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.

Featuring 120 pieces by 33 artists, the groundbreaking exhibition showcases works that reinterpret Traditional Stories and iconography, express contemporary issues affecting Indigenous Nations today, and meld Indigenous Traditions and Knowledge with the aesthetics and properties unique to the medium of glass.

Picasso Landscapes: Out of Bounds brings to our galleries paintings and sculptures by the artist from some 25 public and private collections across the United States and Europe.

Drawn from the collection of Richard Rosenthal and his family, this exhibition celebrates a promised gift to the Cincinnati Art Museum and features 38 works by self-taught artists from diverse cultures and circumstances.  

How well do we know iconic American artist, Georgia O’Keeffe? Scholars have examined her paintings, home, library, letters, and even her clothes. Yet, despite O’Keeffe’s long and complex association with the American photographic avant garde, no previous exhibition has explored her work as a photographer.

The exhibition Beyond Bollywood: 2000 Years of Dance in Art considers the compelling visual language of dance in the arts from South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Himalayan region from the first to the twenty-first century. Through religious, courtly, and everyday objects, the exhibition illustrates how dance occupies a uniquely important place in the region.

Over 90 years after its completion, the Wormser bedroom went on public view for the first time, fully conserved and installed to reflect its original state as photographed in 1930.

Drawn from the extensive collection of the artist’s work at the Cincinnati Art Museum, with a few select loans, this exhibition relates Mosler’s journey and takes a close look at how he developed his paintings through studies across media.

One Each features paintings by five young French artists who, in the 1860s, used the still life genre to experiment with new techniques and pictorial aims in painting. 

David Driskell (1931–2020) was one of the most revered American artists of his generation, long recognized for his vibrant and versatile work as a painter and printmaker. His art combines keen observations of America with the imagery and aesthetic innovations of the African diaspora.

Hear David Driskell discuss selections from the exhibition.

Working Together is the first major museum exhibition about the Kamoinge Workshop, a groundbreaking African American photographers’ collective founded in New York City in 1963. The founders chose the name Kamoinge—meaning “a group of people acting and working together” in the Gikuyu language of Kenya—to reflect their shared dedication to community, collective action, and a global outlook.

Hear Kamoinge artists and family members reflect on individual artworks.

From the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation

Kara Walker (b.1969, Stockton, CA), renowned for her cut-paper silhouettes, emerged as a prolific and leading contemporary artist in during the mid-90s. Her work incorporates stereotypes to examine the narratives that feed into racism, sexism, sexuality and identity. Drawing on mythology, art history and American history, Walker’s art challenges viewers to take a critical and haunting view of the past while proposing questions around the challenges we continue to face collectively today.

Jewelry of the 1960s and 1970s was as groundbreaking as the era itself. The space race, rock ‘n’ roll, the Beatles, the Vietnam War, the Kennedy assassinations, the Civil Rights movement, Pop Art, the Women’s Movement, the widespread use of drugs, the Pill, and the concept of free love were all facets of cultural change associated with these two decades. These social deviations set the stage for what jewelers had to offer, expressing individuality, nonconformity, and the aesthetic, political and intellectual values of those who wore it.

From the Nazis’ exploitation of artworks to the protection and restitution efforts of the “Monuments Men,” art and politics were frequently intertwined in the World War II era.