CINCINNATI, OH.- The Cincinnati Art Museum beats its record attendance number by more than 20,000 visitors, celebrating the third highest attendance year in the history of the Art Museum for the second year in a row.

Director Aaron Betsky announced today that the Cincinnati Art Museum has just finished its last fiscal year with the third highest visitor attendance in the history of the Art Museum AGAIN! From September 1, 2011 to August 31, 2012, 295, 661 people visited the museum to see Trial by Fire: New Glass Work by Darren Goodman; Art Deco: Fashion and Design in the Jazz Age; The Collections: 6,000 Years of Art; Nick Cave: Meet Me at the Center of the Earth; Monet in Giverny: Landscapes of Reflection; The James Bond Car, Aston Martin DB5 on view; Henry Ossawa Tanner: Modern Spirit; Printmaking Today; and The Art of Sound: Four Centuries of Musical Instruments. While they came for the world class exhibitions, they stayed for our lectures, children’s programs, Museum Shop, lunches in the Terrace Café, Art After Dark Final Fridays, and Dine Early & View Late Thursdays in August. For the Monet in Giverny: Landscapes of Reflection exhibition, 86,492 visitors viewed select paintings from our collection and around the world painted by the Master in Giverny, France.

Betsky says, “We are thrilled to be bringing more and more Cincinnatians and their visitors together with great art.”

In 1982-1983, when attendance was 311, 006, the traveling exhibit, Treasures from the Tower of London stopped here. In 2000-2001 when there were 301,647 visitors, the Art Museum brought another blockbuster traveling exhibit to town: European Masterpieces: Five Centuries of Paintings from the National Gallery of Victoria Australia. Just last year during the 2011-2012 exhibition season, 272,352 visitors came to the Cincinnati Art Museum making it the third highest attended year in the Museum’s history until this year.

This coming exhibition season, the Cincinnati Art Museum looks forward to even larger crowds enjoying all the wonderful programming and exhibitions we have to offer to including: Marjorie Schiele Prize winner, Sarah Vanderlip: Drawings for Sculpture Buildings; Marjorie Schiele: Artist, Expatriate, Benefactor; Herb Ritts: L.A. Style; Doug and Mike Starn: Gravity of Light; Toulouse-Lautrec and the Spectacles of Paris; James Welling: Monograph; and Eternal Summer: The Art of Edward Henry Potthast.