By Marilyn Bauer
The Cincinnati Enquirer

When the Cincinnati Wing of the Cincinnati Art Museum opens this spring, 14 of the 15 galleries will be configured to tell the story of art in the Queen City. Starting in the early 19th century through the 1940s, more than 400 objects from the museum's permanent collection will be rotated through the new galleries.

But the 15th gallery may make the strongest statement on Cincinnati art.

ON TAP AT CAM

Future exhibitions of Cincinnati artists' work include: The Editorial Eye: Cartoons by Jim Borgman and Jeff Stahler, Aug. 2-Oct. 12; The Fashions of John Bartlett (working title), Nov. 7-May 2, 2004; and New Acquisitions from the Museum's Costumes and Textiles Collection, May-August 2004. "The exhibitions," Cincinnati Art Museum Director Timothy Rub says, "will celebrate Cincinnati's continued artistic vitality and recognize the achievements of the many fine artists working in Cincinnati today. And it will give us an opportunity to show the work of established figures, as well as emerging artists."

Newly named the Sara M. Vance and Michelle Waddell Gallery, the 15th gallery will show the work of contemporary Cincinnati artists. The museum has been criticized for not supporting local artists and showing only the work of "dead white men."

"I have heard since I came here," says CAM Director Timothy Rub, "that the museum hasn't made a commitment to contemporary Cincinnati art. That's not true. The museum has done lots of interesting things in the past."

For the opening, the Vance-Waddell gallery will hold an installation by multi-media artist Mark Fox.

"Some of my earliest experiences with the transformative power of images occurred in the Cincinnati museum when I was a child," says Mr. Fox. "The walls and galleries, felt, as they still do, alive - almost haunted . . . Certain pieces from the museum's collection have left an indelible mark on me and still inform the work I pursue today."

Mr. Fox, 39, won out over a number of artists Mr. Rub visited over the past year as he looked for the appropriate person to inaugurate the space. (Mr. Rub also likes the work of Thom Shaw and Frank Herrmann.) Because the museum does not have a curator of contemporary art, Mr. Rub has assumed that duty with the hope of hiring someone next year.

The selection of Mr. Fox came about after meetings with the staff and the internal exhibition committee. With the first exhibition, the museum felt it was important to make a point by choosing a living artist.

"Cincinnati's art and artistic creations don't simply begin in 1800 and end in 1940," says Mr. Rub. "We wanted to send a signal that this is something we as a museum and as a community need to investigate."

The work Mr. Fox will create - the museum will display but not buy the piece - will have to do with collecting, preserving and potentially losing the artifacts that surround us. It will also explore the role of the museum.

"He wanted to combine his artistic concerns with his efforts to catalog his life and possessions, says Mr. Rub. "There is an analogy between that kind of activity and what a museum does."

For those unfamiliar with Mr. Fox's work, his most recent exhibitions Downburst and chitterchatter at the Linda Schwartz Gallery have featured small drawings meticulously cut out and mounted on a wall with varying lengths of wire. The drawings are of Mr. Fox's possessions, part of a long-term goal to "record all of my belongings."

With Downburst, a conglomeration of 1,600 drawings, Mr. Fox painted the reverse side of his drawings in a glossy, fluorescent green then mounted them on a 40-foot wall. The drawings ranged in size and were mounted on various lengths of wire, ultimately creating a three-dimensional object with a fern-colored aura.

For the inaugural show at CAM, Mr. Fox will create another flurry of personal property, this time with 8,000 drawings ranging in size from 1 inch to 8 feet. Film projections and videos will be played around the gallery's perimeter depicting the various sections of the museum in the process of being destroyed. These will include a hoard of marble eating locusts and their cousins, the death-moths, devouring paintings, a scene of the Ohio River flooding the museum's Great Hall with an Egyptian sarcophagus, beer bottles and the Deborah Butterfield sculpture floating by and a tornado raging just outside the wing's enormous window.

"It's a personal and public response to this idea of collective memory," says Mr. Rub.

The Vance/Waddell gallery also will host showings of the museum's costume collection, works on paper, prints and photographs and local Cincinnati collections of furniture, pottery and paintings.

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