Exhibitions

Creative Resistance Captured in Tintype: Immortalizing Art as Activism

Working with artists from Cincinnati and the surrounding regions, Lippert combines in-depth interviews with handcrafted tintypes to explore how different and sometimes unexpected art functions as a tool for community building, cultural memory, and protest.

Voices Unheard: Art, Identity, and Experience

This multidisciplinary art show highlights the voices of detained youth through visual art, writing, music, and science. Each piece reflects personal stories of identity, resilience, rehabilitation, and growth based on environment and lived experience.

Student Art Show: 2026 CAC School Program

The student art show is the culminating event of the School Outreach Program. Featuring the work of students K-12 enrolled in the CAC's SOP Program.

Catch Flight

Xavier Art Society Members Respond to Sheida Soleimani: What a Revolutionary Must Know

Collecting: Classical to Contemporary Art from the University of Cincinnati

Great universities hold great art collections that offer inspiration, knowledge, and learning. They present opportunities to appreciate and interact with original works and enrich our overall human experience. This exhibition showcases a careful selection of works that reveal collecting practices over 200 years at the University of Cincinnati.

Teen Art Show: Butterfly Effect

Butterfly Effect explores this pivotal stage of life, highlighting the many ways young adults wrestle with the choices placed before us and the impact those choices carry.

States of Becoming: 2026 MFA Thesis Exhibition

MFA graduate students exhibit their thesis works.

Faces

Featuring a dynamic and international group of emerging artists, the exhibition explores the profound meaning carried in every texture, style and strand. From natural hair to locs and tapered fades, these world-class works speak life into the journey of diverse hair - a journey of self-expression, heritage, and defiance.

Illustrated Memoir Project

Voices from Nakivale: Illustrated Memoirs by Young People in the Nakivale Refugee Settlement

Lillian Schwartz: Pictures from a Gallery

Decades before computers were small enough to fit on desktops, in our pockets, or strapped to our wrists, and when processing power would take days to generate an image, Lillian Schwartz created groundbreaking digital artworks.

Sheida Soleimani: What a Revolutionary Must Know

Sheida Soleimani’s solo exhibition brings together her full “Ghostwriter” series - visually arresting photographs, sculpture, and video that piece together the remarkable journey of her parents' escape from Iran’s totalitarian regime.

Second Nature: 21c at CAC

Second Nature at the Contemporary Arts Center presents three works from the collection of 21c Museum Hotels.

Aaron Kent: Stains and Relics

Stains and Relics is a series by artist Aaron Kent that explores the intersection of ceramics and printmaking, delving into the concept of what is left behind in the world through the passage of time.

Journey of Healing: The Trauma-Informed Power of Art

Artists from the Greater Cincinnati region bring awareness to the lived experiences of those seeking a world where no woman lives in fear of violence.

Kahlil Robert Irving: Ground Water from screen Falls [(Collaged media) + Midwest] Street

For the lobby carpet installation, Kahlil Robert Irving integrates imagery of asphalt with pop culture references, news headlines, and digital ephemera. The artist asks viewers to reconsider their daily engagement with social media, civic community life, and the urban landscape.

Loose Threads

Students from the Art Academy of Cincinnati respond to the artist, materials, and themes presented in 'Sheida Soleimani: What a Revolutionary Must Know'.

Soul of a Garden

A space for learning, grieving, and transformation.

Ancestral Visions, Future Dreams

Urban Native Collective presents their seventh Indigenous People’s Day Convergence with the theme Ancestral Visions, Future Dreams.

Marcus Leslie Singleton: New Steps

This exhibition presents the results of the new steps Marcus Leslie Singleton took in his artistic practice following his return from a month-long artist residency at La Four­chette de Rōze, in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire in January 2024.

Feed the People By Cofi

Feed the People By Cofi, is a Co-LAB exhibition that offers a profound, immersive experience centered on sustainability, zero waste, and environmental consciousness.

Ohio Now: State of Nature

'Ohio Now: State of Nature' brings together artists across Ohio who focus on sustainability, agriculture, food justice, and natural ecologies.

2025 Truth & Innovation Showcase

Original artwork of 25 BIPOC artists commissioned through ArtsWave’s Black and Brown Artist Grant program.

Regional 90 Community Gallery

Regional Connections features works by artists living and working in Cincinnati, OH or Indianapolis, IN, and Louisville KY and surrounding cities. The show comes to the CAC as a collaboration with artist collective Region 90, created by Cierra Fogle and co-founder Maxine Wallace.

ProjectArt Presents: Inner Worlds, Shared Spaces

Group exhibition of ProjectArt teaching artists and students.

The Anti-Robot Inundation Army

The artist Paul Wright presents The Anti-Robot Inundation Army Project, an ongoing art project exploring media, propaganda, data, information, knowledge, and web programming.

Student Art Show: 2025 CAC School Program

Celebrating its 42nd year of continuous operation, the CAC School Outreach Program is the longest-running arts outreach program for K through 12th-grade students in Ohio. The student art show is the culminating event of the program year.

Vivian Browne: My Kind of Protest

This exhibition recovers the depth and variety of the more than three-decade career of Vivian Browne (b. 1929, Laurel, FL; d. 1993, New York, NY). The exhibition features paintings, prints, and works on paper across seven bodies of work, as well as ephemera that highlight Browne’s pioneering activism and influential teaching career.

