Thursday April 29, 2021

Press Release

The Cleveland Museum of Art Exhibition Schedule through May 2022

Now on View

Laura Owens: Rerun
CMA at Transformer Station
Through May 30, 2021
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Laura Owens (b. 1970) is known for her wide-ranging and experimental approach to the medium of painting. Her work embraces a breadth of sources from the avant-garde to the popular to the decorative. Owens grew up close to Cleveland in Norwalk, Ohio, and as a teenager spent many hours studying the CMA’s encyclopedic collection. Having lived in Los Angeles for the past three decades, she has returned to Cleveland to develop an exhibition in collaboration with high school students participating in the CMA’s Arts Mastery program, called Currently Under Curation. The students involved in this effort include Jamal Carter, Xyhair Davis, Skylar Fleming, Yomi Gonzalez, Joseph Hlavac, Agatha Mathoslah, Arica McKinney, Maya Peroune and Deonta Steele.

Owens was recently the subject of a mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017–18), which traveled to the Dallas Museum of Art (2018) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2018–19). Other recent solo exhibitions were at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2016); Secession, Vienna (2015); and Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany (2011). Owens studied at the California Institute of the Arts and the Rhode Island School of Design.

Major support is provided in memory of Myrlin von Glahn

All exhibitions at the Cleveland Museum of Art are underwritten by the CMA Fund for Exhibitions. Major annual support is provided by the Estate of Dolores B. Comey and Bill and Joyce Litzler, with generous annual funding from Mr. and Mrs. Walter R. Chapman Jr., the Jeffery Wallace Ellis Trust in memory of Lloyd H. Ellis Jr., Ms. Arlene Monroe Holden, Eva and Rudolf Linnebach, William S. and Margaret F. Lipscomb, Tim O’Brien and Breck Platner, the Womens Council of the Cleveland Museum of Art, and Claudia Woods and David Osage.

Transformer Station, the CMA’s sister contemporary art museum
1460 West 29th Street
Cleveland, OH 44113

For hours and other information, visit transformerstation.org.

Bruce Davidson: Brooklyn Gang
Through June 13, 2021
Mark Schwartz and Bettina Katz Photography Gallery
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Bruce Davidson, one of the most respected and influential American documentary photographers of the past half century, offered an independent look at America in the age of visual and social homogenization presented by Life and Look magazines. Davidson’s 1959 series Brooklyn Gang—his first major project—was the fruit of several months spent photographing the daily lives of the Jokers, one of the many teenage street gangs worrying New York City officials at the time. Bruce Davidson features 50 photographs from that series, which are part of a recent anonymous gift to the museum of extensive selections from the artist’s archives. Included are several sets of variant images, affording a rare glimpse into Davidson’s working process.

The Cleveland Museum of Art is funded in part by residents of Cuyahoga County through a public grant from Cuyahoga Arts & Culture.

This exhibition was supported in part by the Ohio Arts Council, which receives support from the State of Ohio and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Gustave Baumann: Colorful Cuts
Through June 27, 2021
James and Hanna Bartlett Prints and Drawings Gallery
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Like many Chicago artists in the first years of the 20th century, Gustave Baumann discovered the beauty of rural Brown County in Indiana. While living in Nashville from 1910 to 1916, he produced his first important set of color woodcuts. In 1917 he headed east before traveling the next year to New Mexico, where he spent the rest of his life. Exhilarated by the state’s natural beauty, he settled in Santa Fe and over the next five decades produced complex color woodcuts that captured the area’s intense sunlight and arid atmosphere. Baumann’s prints portray not only stunning mountain scenery but also Indigenous adobe architecture and scenes representing Native American and Hispanic cultures.

Over the years, Baumann made numerous trips around New Mexico, Arizona and California searching for additional picturesque venues, such as at the Grand Canyon and among giant sequoias, all of which became the subjects of beautiful color woodcuts.

The exhibition also illustrates how Baumann worked. He began by making tempera drawings in front of the subject. The outlines of the main forms were transferred to woodblocks, one for each color. The museum owns a set of blocks for his print Summer Clouds (1926) and the proofs, allowing visitors to understand how he printed layers of color to achieve rich effects.

