The CAC is a non-collecting museum that focuses on new developments in painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, performance art and new media.

Focusing on programming that reflects "the art of the last five minutes",[1] the CAC has displayed the works of many now-famous artists early in their careers, including Andy Warhol.

These two spaces, designed by Carl Strauss and Ray Roush, consisted of about 900 square feet (84 m2) each and featured movable wooden wall covers.

The search narrowed 97 statements of qualification to twelve semi finalists: Coop Himmelblau, Diller & Scofidio, Herzog & de Meuron, Steven Holl, Rem Koolhaas, Eric Owen Moss, Jean Nouvel, Toyo Ito, Antoine Predock, Zaha Hadid, Daniel Liebeskind and Bernard Tschumi.

In 1988, the CAC put Metrobot by Nam June Paik on permanent exhibition in front of its Mercantile Center location on Fifth Street.

[2] Participating architects included:[2] Christie's Fine Arts Division sold eight pieces and one concept at auction raising $425,000.

In 1990, a Cincinnati jury acquitted the Contemporary Arts Center and its director, Dennis Barrie, of obscenity charges stemming from an exhibition of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe.

The CAC chose to honor two of its major donors by naming the building the Lois and Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art.

Hailed by The New York Times' architecture critic Herbert Muschamp as "the most important American building to be completed since the cold war," the project was the brainchild of Director Charles Desmarais.