The Collective: Student Protests

Xavier Art Society Members Respond to Vivian Browne: My Kind of Protest

Tiger Lily Press: Urban Printers

The culminating exhibition forTiger Lily Press' Urban Printers.

Changing Spaces: 2025 MFA Thesis Exhibition

MFA graduate students exhibit their thesis works

Teen Art Show: Finding Your Place

As teens age out of childhood and begin taking steps toward adulthood, it can be hard to find their place. Finding Your Place will feature work that celebrates, laments, and expresses all the feelings that fall in between when trying to figure out who you are.

Terra Futura

Created in 2022 by artist and storyteller Louisa L, Terra Futura is more than an art project, it's a movement aimed at igniting passion and action inspired by the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The project educates and empowers young minds to champion sustainability and drive positive change for a brighter future.

Terra Futura Community Response Show

Artist Louisa L. created Terra Futura to be not just an art project, but a movement aimed at igniting passion and action for sustainable-focused issues. The Terra Futura Community Response Show highlights both Louisa's work, and the hundreds of response pieces the CAC has received from students, schools, and local artists.

Barbara Probst: Subjective Evidence

Barbara Probst’s unique photographic practice, combining simultaneous, multiple views of a single scene, conveys a complex, playful, and darkly cinematic vision of people in time and space.

Chip Thomas and the Painted Desert Project

Chip Thomas is a photographer, activist, and physician whose public murals appearing in the desert landscape of Northern Arizona reflect the spirit and struggles of the Navajo people and other marginalized communities.

Optical Authority

Students from the Art Academy of Cincinnati respond to the artist, materials, and themes presented in Subjective Evidence.

Knowing Ourselves, Understanding Each Other

These illustrated memoirs of English language learner students, tell the powerful stories of their lives through words and images.

Journey of Healing: The Trauma-Informed Power of Art

Artists finding healing from abuse and trauma through artistic expression

Take It Or Leave It

What turns an everyday object into a work of art? Inspired by Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ work in the CAC’s 5th floor gallery, "Take It or Leave It" explores the questions that everyday objects as art can raise. This show in the CAC's Community Gallery invites the public to curate and create with everyday objects.

Jayson Musson: His History of Art

"a sitcom orbiting art history and all the fun to be had dancing on the minefield of the past"

Felix Gonzalez-Torres: “Untitled” (L.A.)

Queens Village: Revolutionary Recipes

Revolutionary Recipes: The Flavors of a Black Woman Amplified" is a collaborative, intergenerational, and immersive exhibition that explores Black womanhood with an ethnographic focus on what ingredients made the woman in

After (Work) Hours

Nature Deficit: Act of Desperation

Featuring work from the CAC's spring Artist in Resident, Kateri Sparrow, Nature Deficit: Act of Desperation was created as a response to the ongoing struggle to find and connect with nature in the urban landscape of today.

AfroSwag

 AfroSwag - Hair and Fashion as Art Exhibition - Past Present AfroFuture is a tribute to black culture’s influence and historical impact on Fashion, Style and Beauty Standard.  The multimedia exhibit features Nubian Woodworking, Naj Arts, Lavish Vixenz  Photography, exclusive hair and fashion looks from the AfroSwag Show and more.

2024 School Outreach Program Student Work

Local students showcase original, collaborative artwork inspired by CAC's School Outreach Program experiences.

Shapes of Connection: The Lines of Our Identity

Group exhibition of ProjectArt teaching artists

This is Me

UC students create interactive works that allow children to explore the lived experience.

Regional Connections

Records of Our Remains

Tai Shani: MBR

Drawing on queer and feminist theory, and political ideologies of collectivism, to ponder love as a device for healing and resistance.

Sustainability and Cincinnati's Future

University of Cincinnati, College of Planning graduate students present sustainable projects for the city of Cincinnati.

Haptic Narratives

Artworks created during a workshop utilizing "Together, Tacit" technology

What We Don't Say

Organized by the CAC's Teen Art Council, What We Don’t Say reflects on the things that are often hidden beneath the surface.

Self/Realization: 2024 MFA Thesis Exhibition

Miami and DAAP graduate students exhibit their thesis works

Clandestine

A Permanent Nostalgia for Departure

A view of Zaha Hadid's legacy not as a conclusive overview, but rather as a point of departure full of possibilities and reflections

Dimensional

Students from the Art Academy of Cincinnati respond to the artists, materials, architecture, and themes presented in A Permanent Nostalgia for Departure. Participating students: Dominique Braxton Maddy Degyanksy Gavin Dessauer Mina Gomez Erick Guzman Li hurdle Echo Joy Shay Lane Daisy Lorenz Derek Sally Kaylee Sgouris Mar Silvers Elizabeth Zajkowski

Kitchen Sink

An exhibition of work created after a semester-long investigation into artistic research.

Wounded Healers

Artists finding healing from abuse through artistic expression

Community Gallery Growing Roots

This exhibition invites the viewer to learn more about local BIPOC farming and growing initiatives. Photographs and a short film document the experiences of several of these individuals, as well as their reflections on some of the themes explored by the work in Ecologies of Elsewhere.

Underworld Black Arts Festival and Rush Arts Foundation

In coordination with The Underworld Black Arts Festival, a selection of prints from Rush Arts 25thAnniversary Print Portfolio are featured in the CAC’s P&G Gallery.

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.