By Steven Rosen / Cincinnati Magazine / December, 2023
The new Contemporary Arts Center Executive Director arrives to inject life and energy into the iconic Zaha Hadid–designed museum in time for the building’s 20th anniversary.
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When I first interviewed the Contemporary Arts Center’s new executive director, Christina Vassallo, she’d been in town for just a few weeks, having started on March 20. “I sit here less than a month into the job,” she cautioned at the time as I set up the tape recorder in the lobby of the museum’s iconic Zaha Hadid–designed downtown building.
She could have avoided answering questions about future plans and current challenges, citing her newness to the city and to the spectacular building that’s celebrating its 20th anniversary as one of Cincinnati’s architectural gems. Before coming here, she’d been executive director at Philadelphia’s Fabric Workshop and Museum since 2020 and, before that, was executive and artistic director at the Cleveland alternative arts venue SPACES.
But, to her credit, Vassallo knew the CAC needed someone to immediately address a number of concerns. The non-collecting museum had been operating on a reduced budget, prompted by lost revenue during the worst of the COVID pandemic years. In 2022, then–Interim Director Marcus Margerum (currently chief business officer and deputy director) had told me the CAC’s annual operating budget slipped from a pre-pandemic high of $4.4 million to around $3.8 million, resulting in staff furloughs and salary reductions.
Further, it had been almost two years since the organization’s previous leader, Raphaela Platow, moved to Louisville for her new job as director of the Speed Art Museum. The CAC’s senior curator, Amara Antilla, moved to Portland, Oregon, and was working remotely. Even the place where Vassallo and I met in April—the café space in the building’s lobby—signified a problem: Independent restaurateurs had struggled there, including the sophisticated and well-regarded Fausto, which closed at the end of 2022. The CAC needs the revenue, as well as the lobby traffic, such a busy space can contribute.
But Vassallo wasn’t deflecting. She was already working on those issues and more and was willing to give her preliminary assessments. For instance, she said, a locally based curator was a top priority. She was also willing to offer a new topic for discussion: the benefits of the CAC and other arts and cultural institutions receiving funding from the city of Cincinnati or, possibly, some kind of Hamilton County tax levy.
“I personally think the CAC can be in the foreground of those kind of conversations,” Vassallo said in April. “All of us help make the city more livable and exciting. Why would employees of a global corporation like those we have situated here want to come? Because there’s a lot going on here. The arts help make the city more livable and exciting.. So I think it would be a really interesting discussion to have with our elected officials.”
After bringing it up, Vassallo cautioned that the topic was “one thing I care about, but it’s not why I’m here. It’s not why I was selected to run the CAC.”
Redefining and advocating for the arts’ role in the larger community—and doing so in a positive, approachable manner—is something she’s been adept at her entire professional career.
Christina Vassallo is 43, lives downtown, and is private about her personal life. Otherwise, she’s happy to share her story: growing up in New York City and northern New Jersey, getting her graduate degree in nonprofit visual arts management at New York University, and starting her career in the Big Apple. She projects a joyful casualness in person and via Zoom, smiling and laughing in her interviews and expressing herself with knowledgeable positivity about not just CAC’s future but the importance of art in enriching lives.
Additionally, she has an indirectly inspirational physical presence with her arch-shaped curly dark hair, reminiscent of photos of Narges Mohammadi, the imprisoned Iranian advocate for human rights and women’s rights who recently received the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts. Among other restrictions, women are required to wear headscarves in public in Iran. Hair equates to freedom for many.
Vassallo likes to think outside the box creatively to engage the community. As executive director of New York City’s Flux Factory in 2013, she co-curated and moderated Flux Death Match, a series of debates on topics of interest to artists as well as to the general public, such as how to confront the concentration of wealth and power within the nonprofit world.
One of her presentations at SPACES in Cleveland was 2018’s A Color Removed, in which the gallery collected donated objects containing the color orange and then staged an exhibition. It was a pointed response to the killing of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, shot by police who thought his toy gun was real because its orange safety tip had been removed.
“The question we posed to Cleveland was, What happens if we remove that symbol of safety,” says Vassallo in a Zoom interview in early October. “Would we all be safer, or would none of us be safe, or would we still experience safety at different levels? That was a really exciting project. I often think of exhibitions as a thought exercise: What kind of possibilities get revealed when we work with artists in new ways?”
Vassallo had a strong impact on the people she met in Cincinnati even before she formally began her job. Or, for that matter, before she even had it. You might say that in those early interactions people were hearing her “love language.”
