In its quest to create a “purrfect” summer for visitors, the Cincinnati Art Museum is mixing serious scholarship — Divine Felines: Cats of Ancient Egypt, an exhibition of 80 cat-related objects, plus three smaller shows — with the sublime silliness of the Internet Cat Video Festival.
The latter is a free public event occurring this weekend.
The festival’s hour-long program of some 100 videos was curated by Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center, where outdoor screenings of the short cat films have drawn thousands. The festival is on a world tour this year, coming to Cincinnati after stops in Japan, Australia, Germany, Memphis, Boston, Portland and more.
The Internet Cat Video Festival occurs outdoors here at 9:15 p.m. Friday at Seasongood Pavilion in Eden Park, right after the 5-9 p.m. Art After Dark: Cats and Cocktails party at the museum. (Heavy rain and/or lightning will cancel the outdoor screening.)
There will also be an indoor screening for families at 11 a.m. Saturday at the museum’s Fath Auditorium. Cat attire is encouraged for this, but masks are prohibited and, of course, actual cats are not allowed in the building, much as they might want to see this. Seating is first-come, first-served.
With that out of the way, attention can be focused on Divine Felines, which has already opened and runs through Sept. 11. The exhibition offers a chance for us to look at how similar ancient Egyptian culture was to our own. For instance, like everyone’s favorite YouTuber Debbie the Cat Lady, ancient Egyptians were obsessed with cats.
Egyptians domesticated cats as companion animals and also used them to protect grain stores from vermin. They lauded their complex duality — the animals were admired for their ferocity and hunting abilities as well as their maternal and protective instincts. The cute critters were popular in Egyptian artwork, as their love of basking in the sun drew associations to the sun god Ra and the change of the seasons and days. In fact, many of their gods possessed catlike features; lions and lion-headed goddesses are featured prominently throughout the exhibit.
The pieces in Divine Felines come in a variety of materials, which have endured thousands of years — wood, plaster, stone and even hard-to-preserve mediums like textile.
“It is fascinating how old these objects are, that they come down to us today, and we can enjoy and relate to them in our own way at this point in time,” says Julie Aronson, CAM’s curator of American paintings, sculpture and drawings.
The “parent” to three cats named after famous female artists and a volunteer at Save the Animals Foundation, Aronson became the exhibit overseer partly because of her love for the animals. However, Divine Felines was curated by the Brooklyn Museum’s Yekaterina Barbash, who drew from its Egyptian collection. Cincinnati is the first stop for the traveling exhibit.
Aronson said the exhibit looked like the perfect combination of something that could be very accessible and popular while at the same time allowing the museum to show Egyptian art of high quality. Standout pieces, she says, include a 3-foot-tall wooden sculpture of a cat with a scarab set into its head, and some other wooden objects that used to contain mummified cats. Most of the artwork dates back to Egypt’s New Kingdom (approximately from the 16th to 11th century B.C.E.) and later.
Many of the pieces featured are actually very small trinkets.
“You can create something that’s just so beautiful in something that’s so tiny,” Aronson says. “It kind of shows you the extent to which the Egyptians really loved these animals.”
Visitors can stroll through three related exhibitions during Divine Feline’s run: Modern Cat, featuring art museum prints from 1890 to 1980 (on display through Sept. 11); Master Cats, a loaned selection of 19th and 20th century Japanese prints (July 11-Nov. 13); and Elizabeth Nourse: Sketchbooks and Archive, which includes cats, dogs and monkeys (on display through Nov. 13).
DIVINE FELINES runs through Sept. 11 at the Cincinnati Art Museum. For more information, visit cincinnatiartmuseum.org.
This article appears in Jun 22-29, 2016.