Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati Sets Upcoming Exhibition Schedule

.The Contemporary Arts Center announces their fall 2016-17 exhibition schedule presenting an in-depth perspective of a diverse group of artists, including two receiving their first solo exhibitions in the U.S.

From the lush, distorted portraits of Glenn Brown to Ugo Rondinone's melancholic clown sculptures to Njideka Akunyili Crosby's paintings that explore the challenges of living between America and her native Nigeria, there will be much for CAC visitors to discover in these international presentations.

Contemporary Arts Center Director Raphaela Platow said, "Last season, the Contemporary Arts Center saw its attendance double when we introduced free admission for all. Now, more visitors will be able to enjoy these changing art experiences and see for themselves how we showcase a plurality of world perspectives, creative expressions, and insights into the human condition. It will be a stellar year of solo exhibitions of the highest quality."

Contemporary Arts Center Curator Steven Matijcio said, "Our upcoming season will feature an extraordinary range of creativity including Noel Anderson's employment of a variety of textiles to investigate the politics of the black male identity and Jane Benson's compelling video installation of displaced Middle Eastern brothers playing duets across divided lands. The exhibition of work by Roe Ethridge leads the programming for the 2016 FotoFocus Biennial. It offers a dream-like take on plastic smiles and catalog consumerism in the artist's first North American survey. Another highlight is Anne Thompson's satirical billboard project that will span Ohio's I-71 corridor as the CAC collaborates with sister institutions in Columbus and Cleveland."

GLENN BROWN

September 9, 2016 - January 15, 2017

Organized by the Des Moines Art Center; Curated by Jeff Fleming

This is the first solo museum exhibition in the U.S. to survey the work of renowned London-based artist Glenn Brown. A prolific painter for the last three decades, Brown crafts paintings with an immaculate, almost supernatural level of detail and fluidity that in turn retain an elusive intrigue. He mines art history and popular culture to create a different kind of language, borrowing icons from the painting tradition and fusing diverse references - the Renaissance, Impressionism, and Surrealism - turning them into fodder for dark theater, both beautiful and grotesque, rational and absurd.

ROE ETHRIDGE: NEAREST NEIGHBOR

October 7, 2016 - March 12, 2017

Organized by FotoFocus; Curated by Kevin Moore

The exhibition leads the programming for the 2016 FotoFocus Biennial which explores the theme of the Undocument, or the blurry line between fact and fabrication in photography.Nearest Neighbor is the artist's first solo museum exhibition in the U.S. and will present over 15 years of photographs drawn from Roe Ethridge's comprehensive body of work. This mid-career survey documents the disparate concepts and photographic methods evident in the artist's broad range of processes, focusing on his shifts between the realms of commercial, fine art, and personal photography.

NOEL ANDERSON: BLAK ORIGIN MOMENT

February 10 - June 18, 2017

Organized by the Contemporary Arts Center; Curated by Steven Matijcio

Noel Anderson is a Louisville, KY-born artist and a professor at the University of Cincinnati, presently working in New York City. He is known for complex investigations into the evolving make-up of black male identity translated through a variety of textiles - from old rugs to digitally produced tapestries. This exhibition emerges out of performance work Anderson is doing with readings of scripts established through interviews of black men. Prompted by the provocative question, "when did you know you were black?" he produces a series of intimate interviews/recollections as to the origin and genealogy of black consciousness.

UGO RONDINONE: CHROMAphile

May 5 - August 27, 2017

Organized by the Contemporary Arts Center; Curated by Raphaela Platow

This exhibition will celebrate a new iteration of the Swiss-born, NY-based artist Ugo Rondinone's color spectrum series that congregates his art, the gallery architecture, and every visitor to the space as collaborators in an all-encompassing experience.

NJIDEKA AKUNYILI CROSBY: THE PREDECESSORS

July 14 - October 20, 2017

Organized by the Contemporary Arts Center & Tang Museum, Skidmore College; Co-Curated by Ian Berry and Steven Matijcio

When Njideka Akunyili Crosby left Lagos for the U.S. at age 16, she detoured from her initial plan to be a doctor to pursue painting in order to tell another side of Nigeria's story to an American audience. To posit a pronounced but hybridized voice, she fuses painting, drawing, collage, and the use of transfers - a typically Western printing process that involves transferring ink from photographs using solvent. She was featured in Artnet as one of "10 Black Artists to Celebrate in 2016."

JANE BENSON: HALF-TRUTHS

July 14 - October 20, 2017

Organized by the Contemporary Arts Center; Curated by Steven Matijcio

The story of two Iraqi brothers who escaped from Baghdad in early 2002, becomes a vehicle for British-born, NY-based artist Jane Benson to explore the social reverberations caused by geo-cultural separation. The artist uses music to tell the story in a dual-channel video entitled Finding Baghdad (Part A) that serves as the exhibition's centerpiece. The video begins with two instruments as they are split in two, then proceeds to a virtual duet played by the brothers on these half instruments, each on their own screen, from their respective new homes in Germany and Bahrain. In the process the brothers momentarily bridge the distance through an emotional ballad that marries technology and tradition.

THE I-71 PROJECT

October - November 2016 (TBC)

Organized by the CAC, MOCA Cleveland, and Columbus Museum of Art; Curated by Anne Thompson

The I-71 Project is a collaborative venture among three major art centers across Ohio-the CAC, MOCA Cleveland, and the Columbus Museum of Art- to present art on billboards that confront the theater and confusion of elections in the U.S. It is organized by artist, writer, and 2015-16 Missouri School of Journalism Fellow Anne Thompson, who successfully organized a similar project called The I-70 Sign Show. Since April 2014, she has orchestrated works by internationally acclaimed artists on billboards as provocative, cross-partisan commentary on culture-war messages along the stretch of Interstate 70 between St. Louis and Kansas City. Some of the key artists participating include Mel Bochner, Marilyn Minter, and Kay Rosen, whose work BLURRED (2004/14) has become an iconic image connecting both Interstate projects and their satire of political partisanship and polarization.