Wheeling to Columbus to Cincinnati

Setting aside the sites and parks of Pennsylvania, let’s skip to Wheeling, West Virginia, which visibly continues to struggle with economic depression — and yet it’s a lovely place to stop. Not lovely in the sense of pristine, beautified, or gentrified, but rich in history, nostalgia, and nature.

With its fortunate location on the eastern bank of the Ohio River, Wheeling offers a riverside walk as part of a 16.5-mile rail trail alive with hedgehogs. Along Main Street of Old Town there’s a stretch of restored Victorian architecture, and scattered around Wheeling may be found 48 sites on the National Register of Historic Places. The most wonderful of these is the Wheeling Suspension Bridge, spanning the Ohio like a giant spiderweb. Revered as the oldest vehicular suspension bridge still in use in the United States and replete with a walkway, the bridge is surely the most dramatic and possibly fearsome means of crossing the river.

On the downtown end of Main Street is the Artisan Center. Housed in a renovated industrial building, the Center offers regionally crafted food and objects, including bowls, dishes, jewelry, and decorative pieces made of vibrantly colored glass – the traditionally favored material among artisans of the Ohio River Valley.

Across the river, well into the state of Ohio and only a couple of miles north of Interstate 70, can be found the glorious Dawes Arboretum, a premier landscape, free of charge and open year round, with miles of rolling trails among displays of healthy trees, a Japanese garden with koi pond, and — at this moment of spring — a cavalcade of orange, pink, red, fuchsia, yellow, and white azaleas, alongside mountains of purple rhododendron. Birds sing and hawks soar overhead.

Hello, Columbus

Not much further westward along interstate 70 a road trip traveler comes upon Columbus, where I invariably stop to visit the Wexner Center for the Arts, located on the campus of Ohio State University. Not to be ignored is an outdoor installation constructed of 43 tons of recycled broken tinted windshield safety glass. Titled Groundswell and created by Maya Lin, the installation is a field of glistening undulating hills of glass, reminiscent of the prehistoric burial mounds of southeastern Ohio, where Maya Lin was born, as well as the importance of glass to Ohio artisans. Sculpted onsite by Ms. Lin, Groundswell fits into space left void by the architectural lines of the steel grid and glass building that is the Wexner. (By the way, Laurie Olin of Philadelphia was the Center’s landscape architect.)

I ventured inside to enjoy the Wexner’s current exhibit, Eye of the Cartoonist (through August 3), which highlights selections from print comic history, chosen by artist Daniel Clowes and including Peanuts, Dick Tracy, Popeye, Nancy, The Little King, Buck Rogers, Hirschfeld caricatures, Peter Arno cartoons, etc. — and none by women artists, not even Lynda Barry.

Cin City

From Columbus, I drove south on interstate 71 toward Cincinnati, home to the Contemporary Arts Center, the first museum in the United States designed by a woman, Dame Zaha Hadid, and heralded by the New York Times as "the most important American building to be completed since the cold war." I love the CAC for the building and then some. It is politically and artistically a daring place within the conventional atmosphere of Cincinnati. In 1990 the directors stood up in the heat of prejudicial outrage against a Robert Mapplethorpe photography exhibit of primarily homosexual nudity. The result was an obscenity trial, constituting the nation’s first criminal trial of an art museum over the content of an exhibition. The CAC and its director were acquitted in a decision favoring curatorial freedom of speech.

On this trip, I left off the CAC to explore another of Cincinnati’s architectural treasures, the art deco Union (train) Terminal. Completed in 1933, the Terminal offers a towering domed ceiling painted in cream, salmon, and pink pastels, above massive walls ablaze with huge WPA murals. Composed of mosaic tiles, the murals depict a multiplicity of American men (there are only two women and two children) engaged in the range of laborious work that built the nation. Union Terminal, barely, but happily, escaped the wrecking ball in the 1970s and became the Museum Center of Cincinnati in the 1990s.

In the Changing Exhibits Hall, I enjoyed a pop culture assemblage, Diana, A Celebration, now in the final months of an international tour (terminating in Cincinnati on August 17). On view were artifacts from each stage in the life of Lady Diana Spencer, Her Royal Highness the Princess of Wales — childhood books and toys, courtship and marriage photos and jewelry, videos of humanitarian expeditions to India and Africa, and an inestimable number of letters of condolence. Best, because it is the most enticingly artistic, was a collection of 28 designer outfits that Diana wore: from a handsomely tidy tartan plaid suit to a stunningly slinky, scintillatingly red ball gown. Her bejeweled wedding dress with a 25-foot train could also be admired. Altogether, organized by the Spencer family, the exhibit affectionately achieved its assumed intention: to evoke feelings both sweet and sad.

Oh, and a final recommendable work of art and nature, situated in the Ohio River Valley, is the countenance of my mother Helen. The goal of my road trip was to celebrate her 102nd birthday. Though frail of body and dependent upon a walker, she is remarkably sound of mind, with mostly cheerful disposition, softly curled white hair, bright red lipstick, and turquoise blue eyes: an achievement.

For another art-lover's road trip by Joanna Rotté -- this one with a James Garfield theme -- click here.