“The first thing everybody notices about her right off the bat is her energy,” says Gale Beckett, president of the CAC’s board of trustees and a member of the search committee that recommended Vassallo. “It comes off the written page, it comes off in a phone call, it comes off in a Zoom meeting, and it certainly comes off in person. She really loves to collaborate, and that’s not always the case in the arts world. During one of our interviews with her, she used the words, Collaboration and partnerships are my love language.”
Beckett says Vassallo has made an effort to meet every staff member and most of the board members, community leaders, artists, industry professionals, and educational professionals. “She just really thrives on getting to know people and finding connections in new ways,” says Beckett. “That came through in examples from her previous roles, and it’s certainly proving true now.”
That show of enthusiasm impressed Cal Cullen when she was still executive director of Camp Washington’s Wave Pool, which considers itself a contemporary art fulfillment center. (Cullen is now program manager for the Haile Foundation.)
“The week before she offcially started at the CAC was when the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts held its convention here, and it was an insanely busy and amazingly entertaining week for the arts in Cincinnati,” Cullen recalls. “Christina came to Wave Pool for the opening reception we had for our three new exhibitions. She made an effort to introduce herself to me and the other staff members and artists and to really be out in the community and building relationships. That’s so important for the Contemporary Arts Center.”
For my Zoom interview with Vassallo, she was in New York City to see museum exhibits, including the Whitney’s Henry Taylor: B Side, featuring distinctive portraiture by the Los Angeles artist whose subjects mostly include African Americans. Taylor, she says, had served as artist-in-residence and had an exhibition at her Fabric Workshop and Museum earlier this year.
Vassallo certainly has jumped into her new role in Cincinnati, and the institution that hired her is reaping the benefits. CAC trustees were in a forward-looking mood when they announced a $4.7 million working budget for the fiscal year that started in September, projecting a nice recovery from the pandemic dip, and started a strategic planning process to map out the next several years.
Vassallo also announced the achievement of her top priority, hiring a full-time curator. Theresa Bembnister, who started at the end of October, had been at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts in Little Rock since 2020, first as associate curator and then as curator. Before that, she spent five years at the Akron Art Museum, reaching the title of curator of exhibitions. Bembnister will live here, which Vassallo says is critically important.
“I surveyed the staff and asked them what we needed in a new curator, and resoundingly I heard they thought it really required and deserved someone who is going to live in the city and help forge the connections with the artistic talent in the region,” says Vassallo. “Our curator is really going to be tasked with not only bringing an international and national perspective to our programming but also understanding the local talent pool and incorporating that into her work.”
Meanwhile, Antilla—who served as curator-at-large after moving to Portland—has relocated to the Washington, D.C., area and transitioned into a guest curator role. She curated a show at the CAC that opened in November and runs through April 14, 2024: Tai Shani: My Bodily Remains, the first U.S. solo museum exhibition for the British artist. It features a new site-specific installation and a feature-length film.
But the year’s biggest show, which remains on view through January 28, 2024, celebrates the 20th anniversary of the CAC’s Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art at the northwest corner of Sixth and Walnut streets. Titled A Permanent Nostalgia for Departure: A Rehearsal on Legacy with Zaha Hadid, it was guest-curated by Madrid-based Maite Borjabad, who previously worked at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain and was curator of architecture and design at the Art Institute of Chicago. She’s also a trained architect.
The show is a tribute to the Iraqi-born and London-based Hadid, whose CAC building was her first in the U.S. and the first U.S. museum designed by a woman. Architecture critic Herbert Muschamp of The New York Times called it “the most important American building to be completed since the end of the Cold War.” Hadid parlayed its success into an inspiring superstar career. She died of a heart attack in 2016; her firm remains active and has been in the news lately for its rendering of the 1,082-foot-tall Discovery Tower on a mountaintop in Saudi Arabia.
For the CAC exhibit, Borjabad commissioned seven new Hadid-inspired works from Middle Eastern and European artists and received loans of seven fascinatingly futuristic artworks by Hadid. One of her pieces is a 1977 graduation project that envisioned a 14-story hotel on London’s Hungerford Bridge over the River Thames that looks like it’s in outer space.
The show’s title derives from a 2011 ode to Hadid written by Lebanese-American poet and essayist Etel Adnan. The passage at its heart was reprinted in a 2016 issue of Artforum magazine: “Hadid is a poet of forms and of the materials that give presence to these forms; one must admire them close up and from afar to discover, in this woman who built on solid rock, a permanent nostalgia for departure. Everything she made seems to always be the day before a departure, a permanent invitation to the imagination and to the imaginary.”