Principal support is provided by Kenneth F. and Betsy Bryan Hegyes, Leon* and Gloria Plevin and Family, and the Print Club of Cleveland. Major support is provided by the Ann Baumann Trust.
*deceased

Variations: The Reuse of Models in Paintings by Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi
Through August 22, 2021
Julia and Larry Pollock Focus Gallery
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Recent conservation of the CMA’s Italian Baroque painting Danaë by Orazio Gentileschi (1563–1639) has revealed a more vibrant and refined work than has hitherto been possible to perceive. This extraordinary picture now conveys the artist’s trademark virtuosity in rendering drapery and flesh tones. Danaë is the second version of a picture that Orazio painted in Genoa around 1621–22. The artist often copied his own works, and these subsequent versions can rival the original in quality.

While issues of attribution are still very much alive in works by Orazio and his daughter Artemisia (1593–after 1654), it is clear that both artists returned to and reworked certain themes and compositions throughout their careers. In content and form, Orazio’s Danaë is a key example of this phenomenon.

In the exhibition, Danaë is at the center of an intimate group of paintings by father and daughter that beautifully distill the artists’ capacity to modify and manipulate forms across subjects.

Generous support is provided by an anonymous gift in honor of Professor Edward J. Olszewski.

Generous support for public programs related to this exhibition is provided by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.

Rinpa (琳派)
Through October 3, 2021
Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation Japanese Art Galleries
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Rinpa is a style of Japanese art focused on abstracted natural motifs and allusions to classical literature. Coined in the early 1900s, Rinpa means “Rin School,” after painter Ogata Kōrin (1658–1716), whose work was critical to the later transmission of the tradition. Three techniques associated with Rinpa are tarashikomi, horinuri, and mokkotsu. In tarashikomi (dripping-in), the artist drips ink or color on wet surfaces, creating pooling effects. Horinuri (painting-by-carving) leaves initial ink outlines uncovered after shapes are filled with ink or color, so the surface looks carved. Mokkotsu (boneless) entails creating shapes without contours or lines defining edges and boundaries.

This rotation tells the story of later Rinpa style, introducing works by important artists active in the 1700s, 1800s, and early 1900s, including Kōrin and his brother Ogata Kenzan (1663–1743); Sakai Hōitsu (1761–1828), the Edo-based (present-day Tokyo) dynamo who revolutionized Rinpa painting; and Kamisaka Sekka (1866–1942), the Kyoto-based master of graphic design who delighted with his prints and drawings. (Gallery 235A)

Also, on view for the first time since 2014 are treasures of early Japanese Buddhist sculpture in bronze and wood, as well as an indigo-dyed sacred Buddhist sutra scroll written in gold and silver. A gorgeously woven silk Buddhist monk’s garment called a kesa is also on display. (Gallery 235B)

Interpretation of Materiality: Gold
Through October 25, 2021
Korea Foundation Gallery
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Due to its remarkable malleability and durability, gold has been widely used in artifacts for the wealthy and for royalty since the fifth millennium BC. In Korean art, this precious mineral was the main material for luxury goods during the Three Kingdoms period (57 BC−668). In The Book of Pleasant Journeys into Faraway Lands, the author Muhammad al-Idrisi (1099−1166) writes: “Gold is too common in the Silla kingdom. Even the dog’s leash and the monkey’s collar are made of gold.”

This exhibit illuminates how Korean artists from ancient times to the present day creatively used and interpreted gold and its distinctive materiality. One highlight is the 13th-century Buddhist text Avatamsaka Sutra No. 78. Mixed with ink and glue, refined gold powder was applied on the smooth surface of the dark blue, indigo-dyed mulberry paper. In the practice of copying a Buddhist sutra, gold served as the perfect medium to visualize the splendid world of Buddhas and their awakening teachings.

The establishment of this gallery was made possible by the support of the Korea Foundation and the National Museum of Korea, Republic of Korea.

The casework in the Korea Foundation Gallery has been generously funded by the National Museum of Korea, Republic of Korea.

Fashioning Identity: Mola Textiles of Panamá
Through January 9, 2022
Arlene M. and Arthur S. Holden Textile Gallery
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The mola is a key component of traditional dress among the indigenous Guna (formerly Kuna) women of Panamá. Guna women have been sewing mola blouses since the turn of the 20th century, and they have become powerful symbols of their culture and identity. During the Guna Revolution of 1925, Guna people rallied around their right to make and wear molas as a statement of their independence. They ultimately gained sovereignty over their territory, an archipelago of hundreds of small islands along Panamá’s Atlantic coast, known collectively as Gunayala.

