Cincinnati's Contemporary Art Scene Debated Amid Recent Exhibitions

Cincinnati's arts community has shifted since the 1990 obscenity trial over Robert Mapplethorpe's The Perfect Moment at the Contemporary Arts Center, though critic Jerry Stein argues a chilling effect persists. Recently, the Contemporary Arts Center has hosted exhibitions by Pat Steir, Marilyn Minter, and Shepard Fairey, whose Supply and Demand retrospective in 2010 sparked minor controversy with city murals. A Keith Haring exhibition, Keith Haring: 1978 -1982, debuted in February 2011 in collaboration with Kunsthalle Wien, featuring early works from 1978-1979 influenced by Mark Tobey and Jackson Pollock, but quality declined by 1980 except for the 1983 piece Matrix. Rosson Crow's Myth of the American Motorcycle, with seven commissioned paintings, struggles with scale, while the Cincinnati Art Museum shows Kara Walker's Harpers' Pictorial history of the Civil War (Annotated) and The Way We Are Now from the 21c Collection. 21c, a Louisville, Kentucky boutique hotel museum, includes works by Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry, and Kehinde Wiley's The Prophet and The King II is juxtaposed with John Singer Sargent's A Venetian Woman, highlighting Wiley's formal limitations. Stein contends no significant exhibition in 20 years matches The Perfect Moment's impact, citing tame or commercialized works.