Hadid wanted the glass-windowed CAC lobby to serve as an “urban carpet” that—according to her architectural firm’s website—“lets pedestrians into and through the interior space via a gentle slope, which becomes, in turn, a wall, ramp, walkways, and even an artificial park space.” And the current Hadid exhibition has a wonderful tribute to that vision. Turkish artist Hera Büyüktasçiyan allowed six narrow strips of carpet, with brown tones and very subtle patterning, to cascade down a gallery wall to the floor, like a waterfall. It’s a sacrosanct memorial to the building’s creator and her goals for the CAC building. I wish it could stay there permanently.
Ipersonally love the building’s urban carpet. I imagine myself gliding gently from the front doors to the sloped rear interior wall and then climbing right up, defying gravity. I’ve even tried to walk up it a couple of times. And the stark blackness of the stairway that is the lobby’s centerpiece commands attention and demands to be climbed upward to see the art.
But not everyone feels that same magical pull. They need specific reasons to step into the CAC lobby from the street, especially if they’re not already headed to shows in the upstairs galleries. And they may soon be getting a new café, another top priority for Vassallo.
The organization posted on the ArtsWave jobs page in October for a manager to run a space that would be owned and operated by the museum itself. “We’ve decided to take the operation of our café in-house,” says Vassallo. “We did a lot of research on this topic, and we’ve learned it’s nearly impossible for a third party to really make a good profit in a museum café space, especially as American downtowns—where we are and where many museums are located—continue to rebound from the effects of COVID. Not everybody is working on a five-day office schedule anymore, so that has an effect.”
She understands a café is a visitor amenity that doesn’t need to make a big profit on its own. “We just want to better serve our visitors and make sure they’re comfortable and can have some refreshments,” she says. In the meantime, a CAC employee sells coffee and snacks in the former Fausto space.
Vassallo has also been finalizing the CAC’s exhibition schedule for next season, putting another stamp on the institution’s future in a tangible way. Shows will include Jayson Musson: His History of Art, a showcase of recent MFA graduates from DAAP and Miami University, and a CAC Staff Art Exhibition. “The new season will include major thematic group shows and solo exhibitions by living artists, some who live in Cincinnati and some who are setting foot [here] for the first time,” she says.
In her spare time, if any exists, Vassallo continues to envision a better-financed and more stable future for Cincinnati’s arts sector. She believes the pandemic revealed major fault lines in terms of how nonprofits operate and thrive. “This interview isn’t really about my political soapbox, but I think it’s an important conversation to be having,” she says. “We’re still not out of that COVID trench of financial pressure, right? I think there’s a lot more work to be done.”
Vassallo acknowledges the importance of ArtsWave’s longtime work to fund-raise for the region’s arts organizations—its 2023 workplace giving campaign brought in $11.9 million for 150-plus organizations, projects, and artist commissions—but says other cities where she’s worked have used a variety of public funds to support their arts groups. Cleveland organizations receive funding through a Cuyahoga County tax on cigarette sales, and for a time the money was distributed by Cuyahoga Arts and Culture. That city recently added the position of senior strategist for arts, culture, and the creative economy.
Philadelphia has an arts, culture, and the creative economy office within City Hall. While working in that city, Vassallo had been appointed by city council to serve on the then-new Arts & Culture Task Force to develop recommendations to uplift disadvantaged communities through the arts and culture sector, especially in the aftermath of COVID.
The city of Cincinnati doesn’t have a dedicated office, department, or staff member for assistance to the arts, though a “leveraged support” process—with an arts category—offers direct financial support to nonprofit organizations with strong local impact. “No specific dollar amount or percentage of overall funding is assigned to each category [within the program],” says Ben Breuninger, deputy director of communications. “Rather, we’ve identified these areas as important for city investment and ask leveraged support applicants to identify which category best defines their work.” ArtsWave’s Black and Brown Artists program recently received $75,000 from this fund, and ArtWorks received $150,000.
That type of one-time funding is appreciated, says Vassallo, but isn’t the same kind of year-after-year support that dedicated, ongoing public funding provides. “I believe if we had [public funding], it would make the job of every director in the cultural sector easier,” she says. “Creating an atmosphere where there is an appetite for funding like this to exist is definitely a product of my main job running the CAC.”
As the CAC tries—and needs—to grow revenue by attracting post-COVID visitors to its downtown site, it should continue to feed off of the challenging creative and visionary edge that Zaha Hadid gave its building and that inspires its artists and curators. Vassallo assures me she will as she works to grow its audience for shows and other activities.
“I don’t see challenging work as being in direct opposition to also being welcoming,” she says. “Creating a buttress of support around an exhibition, which our education department does, gives people entry points into a show. What I love about museums, especially contemporary art museums, is visitors have the opportunity in one building to be exposed to so many perspectives. Museums allow us those access points. That’s what I think is so exciting about this kind of work.”
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