Molas are masterfully hand-sewn cotton panels that are made in pairs and sewn into blouses. They feature a wide array of vibrantly colored compositions, with designs ranging from geometric abstraction to imaginative scenes inspired by popular Western culture.

This exhibition presents both individual mola panels and complete mola blouses from the collections of the CMA and Denison University in Granville, Ohio. The molas on display span distinct periods of Guna history, from the era of the 1925 revolution to the 1980s.

The Cleveland Museum of Art is funded in part by residents of Cuyahoga County through a public grant from Cuyahoga Arts & Culture.

This exhibition was supported in part by the Ohio Arts Council, which receives support from the State of Ohio and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Contemporary Art Reinstallation
Betty and Max Ratner Gallery | Contemporary Corridor 224A
Toby’s Gallery for Contemporary Art | Galleries 229A, 229C
Paula and Eugene Stevens Gallery |Gallery 229B
The above galleries are located in the S. Mueller Family East Wing
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The newly reinstalled galleries present exciting, fresh conversations among works in the museum’s contemporary collection. Visitors encounter contemporary re-imaginings of portraiture and representations of the body, discover recent takes on abstraction and find innovative adaptations of materials, from video to clay. Spanning the past six decades, the contemporary reinstallation carries forward in time stories whose beginnings are told throughout the CMA’s historic collection.

The galleries feature longtime favorites—among them Andy Warhol’s Marilyn x 100 (1962) and Anselm Kiefer’s Lot’s Wife (1989)—alongside more recent additions. Some highlights are Robert Colescott’s Tea for Two (The Collector) (1980), Simone Leigh’s Las Meninas (2019), Teresa Margolles’s El manto negro / The black shroud (2020) and a selection of foundational video artworks. Together, these works demonstrate the wide range of perspectives that animate contemporary art.

The reinstallation of these galleries is made possible with principal support provided by the Sandy and Sally Cutler Strategic Opportunities Fund.

Upcoming

Art of the Islamic World
Opening May 21, 2021
Gallery 116
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Artwork from the Islamic world is as diverse and vibrant as the peoples who produced it. The objects presented in this gallery were created during the 8th through 19th centuries, a period of great cultural and geographic expansion. As a result, these works represent a vast area including Spain, North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. While they originate within the Islamic world, they reflect the unique artistic and cultural traditions of disparate regions. Each object offers insight into the production and consumption of Islamic art within its respective cultural, geographic and historical contexts.

Early works reveal the adoption and adaptation of motifs from antiquity, while later objects make clear the impact of exchange, trade and cross-cultural interconnection. The variety of media speaks to the skill of the artisans who produced these objects, as well as the technological innovations that spread throughout the Islamic world at that time. Drawing on highlights of the museum’s collection, the gallery illuminates the broad range of Islamic art produced for both sacred and secular purposes.

Medieval Treasures from Münster Cathedral
May 22, 2021, to August 14, 2022
Gallery 115
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Saint Paul’s Cathedral in Münster, Germany, preserves one of the most outstanding church treasuries of the Middle Ages in Europe and looks back on a tradition of more than 1,200 years. Most of the objects were made for the cathedral church and have been kept there for many centuries. The exhibition comprises a selection of masterpieces, giving insight into the art of the Middle Ages and the diverse forms of reliquaries, which every church possessed at that time.

These precious objects bring viewers closer to the piety and thinking of an age seemingly long gone. But they also provide direct insight into medieval trade, for example via Paris, as a production center, or Africa, whence some of the materials used in their manufacture originally came.

The exhibition sheds new light on the CMA’s collection, which, with objects from the Guelph treasure, already possesses famous holdings of medieval German art.

The Cleveland Museum of Art is funded in part by residents of Cuyahoga County through a public grant from Cuyahoga Arts & Culture.

This exhibition is supported in part by the Ohio Arts Council, which receives support from the State of Ohio and the National Endowment for the Arts.

