Staff at the Cincinnati Art Museum are working diligently to make sure our summer special exhibitions — including From Shanghai to Ohio: Woo Chong Yung, Rodin | Response and The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century (opening June 28) are installed and ready for visitors to enjoy. But in addition to these shows, visitors can also enjoy the museum’s collection of artworks displayed throughout the galleries and spanning the past 6,000 years.

Did you know that CAM offers free public tours of the collection open to everyone from all walks of life? Our tour guides, known as docents, train rigorously for over a year to become properly certified tour experts.

The museum goes above and beyond to accommodate our visitors, offering unique and lively experiences, including our docent-led tours. When a guest stops by the main desk and asks me what is covered on a public tour, I always answer, “That’s an excellent question that I am sure our docents would love to answer for you.” The reason for my answer: the docents typically focus their tours on the interests of our visitors. You might think, “What kind of museum doesn’t have a set tour?” But you can also ask a more philosophical question, “Does life have a set path?”

As in our own lives, we enjoy engaging our family and friends with interesting topics, just like the museum’s docents enjoy sharing the collection with visitors who want to learn more and participate in discussions about art. Each tour is different from the tour before, and the one after, because docents have the freedom to choose which works to discuss, based on the interests of our visitors and which works resonate with them.

So next time you visit the Cincinnati Art Museum, check out a public tour from one of our fantastic docents and enjoy a conversation about art!