Cincinnati Art Museum – Cincinnati, OH
Ask me for the best free thing in Cincinnati and I won’t even pretend to think about it. The Cincinnati Art Museum sits on a hill in Eden Park, it’s been collecting since 1886, it holds about 6,000 years of human creativity, and general admission costs exactly zero dollars. There’s a brass plaque set into the lobby floor crediting the Rosenthal Family Foundation for that last part, and I stopped to read every word of it out of respect.
The Building Is the First Exhibit
Here’s the thing nobody warns you about: you come for the paintings and spend half the visit gawking at the rooms. The Great Hall opens up like an opera set, with a double staircase and wrought iron balconies that would carry a lesser museum all by themselves.
And it keeps going. Red walls under gilded cornices, inlaid marble floors with green marble medallions, a long wood-paneled hall that looks borrowed from a Tudor manor. Every gallery is dressed to match its art, which means the frame around the frames is also worth your time. Vi called it right in one sentence: the building itself is a work of art.
Six Thousand Years on One Hill
The old masters wing is the real deal. Lorenzo di Credi‘s Madonna and Child hangs in a carved tabernacle frame roughly the size of a garden shed, and five hundred years haven’t dulled it one bit.
Then the museum throws you a curveball: an entire gallery wall of Saul Steinberg, The New Yorker’s self-described “writer who draws.” In 1947 Cincinnati’s Terrace Plaza Hotel hired him to paint a mural, and that room-length daydream of a cityscape now lives here, whimsy from end to end.
Something about this recent acquisition really grabbed my attention: John Biggers‘ The Gleaners, painted in 1943 while he was a student at Hampton. He took Millet’s famous field workers and restaged them as Black women gathering coal dropped by trains along the railroad tracks, a shimmering city skyline behind them. It says more in one canvas than most galleries manage in a room.
The Art Starts in the Parking Lot
You don’t even need to make it inside. Out front, Jim Dine, a Cincinnati kid himself, planted a giant bronze Pinocchio (Emotional) throwing his arms at the sky like he just stuck the landing. It’s impossible not to grin back at him.
Over on the lawn, Mark di Suvero‘s Atman leans its giant red I-beams together like construction equipment that found religion, and half a dozen more pieces are scattered across the grounds and terraces. They’re all in the gallery below.
Plan on two or three hours. Closed Mondays, open late Thursdays, and did I mention it’s free? A 6,000-year survey of human genius for zero dollars, inside a building that’s a masterpiece in its own right. If that doesn’t get you off the couch, I can’t help you.