From Caves to Tombs: Chinese Pictorial Rubbings from Stone Reliefs (從石窟到墓祠—石刻拓片)
June 11 to November 14, 2021
Gallery 240A
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The exhibit explores the tradition of making and mounting ink rubbings from stone reliefs, practiced in China at least since the 500s. A rubbing is taken directly from the stone’s carved surface. Before high-resolution color photography was available, life-size rubbings taken from ancient sites and cultural relics in China played an important role as primary source and study material.

This display celebrates the recent conservation of two monumental rubbings from the Buddhist caves of Longmen in central China. They were shown for the first time at the museum’s opening in 1916 and have not been on display for almost a century. Also on view are rubbings relating to the Wu Family Shrines of the Eastern Han dynasty (AD 25–220) in Shandong Province in eastern China.

New Histories, New Futures
CMA at Transformer Station
June 26 to September 12, 2021
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This exhibition centers on three contemporary artists’ engagement with time and historical revisionism. Johnny Coleman (based in Oberlin, Ohio) revitalizes the marginalized history of one family’s journey on the Underground Railroad. His archival research on Lee Howard Dobbins, a four-year-old enslaved child whose journey north ended in illness and who was laid to rest in Oberlin in 1853, is the source of an ongoing series of large-scale installations. The exhibition features a new iteration of the series: an immersive installation that includes sculpture, sound and projection. Antwoine Washington (based in Cleveland, Ohio) paints portraits of his own young family to counteract the stereotype of the absent Black father in a style that pays homage to artists of the Harlem Renaissance.

The North Star series by Kambui Olujimi (based in Queens, New York) includes paintings and video of weightless, floating Black bodies “freed from the gravity of oppression,” imaging a future in which a politics of resistance can result in true bodily freedom. In these ways, the artists engage with the exhibition’s premise from standpoints rooted in the past, present and future.

The Cleveland Museum of Art is funded in part by residents of Cuyahoga County through a public grant from Cuyahoga Arts & Culture.

This exhibition is supported in part by the Ohio Arts Council, which receives support from the State of Ohio and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Transformer Station, the CMA’s sister contemporary art museum
1460 West 29th Street
Cleveland, OH 44113

For hours and other information, visit transformerstation.org.

Private Lives: Home and Family in the Art of the Nabis, Paris, 1889–1900
July 1 to September 19, 2021
The Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation Exhibition Hall
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Ticketed Exhibition

Private Lives: Home and Family in the Art of the Nabis, Paris, 1889–1900 explores the beautiful, enigmatic and paradoxical work of Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis and Félix Vallotton, four members of the Nabi Brotherhood. The Nabis were a group of young artists active in Paris who were inspired by Paul Gauguin and the growing current of Symbolism in literature and theater. They sought to create an art of suggestion and emotion. Private Lives examines their paintings, prints and drawings of home, family and children, or what Bonnard referred to as the small pleasures and “modest acts of life.” Throughout their formative years in the 1890s, these four artists were deeply entwined in each other’s lives; Bonnard, Vuillard and Denis shared a studio, and Swiss-born Vallotton became a close associate of all three and remained a lifelong confidant of Vuillard. Although their styles varied, each returned repeatedly to the motifs of home life, romantic love and family.

Yet the domestic world was not always what it seemed; suppressed secrets, hidden affairs and familial tension bubble beneath the surface, challenging the viewer to construct the unspoken narrative of these small but powerful images of interiors, gardens and the city of Paris.

Loans from the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Musée d’Orsay, as well as from many additional public and private collections, will feature in this exhibition, alongside the rich holdings of works by the Nabis in the collections of the CMA and the Portland Art Museum.

The exhibition is organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Portland Art Museum.

Major support is provided by the Florence Gould Foundation. Additional support is provided by Anne H. Weil. Generous support is provided by an anonymous supporter and by Sandra and Richey Smith.

The exhibition catalogue for Private Lives: Home and Family in the Art of the Nabis, Paris, 1889–1900 was produced with the support of the FRench American Museum Exchange (FRAME).

