More than 150 photographs, personal ephemera and working materials from photographer Nancy Rexroth are now on public view at the Cincinnati Art Museum, many of them exhibited for the very first time. The exhibition, Nancy Rexroth: Secrets of My Power, opened October 2 and runs through January 3, 2027, marking the public debut of the museum's entire Nancy Rexroth Collection. Admission is free, with no tickets required.
The show represents the first career retrospective ever mounted for Rexroth, according to CityBeat. It arrives five years after the Cincinnati Art Museum completed a multiyear acquisition of more than 400 vintage prints from the artist in 2021, a collaboration that, per the museum, began back in 2017. As Cincinnati Magazine reports, that timeline tracks with curator Nathaniel M. Stein's own account of connecting with Rexroth roughly nine years into his tenure at the museum.
Rexroth, born in 1946, first picked up a plastic Diana toy camera and used it to shoot every image that would appear in her landmark 1977 photobook IOWA. Most of those images were made while she was completing an MFA in photography at Ohio University, primarily in and around Athens, Ohio, according to the Cincinnati Art Museum. As Hyperallergic notes, the dreamlike, blurred-edge pictures drew on Rexroth's remembered childhood in Iowa even as the camera's shutter clicked in rural Ohio.
A Collection Decades in the Making
The Nancy Rexroth Collection now held by the museum includes a nearly complete set of Diana-camera images spanning both the 1977 and 2017 editions of IOWA, plus unpublished photographs never folded into the book at all, the museum says. A large share of the roughly 400 prints are unique objects that exist in no other repository, according to the museum's own collection page. Rexroth also donated her personal and professional papers to the museum's Mary R. Schiff Library & Archives, along with tools and other artistic materials, per Cincinnati Magazine's reporting.
Stein, the museum's curator of photography, chose the exhibition's title himself. He has described Rexroth's creative output as an inner voice that rejects prescribed quietness, and said her work carries a persistent sense of mystery, according to Cincinnati Magazine. Stein said he wanted the show to emphasize that same sense of power running through her career. The title borrows directly from Rexroth's own words: she once described her IOWA photographs as the secrets of my lonely power.
From Athens to Yellow Springs
After finishing her MFA in 1971, Rexroth went on to teach photography at Antioch College and later at Wright State University while living in Yellow Springs, Ohio, from 1977 to 1983, the museum notes. She later resided in the Cincinnati area during the 1980s and, per Cincinnati Magazine, took a hiatus from publishing new work during that stretch of her career.
Among the pieces on view are several contemplative self-portraits, including In Between, Self Portrait in My Living Room, made in Athens, Ohio in 1970, and Behind, Touch, Self-Portrait With My Mother, which depicts Rexroth alongside her mother. Other works span a wider geographic and temporal range, from A Woman's Bed, shot in Logan, Ohio in 1970, to Girl in Car, captured at Winchester Raceway in Virginia back in 1968.
Part of a Region-Wide Photography Showcase
The exhibition is also a Featured Exhibition in the 2026 FotoFocus Biennial: The Long View, which this year spans 74 exhibitions across 65 venues throughout the region, according to FotoFocus. FotoFocus describes the Cincinnati show as a major retrospective exploring Rexroth's life, work and archive, tying it to the iconic 1977 photobook that first made her name. The timing lines up with the 50th anniversary of that self-published debut.
Visitors to Gallery 234 will also find updated accessibility accommodations built specifically for this show, including improved wayfinding, multisensory interpretation with tactile and scent elements, enhanced audiovisual content and a customized welcome station, the museum says. Nancy Rexroth: Secrets of My Power remains on view through January 3, 2027.
