Members Opening—Rodin | Response: FIELD Family Secrets

Thursday, June 13, 2024 from 5–7 p.m.

Free. Reservations not required.
Members only.

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Members are invited to view Rodin | Response: FIELD Family Secrets before the exhibition opens to the public. Enjoy snacks and a cash bar in our Great Hall. When you arrive, please check in at the Visitors Services desk.

About the exhibition (on view June 14–September 8, 2024): 

What do an Egyptian mirror from 2000 BCE, a bronze statue conceived in France in the 1880s, and a 2024 bio-sculpture composed from lawn waste have in common? Is it possible to uncover relationships between a photograph of a limestone quarry commissioned by the French government in 1851, a ball of rubber harvested in the Congo Basin in 1890, and a lecture on knowledge by a Malian ethnographer broadcast on French TV in 1969?

Posing unexpected questions, Rodin | Response is the culmination of a pedagogical research project undertaken by Indian artist Supermrin. Informed by her own decolonial bioart practice FIELD, the exhibition develops both as a provocation and an artistic response to four canonical sculptures by Auguste Rodin on temporary loan to the Cincinnati Art Museum. This spring, Supermrin worked alongside her undergraduate students at the University of Cincinnati’s School of Art, mining art history, art theory, and the museum’s collection to weave narratives across time and space that probe the hybrid subjectivities within and beyond Rodin’s original propositions. Rodin | Response presents contemporary sculpture as inheritances—the “family secrets” embedded within the fragmented legacies of modernism and coloniality.  

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 the participation of the Iris Cantor Collection.

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.

If you need accessibility accommodations, please contact us in advance at [email protected] or fill out the accessibility request form.