A New York Minute: Street Photography, 1920–1950
July 10 to November 7, 2021
Mark Schwartz and Bettina Katz Photography Gallery
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Street photography—spontaneous images of everyday life captured in public places—blossomed in New York City during the first half of the 20th century. This genre of photography was heir to the slightly earlier tradition of urban realism in painting and printmaking, as seen in the complementary exhibition Ashcan School Prints and the American City, 1900–1940, on view in the James and Hanna Bartlett Prints and Drawings Gallery. Both movements turned to depictions of the everyday activities of urban dwellers to explore the radical demographic, social and economic shifts then transforming the city.

All exhibitions at the Cleveland Museum of Art are underwritten by the CMA Fund for Exhibitions. Major annual support is provided by Bill and Joyce Litzler, with generous annual funding from Mr. and Mrs. Walter R. Chapman Jr., the Jeffery Wallace Ellis Trust in memory of Lloyd H. Ellis Jr., Ms. Arlene Monroe Holden, Eva and Rudolf Linnebach, William S. and Margaret F. Lipscomb, Tim O’Brien and Breck Platner, and Claudia Woods and David Osage.

The Cleveland Museum of Art is funded in part by residents of Cuyahoga County through a public grant from Cuyahoga Arts & Culture.

This exhibition was supported in part by the Ohio Arts Council, which receives support from the State of Ohio and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Ashcan School Prints and the American City, 1900–1940
July 17 to December 26, 2021
James and Hanna Bartlett Prints and Drawings Gallery
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Ashcan School Prints and the American City, 1900–1940  presents prints of city life made by urban realists during a time of rapid demographic, social and economic change. With New York City as an epicenter of change—packed with vibrant new communities of immigrants from Europe and Latin American countries, and Black Southerners who had migrated north—artists responded to the everyday lives and experiences of city dwellers, incorporating advertising and mass media techniques into their depictions of the lower classes, immigrants, working women and social elites alike.  

Principal support is provided by the Print Club of Cleveland.

Collecting Dreams: Odilon Redon
September 19, 2021, to January 23, 2022
Julia and Larry Pollock Focus Gallery
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One critic referred to Odilon Redon as “the prince of mysterious dreams” for his enigmatic and imaginative paintings, drawings and prints, which mined fantasy, literature and the subconscious. The Cleveland Museum of Art was among the earliest American museums to collect pieces by this groundbreaking 19th-century French artist. Beginning nearly a century ago, in 1925, the institution’s early supporters made significant donations of artworks by Redon, such as his darkly evocative lithograph Parsifal and his pastel masterpiece Orpheus—described by one art historian as the artist’s finest work. These early acquisitions earned the CMA an international reputation as the most important repository of works by Redon outside France, and the museum continues to augment its remarkable collection to this day.

Collecting Dreams: Odilon Redon celebrates the CMA’s exceptional holdings and includes a newly acquired charcoal drawing. It also features one of Redon’s most significant late paintings, Andromeda (1912), a special loan from the Arkansas Art Center that was exhibited for the first time in the United States at the CMA in 1926. Together, the objects on view reveal the legacy of this influential Post-Impressionist artist in Cleveland.

All exhibitions at the Cleveland Museum of Art are underwritten by the CMA Fund for Exhibitions. Generous annual support is provided by Mr. and Mrs. Walter R. Chapman Jr., the Jeffery Wallace Ellis Trust in memory of Lloyd H. Ellis Jr., and William S. and Margaret F. Lipscomb.

The Cleveland Museum of Art is funded in part by residents of Cuyahoga County through a public grant from Cuyahoga Arts & Culture.

This exhibition was supported in part by the Ohio Arts Council, which receives support from the State of Ohio and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Picturing Motherhood Now
October 16, 2021, to March 13, 2022
The Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation Exhibition Gallery
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Ticketed Exhibition

Responding to our time, Picturing Motherhood Now brings together works by a diverse range of contemporary artists who reimagine the possibilities for representing motherhood. Drawing on a range of feminisms, it challenges familiar archetypes of motherhood, construing motherhood as a multivalent term. The artists in Picturing Motherhood Now use motherhood as a lens through which to examine contemporary social issues—the changing definitions of family and gender, the histories and afterlives of slavery, the legacies of migration and the preservation of matrilineal indigenous cultures.

Picturing Motherhood Now focuses on art made in the past two decades, while integrating work by significant pioneers to narrate an intergenerational and evolving story of motherhood.

Major support is provided In Memory of Myrlin von Glahn.

