By Rick Pender

The new Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art will be faced with concrete, glass and a dark panel of metal.

If you've seen earlier images of Zaha Hadid's avant-garde design for the new downtown home for Cincinnati's Contemporary Art Center (CAC), you might have thought it was made of glass, looking like a bunch of irregular shards of ice stacked several stories high. As the CAC begins construction of its new home, new images have been offered of the three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle.

Calling the new center an "intellectual launching pad," "a marketplace of ideas" and "a place to meet," CAC Director Charles Desmarais clarified at a recent news conference that the building's principal façade, facing Sixth Street, will be concrete and glass with a horizontal metal panel. The street level is conceived as an "urban carpet," with windows enabling a continuous linkage from the sidewalk into the lobby floor and its rear wall. Desmarais provided an array of computer-generated images which show the new center in its urban context.

According to Desmarais, "I believe museums of contemporary art have a special obligation to be a part of their community, and a part of the political and cultural discussions of the moment." He added, "At a time like this, the groundbreaking for the Rosenthal Center can help with the long healing process that's necessary not only in Cincinnati but throughout the country."

The 85,000-square-foot, $34.1 million facility will be the first freestanding home for the CAC since its founding in 1939. Gallery space will be 16,441 square feet (about double what the CAC has in its present facility on Fifth Street) plus a 6,621-square-foot "UnMuseum" for educational programs and exhibits.

With all this activity, it would be easy for the CAC to coast until it's ready to move into the new center in 2003. But that's not the case at all, given the May 16 announcement of an ambitious 2001-2002 CAC season.

The first exhibition will be Samuel Mockbee: Architecture of the Black Warrior River (Sept. 8-Nov. 11, 2001). Featuring more than 100 objects -- photos, maquettes, drawings and paintings -- the exhibition will feature architectural design for communities in Alabama where Mockbee and students in his Rural Studio have created homes, chapels, playgrounds, fire stations and community pavilions. Running concurrently will be Rob Pruitt: 101 Art Ideas You Can Do Yourself, which offers "instructions" and leaves the art-making to the viewer.

Later in the fall the CAC will present En Cada Barrio Revolución (Nov. 17, 2001-Jan. 13, 2002), an exhibition of Cuban art assembled by the CAC and four area universities. The five Cuban artists will work with American students in residencies prior to the exhibition. The title, which means "Revolution in every neighborhood," is a governmental slogan, but also an idea the organizers of this project see as a potential outcome from Cuban artists interacting with university communities.

Also opening in Novem-ber will be Screen Room: An Interactive Colored Light Environment. This installation by Paul Tzanetopoulos allows visitors to manipulate lights and colors in a room filled with furniture. It will remain in place until April 7, 2002, in the same vein as earlier projects -- Hyper Room two years ago and Leaf Leap this season -- models for what we can expect from the UnMuseum at the new center.

Japanese animation, inspired by Disney cartoons and Japanese woodcuts, will be the focus of My Reality: The Culture of Anime (Jan. 19-March 31, 2002). Works by Asian and Western artists will be featured. A separate show of sculptural works using elements of corporate design -- screens, cubicles and curtains -- by British artist and writer Liam Gillick will also be on display during the anime exhibition.

"Scatter art" will be the subject of Sprawl (April 13-June 16, 2002), a show featuring works imitating the random chaos of nature in installations. Sixteen artists from Germany, the Netherlands, South Africa, Norway, Japan, Hong Kong and the United States will be involved.

Local artists who create projects inspired by and related to environmental issues will be featured in Ecovention (June 22-Aug. 25, 2002), in addition to an historical archive of earlier works. Paintings by Los Angeles artist Sharon Ellis will also be exhibited during the summer.

E-mail Rick Pender

Lessons Learned (May 10, 2001)
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