of Black motherhood. The collaborative project is a platform for postpartum Black mamas to reclaim their stories and challenge stereotypes and the misogynoir that dominates the current narrative.

Expressions by Cincinnati Asian American Artists

This exhibition celebrates the creativity and achievements of regional Asian American artists during the Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.

School Outreach Program Student Art Show

The Making of Me: Promoting and Analyzing Social Justice Through Children's Media

Regional Connections: A Community Gallery Installation by Region 90

Region 90, the artist collective started by Maxine Wallace and Cierra Fogle seeks to connect, empower, and support artists local to Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and Louisville. "Regional Connections" will feature works by several artists in the collective in the CAC Community Gallery.

Ready to Bolt: 2023 MFA Thesis Exhibition

A culmination of thesis projects from local MFA students

Cameron Granger: The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Heaven

Meditations on Black history and culture, and the communities that continue to thrive, persist, and love

Elsewhere Within: Xavier Student Response Show

Student members of the Xavier Art Society present their responses to the themes in Ecologies of Elsewhere through their own artmaking practice.

Clay Holds Water, Water Holds Memory

A celebration, like electrical current moving from negative to positive, of the work that has been brought about by the perseverance of the Black women and Black non-binary artists working in clay.

Under the Canopy

This installation by interdisciplinary and summer 2022 Co-LAB artist Julia Orquera Bianco uses Burnet Woods and our relationships to it as its subjects. Manipulating light through entrancing canopy banners, the exhibit invites the public to deepen their connection to nature through art.

A Community Gallery Installation by DUMPTRUCK

Spaghetti Midwestern is a cityscape installation meant to remind the viewer of the types of skylines and highway memorabilia found in middle America. The work will be a combination of a site-specific installation where the artists will drape fibers on the Community Gallery walls to create city-like structures and a lovingly rendered tapestry portrait of home.

Images on which to build, 1970s-1990s

Activism, education, and media production in trans, queer, and feminist movements

On the Line: Documents of Risk and Faith

A group exhibition examining the complex relationship between humans and nature

Napoleon Maddox: What You Holdin'?

Director, MC, multimedia artist, and Cincinnati-native Napoleon Maddox will host our October-January CoLAB series and exhibition titled What You Holdin’?. Inspired by the resourcefulness of the Black Arts tradition, this program is centered around the notion of ‘designing your future and life, using your own blueprint with the materials on hand.’

Unraveling

Unraveling is a popup exhibition created in response to the show Baseera Khan: Weight on History and is hosted by the Contemporary Arts Center.

Center of Unfinished Business by Contemporary And (C&)

A roving reading room and discussion-based program organized by the multimedia platform Contemporary And (C&) and conceived by C& co-founders and artistic directors Julia Grosse and Yvette Mutumba. Through the selection of significant and at times unsettling texts, the installation highlights the ubiquitous traces of colonialism that extend throughout all facets of life.

Artist-Run Spaces

A convening of independent arts organizations, nonprofits, and collectives throughout Ohio and northern Kentucky. Discover more than ten boundary-pushing communities of art makers.

Breaking Water

Breaking Water is a group exhibition bringing together works in installation, video, photography, painting, sculpture, and performance that offer a range of approaches to the subject of water, liquidity, and feminism.

Asha Ama's NEW MOON, a Co-LAB Exhibition

School Outreach Program Student Art Show

A student art show from the CAC's School Outreach Program participants

Critical Practice: MFA Exhibition

Isa Gagarin: Risåki (Receding Wave)

The Regional

The first major multi-museum survey dedicated to contemporary artists based in the Midwest.

Sreshta Rit Premnath: Grave/Grove

For his solo exhibition at the CAC, Premnath explores how shared spaces of growth and care, such as community gardens or nurseries, can be embedded within dehumanizing spaces of control or discipline.

Marwa Arsanios: A Letter Inside a Letter

Arsanios’ four-part film series contrasts frameworks of ownership, extraction, and accumulation, with ideas associated with feminism, collectivism, and grassroots revolt.

Hellen Ascoli, Cien Tierras

For her first solo museum exhibition, Ascoli presents several new works including a large-scale textile installation in the CAC’s lobby, a site-responsive kinetic wall sculpture, text-based weavings, videos displayed in custom-built furniture, and more.

Wild Frictions

Attentive to the ways in which artists monitor, contemplate, and intervene in societies as they change, Wild Frictions brings together works that reflect some of the anxieties, disruptions, and tensions which arose or intensified during 2020.

Joan Tanner, FLAW

In this site-specific installation, net-like structures hang from the ceiling, corrugated fiberglass panels disguise corners and wrap around columns, while freestanding elements of cut and painted wood populate the floor.

Steffani Jemison, End over End

This exhibition brings together two videos, alongside a new suite of kinetic sculptural objects and conceptual drawings on glass that unfold as a series of experiments, reflecting Jemison’s interest in performance and the politics of embodiment.

Marjolijn Dijkman

By documenting materials linked to what may become one of the largest lithium mines in the world in Manono in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Dijkman comments on the ecological fallout generated from mining this valuable mineral and the toxic electronic waste produced as a result of the rise of green energy.

Vhils

Vhils is renowned for his unusual technique of removing the surface layers of urban walls to create riveting portraits and imagery. Using construction tools like hammers, chisels and pneumatic drills, the artist exposes and confronts architectural surfaces as they narrate the history of a city itself.

