Cincinnati Art Museum

Few American museums can claim a dedicated wing for the art made in their own city. The Cincinnati Art Museum gives several galleries to the Cincinnati Wing, which traces local creativity from painters such as Frank Duveneck and Henry Farny to the celebrated art pottery of Rookwood and the carved furniture of the city's nineteenth-century woodcarving movement.

Founded in 1881, the museum opened in 1886 in a Romanesque Revival building on a hill in Eden Park, making it one of the oldest purpose-built art museums in the country. Its encyclopedic collection spans thousands of years. Highlights include European paintings from the bequest of Mary Emery, Van Gogh's Undergrowth with Two Figures, and an unusually important group of Nabataean sculpture from Khirbet et-Tannur in Jordan, rarely seen outside the Middle East.

The museum draws about 350,000 visitors a year. It suits both general art lovers and anyone curious about the Midwest's cultural history, and the collections reward a half day or more.