REVIEW BY JANE DURRELL

Native American objects -- such as a ceremonial oil dish from British Columbia (above) and an engraved tablet from Ohio's Adena culture (left) -- have been displaced by new exhibits at CAM.

The new Cincinnati Wing at the Cincinnati Art Museum (CAM) has opened to reams of appreciative media coverage and to throngs of visitors, as well it should. Homegrown art has enriched this city since early in its history, and links to the greater world are real. A museum with the CAM's breadth of collection needs good reason to turn over a spread of 15 galleries to locally-linked art; the Cincinnati Wing is backed by multiple good reasons. Ideas shaping the installation are clearly stated in wall labels and demonstrated in arrangement of the works. All the visitor needs to do is enjoy.

But has this new broom swept too clean? Whenever some wonderful thing comes out of museum storage to go on display, some other wonderful thing very likely goes back to the basement. For this rearrangement of galleries the marvelous African installation has been dismantled. The CAM's African collection is small but choice, of particular importance because some of the pieces have been at the museum since the 1890s when CAM became the first institution anywhere, to its knowledge, to exhibit African works as art. A few token pieces will be shown, but the installation that called up thoughts of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is no more.

The new Terrace Café is located where Native American objects once were seen. They too will be represented elsewhere in a fragmentary fashion, although like the African works these include fine pieces of particular interest because they came early to the CAM's collection, as well as additions made during a period of curatorial attention a few years ago.

Musical instruments, a quirky specialty of the museum, have been only sparingly shown for some time. Many visitors will miss the French period rooms, not always beloved by serious art historians but the public's delight for their quickly imparted sense of other times and other places. CAM's vibrant costume collection currently and literally resides in closets. These new galleries themselves are elegantly spacious and uncrowded, but does that tell us everything we need to know? Certainly during much of the time frame represented less was never considered more, and the museum's rightly termed "embarrassment of riches" in Cincinnati-related art might itself be more abundantly displayed.

The new Cincinnati Wing brings us to the cusp of our present century, with two galleries given over to the century we have just left. In the second of these, 1925 and on, we might expect to see works by more than four living artists, at least one of whom is currently doing very little. For an actual representation of the artistic community that soldiers on now one must go to the second floor, to the balcony section of the temporary exhibition, Making Their Mark: Drawings and Watercolors by Cincinnati Artists, where a good representation of today's artists can be seen. This entire exhibition makes an excellent adjunct to the galleries below, but will close August 3. One of its pleasures is to show us another side of artists whose more familiar work is downstairs in the new installation. For instance: Mary Louise McLaughlin, talented ceramicist, here is represented by an accomplished watercolor portrait of her niece who, as it happened, was the daughter of the architect who designed the original museum building. One of James McLaughlin's sketches for the building is here as well.

The Cincinnati Wing installation ends with a gallery that helps to address the question of representing our own times: It will show changing one-person exhibitions by current Cincinnati artists. First up is Mark Fox, whose visceral consciousness of impermanence makes him a provocative choice to celebrate the opening of new "permanent" galleries. Nothing, Fox tells us, is permanent, and we have to believe him. If it were, we'd not have the new Cincinnati Wing. In museums, as in life, many things are trade-offs. The new Cincinnati Wing is a good thing to have, but let's not forget the trade-offs. The Museum's long-term plan includes reinstallation of works currently in eclipse -- we'll be glad to see them again.

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