All exhibitions at the Cleveland Museum of Art are underwritten by the CMA Fund for Exhibitions. Generous annual support is provided by Mr. and Mrs. Walter R. Chapman Jr., and the Jeffery Wallace Ellis Trust in memory of Lloyd H. Ellis Jr.

Revealing Krishna: Journey to Cambodia’s Sacred Mountain
November 14, 2021, to January 30, 2022
The Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation Exhibition Hall
Images
Ticketed Exhibition

Revealing Krishna: Journey to Cambodia’s Sacred Mountain is the first exhibition dedicated to the art of one of the earliest major Hindu sites in Southeast Asia, Phnom Da (Stone Mountain), established around 1,500 years ago. Through a series of refined and immersive digital experiences, the exhibition presents the CMA’s monumental sandstone sculpture Krishna Lifting Mount Govardhan in the context of the landscape and sacred space from which it came. The newly restored Cleveland Krishna is shown alongside nine related masterworks of stone sculpture on loan from Cambodia and France.

The exhibition provides visitors with an entirely new and eye-opening experience in which digital media supports the understanding and appreciation of exceptional works of Cambodian art. An illustrated print catalogue also accompanies the exhibition.

The exhibition is organized in cooperation with the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts of the Government of the Kingdom of Cambodia.

Principal support is provided by Rebecca and Irad Carmi. Major support is provided by Raj and Karen Aggarwal, the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, Mary Lynn Durham and William Roj, the Rajadhyaksha Family and DLZ Corporation, and the Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw Charitable Trust. Additional support is provided by DLR Group | Westlake Reed Leskosky, the John D. Proctor Foundation, Mr. and Mrs. Paul E. Westlake Jr., and in memory of Dr. Norman Zaworski, MD.

The Official Technology Partner is Microsoft.

This exhibition is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.

All exhibitions at the Cleveland Museum of Art are underwritten by the CMA Fund for Exhibitions. Generous annual support is provided by Mr. and Mrs. Walter R. Chapman Jr.

We recognize Dr. Gregory M. Videtic and Mr. Christopher R. McCann, who are graciously linked to this exhibition through the Leadership Circle.

Major support for the restoration of Krishna Lifting Mount Govardhan is provided by Bank of America.

Women in Print: Recent Acquisitions
January 16, 2022, to June 19, 2022
James and Hanna Bartlett Prints and Drawings Gallery
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This exhibition debuts exciting recent acquisitions to the museum’s collection by contemporary women printmakers. From printmaking’s beginnings more than 500 years ago, techniques such as lithography and etching were often considered too physically demanding for women to pursue professionally. The medium became increasingly accessible to female artists over the past half century as Atelier 17 in New York and the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in New Mexico, among other printshops, trained a generation of women. Women in Print features approximately 30 works by artists ranging from those avidly experimenting with printmaking processes, like Polly Apfelbaum and Julie Mehretu, to others who are exploring the practice for the first time, like Amy Sherald. Working with an array of techniques over the last several decades, these artists have used printmaking as a vehicle for investigating topics as expansive as personal identity, social issues, and even the creative process itself.

All exhibitions at the Cleveland Museum of Art are underwritten by the CMA Fund for Exhibitions. Generous annual support is provided by Mr. and Mrs. Walter R. Chapman Jr.

The Cleveland Museum of Art is funded in part by residents of Cuyahoga County through a public grant from Cuyahoga Arts & Culture.

This exhibition was supported in part by the Ohio Arts Council, which receives support from the State of Ohio and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Currents and Constellations: Black Art in Focus
February 20, 2022, to June 26, 2022
Julia and Larry Pollock Focus Gallery
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This exhibition features a selection of seminal works by major Black artists alongside additional works by a vanguard of emerging and mid-career Black artists, all drawn from the Cleveland Museum of Art’s collection. Through a series of provocative thematic vignettes in the Julia and Larry Pollock Focus Gallery and a set of temporary installations in the permanent collection galleries, powerful and suggestive juxtapositions invite audiences to forge new artistic, social, political and intellectual connections across time and geography, with Black art, artists and thinkers at the core.

All exhibitions at the Cleveland Museum of Art are underwritten by the CMA Fund for Exhibitions. Generous annual support is provided by Mr. and Mrs. Walter R. Chapman Jr.