Emerge

A result of months of discussion, studio visits, and exchanges between university faculty, museum administrators, and art students, the MFA exhibition often serves as students' first presentation in museum context.

Tania Candiani

Produced over the course of two years and several visits to Cincinnati, Sounding Labor, Silent Bodies features historical visual ephemera alongside a new suite of artwork that examines the contradictions present in the rhetoric of progress that accompanied America’s industrial past.

A Thread of Light

Attia’s research-based practice focuses on understanding the individual, national, and societal wounds shaped by Western imperialism and its aftereffects.

Kahlil Robert Irving

Assembling images and materials drawn from diverse sources and histories, Kahlil Robert Irving works with sculpture, textile, and digital media to reflect upon his own biography and the socio-political context of Black life in the Midwest.

Tom Schiff: Surrounded by Art

Cincinnati-based photographer Tom Schiff utilizes the photographic panorama technique, as well as a deliberate framing and moving of the camera, to turn the museum into a medium. This approach captures the iconic quality of landmark United States museum architecture while highlighting their connections and idiosyncrasies across time and space.

Lauren Henkin

The site-specific sculptural installation imagined by Henkin, spars with Zaha Hadid’s concrete and angular designs, adding unexpected interventions in interstitial spaces.

Confinement: Politics of Space and Bodies

This group exhibition highlights the ambiguities of a notion that evokes both the protection of the cocoon and the constriction of the enclosed place.

Robert Colescott

The exhibition explored his oeuvre through issues such as the American Dream and assimilation aspirations, mass media imagery, notions of beauty, sexual and gender transgressions to name a few.

Saya Woolfalk

Born in Gifu City, Japan to a mixed race family marrying Asian and African American heritage, Saya Woolfalk lives, works, and performs the provocative concept of cultural hybridity.

Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum

Through an alter ego whom she calls Asme (as me), and by way of distinct painting techniques that allow for traces of drawing to remain visible under the layers of paint, Pamela Sunstrum renders visible the resolute otherness and newness that the present encompasses, turning imagination into both a creative and revolutionary practice.

Jens Schwarz

In his series Displaced, German visual artist Jens Schwarz explores the topic of migration during the so called 'refugee crisis', a peak period in terms of numbers, in Germany between September 2015 and April 2016.

Bubi Canal

Using bright colorful subjects set against otherworldly landscapes at dusk, Canal imbues his work with optimism and innocence — but most importantly, to transmit hope and possibilities for the future.

Creatures

This exhibition brings together an international coterie of artists and academics that enlist this untamed, “wild” other as partners in the production of art. From Florentine architecture and Mannerist painting to Hollywood film, Japanese anime, and the impossible bodies of video game fantasy, Julien Nguyen builds hybrid histories to pose contemporary queries.

Julien Nguyen

The exquisite paintings of Los-Angeles-based artist Julien Nguyen incorporate a multitude of muses, idols, and mythologies into a historical treatment of today.

Archive as Action

This exhibition convenes a trio of Cincinnati-based artists who continuously activate found and historical materials through a performative and participatory lens. 

Annual MFA Exhibition

Explore this exhibition of emerging artists from the University of Cincinnati and Miami University.

Mamma Andersson

Mamma Andersson: Memory Banks focuses on Anderson’s painting practice, exploring how her use of appropriated imagery and collaged elements charges her paintings with an eerie, uncanny sense of familiarity while indulging in wholehearted fantasy and suggestive narrative.

Akram Zaatari

For this exhibition he positions the seemingly simple photo as a narrative form, a reorganization, an enduring obfuscation and the memory of material.

Karl Blossfeldt, Francis Bruguière, Thomas Ruff

No Two Alike: Karl Blossfeldt, Francis Bruguière, Thomas Ruff restages the 1929 exhibition of plant photographs by the German sculptor Karl Blossfeldt (1865

Raquel André

Raquel André is a Portuguese-born performer, actress, theatre director and researcher who fashions intimate platforms to meet, converse and examine the evolving architecture of relationships.

Kahlil Joseph

Until the Quiet Comes, in which Kahlil Joseph channels the music of electronic producer/musician Flying Lotus, provides a searing, yet surreal look into the Nickerson Gardens neighborhood of Los Angeles.

Chris Larson

Using humble materials and pioneer techniques to fabricate unexpectedly fantastical worlds that are simultaneously spartan and psychedelic, Chris Larson employs a workman’s approach to archaic looking machines that recast their surroundings, and inhabitants, in a newfound light.

Mark de Jong

Mark deJong’s Swing House welcomes adventurous renters into a three-story structure where all floors and walls have been removed to allow the flight of a swing from the front of the house to the back.

Firelei Báez

Caribbean-born, Brooklyn-based artist Firelei Báez navigates a broad spectrum of color, race, and identity in her first Ohio exhibition.

Alison Crocetta

Alison Crocetta celebrates the delicate resonance of her voice in both song and action as well as the unique marriage between objects and their shared lives as subjects and performance supports.

Graham MacIndoe

Through his iconic images, Scottish photographer Graham MacIndoe explores the Cincinnati rock band, The National.

Listen!

Artist Caroline Woolard works with four organizations and two art centers to create objects that speak to, and of shared language and better understanding in Cincinnati, Ohio.