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Silke van de Grift

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The Cincinnati Art Museum is one of North America’s oldest museums.

The Cincinnati Art Museum was founded all the way back in 1881. While usually museums were housed in discarded buildings, the museum in Cincinnati was the first museum west of the Alleghenies to get its own brand new building.

This of course doesn't mean architect James W. McLaughlin designed a flashy modern building. Like basically every museum in the US, it’s a Romanesque-revival building. I mean, a museum HAS to have columns right? In the past 100+ years, many renovations and additions changed the shape of the building. By 2000, the museum numbered over 60,000 objects and, today, is the largest in all of Ohio. In 2003, they added the newest wing to the museum, this “Cincinnati Wing” now houses an extra fifteen galleries and covers a whopping 18,000 square feet.

In 2012, artist Todd Pavlisko planned to have a sniper shoot a rifle inside the museum, during the opening of Pavlisko’s solo exhibition “Crown”. The bullets would be fired into a chunk of bronze, while Pavlisko himself filmed the whole ordeal with high-speed cameras. This obviously sparked some controversy and re-ignited the debate on guns. Some deemed the performance “too edgy” for the museum. Some believed the exhibition should not open at all.  Museum shareholder Stewart Maxwell of Hyde Park said: "To shoot a gun in the halls in the museum, it's in bad taste. The speeding bullet is going in front of 18 iconic treasures. I think it's his way of showing that it's dead art and not relevant". On an October day in 2012, the sniper guy shot his rifle and the exhibition opened. Oh, and it was a hit.

 

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Here is what Wikipedia says about Cincinnati Art Museum

The Cincinnati Art Museum is an art museum in the Eden Park neighborhood of Cincinnati, Ohio. Founded in 1881, it was the first purpose-built art museum west of the Alleghenies, and is one of the oldest in the United States. Its collection of over 67,000 works spanning 6,000 years of human history make it one of the most comprehensive collections in the Midwest.

Museum founders debated locating the museum in either Burnet Woods, Eden Park, or downtown Cincinnati on Washington Park. Charles West, the major donor of the early museum, cast his votes in favor of Eden Park sealing its final location. The Romanesque-revival building designed by Cincinnati architect James W. McLaughlin opened in 1886. A series of additions and renovations have considerably altered the building over its 138-year history.

In 2003, a major addition, The Cincinnati Wing was added to house a permanent exhibit of art created for Cincinnati or by Cincinnati artists since 1788. The Cincinnati Wing includes fifteen new galleries covering 18,000 square feet (1,700 m2) of well-appointed space, and 400 objects. The Odoardo Fantacchiotti angels are two of the largest pieces in the collection. Fantacchiotti created these angels for the main altar of St. Peter in Chains Cathedral in the late 1840s. They were among the first European sculptures to come to Cincinnati. The Cincinnati Wing also contains the work of Frank Duveneck, Rookwood Pottery, Robert Scott Duncanson, Mitchell & Rammelsberg Furniture, and a tall case clock by Luman Watson.

The CAM is part of the Monuments Men and Women Museum Network, launched in 2021 by the Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art.

Check out the full Wikipedia article about Cincinnati Art Museum