The Cleveland Museum of Art is funded in part by residents of Cuyahoga County through a public grant from Cuyahoga Arts & Culture.

This exhibition was supported in part by the Ohio Arts Council, which receives support from the State of Ohio and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Alberto Giacometti: Toward the Ultimate Figure
March 12, 2022, to June 12, 2022
The Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation Exhibition Hall
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Ticketed Exhibition

The exhibition Alberto Giacometti: Toward the Ultimate Figure gathers an ensemble of masterpieces focusing on the artist’s major achievements of the postwar years (1945–66). Combining all media—sculpture, painting and drawing—the show of 60 works draws upon the deep resources of the artist’s personal collection and examines a central, animating aspect of his oeuvre: his extraordinary, singular concern for the human figure. Co-organized by the Fondation Giacometti in Paris and the Cleveland Museum of Art, the exhibition will also be presented at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Seattle Art Museum; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City; and the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City.

Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) owes his fame to his invention of a unique style of rendering human figures. During the last years of his life, the thin and elongated bodies animated by tormented surfaces became emblematic of his final, mature style. The exploration of an elemental body, its placement in space and its relationship with the plinth are among the issues Giacometti confronted in trying to solve essential questions for modern sculpture in his continuous creative struggle. The process led him to create iconic human forms informed by a broad range of philosophical issues, as the exhibition reveals through the display of such masterworks as The Nose (1947) and Walking Man I (1960).

The exhibition is accompanied by a large, fully illustrated catalogue written by internationally recognized scholars at the Fondation Giacometti and curators of the participating museums. There has not been a Giacometti exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art in 48 years.

Alberto Giacometti: Toward the Ultimate Figure is co-organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Fondation Giacometti, Paris

All exhibitions at the Cleveland Museum of Art are underwritten by the CMA Fund for Exhibitions. Generous annual support is provided by Mr. and Mrs. Walter R. Chapman Jr.

The Cleveland Museum of Art is funded in part by residents of Cuyahoga County through a public grant from Cuyahoga Arts & Culture.

This exhibition was supported in part by the Ohio Arts Council, which receives support from the State of Ohio and the National Endowment for the Arts.

The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion
May 8, 2022, to September 11, 2022
The Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation Exhibition Gallery
Images
Ticketed Exhibition

The vibrant portraits and conceptual images in The New Black Vanguard fuse art and fashion photography in ways that break traditional boundaries between genres. They open conversations around the representation of the Black body and Black lives as subject matter and challenge the idea that Blackness is homogenous.

Curator and art critic Antwaun Sargent selected 15 emerging talents, including Tyler Mitchell, the first African American to shoot a cover for Vogue in the magazine’s 125-year history, and Awol Erizku, whose work has appeared in Vogue, GQ, the New York Times and the Museum of Modern Art.

The men and women whose artworks are on view in the exhibition create in vastly different contexts, from New York and Johannesburg to Lagos and London. They have been featured in traditional lifestyle magazines, ad campaigns and museums, as well as on their individual social media channels. Since their images are constructed, often in association with Black stylists and fashion designers, the exhibition provides an opportunity to examine the rarely explored collaborative nature of fashion and celebrity photography.

The New Black Vanguard reinfuses the contemporary visual vocabulary around beauty and the body with new vitality and substance. It presents new perspectives on the medium of photography and the notions of race and beauty, gender and power. Complementing the photographs, videos and publications will be installations of fashion that elucidate the art of the stylist.

The exhibition is organized by Aperture, New York, and is curated by Antwaun Sargent.

The New Black Vanguard is made possible in part by Airbnb Magazine.

All exhibitions at the Cleveland Museum of Art are underwritten by the CMA Fund for Exhibitions. Generous annual support is provided by Mr. and Mrs. Walter R. Chapman Jr.

To reserve free, general admission tickets, or for more information about the museum’s new safety procedures, visit cma.org.

The Cleveland Museum of Art is open Tuesday to Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. The museum is closed Mondays.

The Cleveland Museum of Art is funded in part by residents of Cuyahoga County through a public grant from Cuyahoga Arts & Culture.

This exhibition was supported in part by the Ohio Arts Council, which receives support from the State of Ohio and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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