When I was eighteen, my dad took me to New York City for a college interview and for him to confirm that the city was safe enough for me to move to without having him worry constantly that I would be abducted on the street. While were were there, I made him take me to the MOMA, and we laughed at an art installation that was basically a toilet in an empty room. This helped him realize that New York was probably an acceptable place for a naive young woman and so ten months later I packed my stuff and was off!
The trip to the MOMA inspired me to take some studio art classes my freshman year. In my “Intro to Sculpture” class, I decoupaged the torn pages of an old book all over the surface of a computer monitor I had found on the street. I had assembled this piece in my dorm room and had not thought through how I would transport it the approximately 28 city blocks to my classroom.
By the time I lugged it there, it was kind of f’d up. Clearly, I didn’t have the chops for a lucrative career in modern art.
Which is why I now spend nine hours a day looking at spreadsheets.
I tell this story because the three women who founded the Contemporary Arts Center were also inspired by the MOMA. But instead of Mod-podging a piece of junk they founded a museum in Cincinnati to showcase rotating exhibits of the world’s best contemporary artists. Some people have vision.
The humiliation of my failures as an artist kept me away from the Contemporary Arts Center for the first seven years of living in Cincinnati, but I wanted to make 2014 the year to move past this. Actually, it was just busyness and lack of initiative that kept me away, but humiliation seems like a better excuse.
The CAC is free on Mondays and I’d been waiting for a free Monday to meet Donnie after work and check it out. The original plan was to meet for a drink first and then go to the museum, but this was the first day after the end of daylight savings time and so I felt like there was no time for a drink because I needed to look at the art and then get to bed pronto.
The first exhibition that we saw was “Based on a True Story” by Duke Riley and Frohawk Two Feathers. The theme of alternative histories overlaps with A People’s History of the United States (#28) and I left newly inspired to finish it by the end of the year.
Next, we saw “Unmade” which is about using blurred lines to veer away from “familiarity, convention, and habit”. Love.
In “Memory Palace” we learned about a Greco-Roman technique of prompting memories by using visualized architecture. Let me clarify: I learned about this technique, Donnie said he knew all about it and couldn’t believe I had never heard of it. Believe it or not, they didn’t teach this us this stuff in “Intro to Sculpture”.
Our favorite exhibit was the surrealist photography of Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs. The photographs taken on road trips through the southwest reminded us of the early days of our relationship when we would drive back and forth between New Mexico and the midwest with three cats and a dog. On one of these trips we got engaged and then had dinner at an I-Hop.
At about midnight (ok, ok, it was only 7:00pm but it was DARK outside) we wrapped up our trip with a quick tour of the children’s floor.
So, look. If you haven’t spent a Monday at the CAC, get yourself there. Actually, it’s probably better if you go on a day when you have to pay the $7.50 admission fee because art doesn’t grow on trees and somebody’s got to fund this stuff. Either way, check it out. There aren’t any toilets or decoupaged computer monitors currently on display, but the exhibits change all the time so you might get lucky.
-K.
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