To Our Vibrant AAC Community,
Welcome to the 2024-2025 academic year and the 155th year of the Art Academy of Cincinnati. We celebrate your success and congratulate you on arriving to this point in your creative career. As we look toward amazing events this fall as a participating venue of the 2024 FotoFocus Biennial: backstories and with the return of BLINK Festival of Art & Light, I encourage all of you to be present, be collaborative, and be awesome to one another.
The AAC is a special place and our commitment to community is our strongest trait. The right to vote has long been a passion for creatives at the AAC, and this election year, I require all of you to make your voice (and vote) heard.
Cornelia Cassady Davis was one such AAC artist. Trained at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, Cornelia studied under Frank Duveneck. Her amazing work and paintings were exhibited at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Davis was also an instrumental member of the Woman’s Art Club in Cincinnati. This club was full of fierce, ground-breaking women artists including Dixie Selden and Elizabeth Nourse.
In 1913, Davis became the first woman admitted to attend the figure drawing class in the all-male Cincinnati Art Club. Davis created the iconic “Let Ohio Women Vote” poster used by the Ohio Woman Suffrage Association for the 1912 campaign to get a state constitutional amendment for women’s suffrage. The image, which incorporates the sun, hills and wheat elements of the Ohio state emblem, is well known. But despite her name on the bottom of the poster, the artist is rarely recognized for her contribution.
We honor and recognize Cornelia Cassady Davis as we welcome renowned artist Shepard Fairey to our campus on September 17 to speak exclusively to our students about the power of exercising your right to vote and how the creative class can make a difference every day of their lives.
Welcome to the AAC for a phenomenal year and always… Make Art, Make a Difference.
Joe Girandola, Art Academy President
