Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art

The Rosenthal Center occupies a deliberately assertive building—Zaha Hadid's first completed structure in the United States—whose tilted planes and cantilevered forms announce a break from conventional museum practice. The architecture itself functions as curatorial statement: the building refuses the neutral white box, instead creating a series of spatially disorienting galleries that demand active navigation rather than passive consumption. This spatial aggression shapes how work is encountered. The collection emphasizes contemporary practice across media, with particular attention to artists working at disciplinary boundaries—those engaged with abstraction, video, installation, and forms that resist categorical tidiness. The museum's programming suggests a house attuned to process and discourse rather than acquisitional prestige; exhibitions tend toward focused investigations rather than comprehensive surveys. The viewer it rewards is one willing to sit with difficulty, to occupy awkward sightlines, to recognize that the building's formal challenges are inseparable from what the art can do. There is little here of the museum-as-refuge; instead, the Rosenthal positions itself as a space where contemporary art's argumentative force remains legible. The collection's shape reflects Cincinnati's particular cultural moment—neither coastal mega-institution nor wholly regional concern—and that positioning has allowed for a certain clarity of vision, an ability to build according to conviction rather than market logic.

Signature collections

The Rosenthal's holdings center on contemporary abstraction and post-medium practice, with strength in video art and large-scale installation. The collection gives weight to artists working across the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries whose practice resists easy periodization. Rather than developing around figurative traditions, the museum has invested in abstraction's evolving dialects, material investigation, and temporal forms. Works emphasizing duration, process, and spatial intervention constitute a significant portion of the permanent collection. The museum's acquisitions reflect curatorial attention to artists whose work engages perception itself—those attending to how bodies move through space, how vision operates, how artmaking can foreground its own conditions. There is evident commitment to contemporary video as a primary medium, and to installation-based work that transforms the gallery into an active participant rather than neutral container. The collection's relative youth and the building's uncompromising architecture create conditions in which contemporary work and spatial design function as mutually reinforcing arguments about what a museum might be.