MONDAY, OCTOBER 12

Where Did All That Cincinnati Public Schools Artwork Go?

Whistleblower Art Expert Rembrant Tadwell says most CPS schools had a long tradition of having valuable art work in their building.  The parents of students would hold carnivals, rummage sales and bazaars and use most of that money raised to buy valuable art work to hang in the schools for the students’ benefit.  Departing classes each year would donate a fountain or art work as their legacy to the school.

Several schools were known to have Rookwood fountains and Rookwood tile walls, bronze and marble statues in the hallways, bronze commemorative tablets and other extremely valuable art paintings and pieces.  The various schools had carefully preserved the art work over decades, some of it even dating from the late 1800’s.  Members of the board of education were quoted as recognizing the artwork in the schools as “priceless fine art”. 

In the late 1970s into 1980, CPS board member Virginia Kiessling Griffin decided to take control over all this fine art by physically removing all of it from the roughly eighty schools.  Principals, parents, PTA’s and school alumni opposed this action, but the school system ignored them and let Virginia Griffin go ahead with her scheme.  The only school to successfully oppose her plan was Walnut Hills High School.

Virginia Griffin was a CPS board of education member for over thirty years from 1968 to 1999.

Coincidentally, Griffin, the wife of a doctor, was at that time also the owner of the Griffin Gallery of Fine Arts in Cincinnati where works of fine art were sold.  Hmmm.

Griffin sent crews into the schools to remove fountains, statues, tile walls and fine art hanging in the schools.  Paintings included in this artwork were gathered in an art gallery housed in half of a top floor the former CPS Headquarters located at 230 East Ninth Street downtown, before the building was bought by Hamilton County for use as Probate Court and the Court of Appeals. The public could see the collection by appointment only and then only with great difficulty.  However, this priceless collection of fine art was accessible to anyone with a key to the gallery room, even a janitor.

After the sale of that building, the collection was put on display at the Museum Center in a couple of rooms and identified as the collection belonging to the Cincinnati Public School System. The CPS headquarters is now housed in the former Merry Junior High School Building at 2651 Burnet Avenue.

An accurate inventory and accounting of all of the Artwork owned by the Cincinnati Public Schools does not appear to exist from the time Virginia Griffin began this massive art centralization. What fine art now survives and exists from this massive collection she removed from the schools?  We don’t know.

Maybe Superintendent Mary A. Ronan could you explain this?