Current Exhibitions
The newly reinstalled galleries invite visitors to join exciting fresh conversations among works in the museum’s contemporary collection. The galleries will feature longtime favorites alongside more recent additions and a selection of foundational video artworks. Together, these works demonstrate the wide range of perspectives that animate contemporary art.
Revealing Krishna: Journey to Cambodia’s Sacred Mountain presents the story, context, and new restoration of a masterwork in the museum’s collection, Krishna Lifting Mount Govardhan. The 1,500-year-old stone sculpture from Cambodia, larger than life size, depicts the young Hindu god in the superhuman act of shielding his people from destruction.
Featuring four immersive digital galleries, the exhibition places the sculpture in the southern Cambodian landscape and sacred space from which it came. In partnership with the National Museum of Cambodia in Phnom Penh and the Angkor Borei Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art is displaying the newly restored work alongside other large-scale early sculptures from Phnom Da, or “Stone Mountain,” generously lent from the National Museum and the Musée national des arts asiatiques–Guimet in Paris. Revealing Krishna illuminates the effect of global changes over the past 150 years on the discovery, disposition, and conservation of the sculptures from one of the earliest major Hindu sites in Southeast Asia.
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.
Odilon Redon was known as “the prince of mysterious dreams” for his enigmatic and imaginative paintings, drawings, and prints that mined fantasy, literature, and the subconscious.
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.
Seventeen rarely seen or newly acquired works will be installed in the African arts galleries throughout late fall 2021. These 19th- to 21st-century works from northern, central, western, and southern Africa support continuing efforts to broaden the scope of African arts on view at the CMA.
The wig shops in the artist’s Brooklyn neighborhood inspired the nine monumental paintings of wigs on mannequin heads in Derrick Adams: LOOKS.
The textiles in the current rotation from the permanent collection represent several different civilizations that flourished in the ancient Andes, today Peru and parts of adjacent countries. Though unrelated by cultural affiliation, they are unified by being special in some way, whether through rarity, complexity of execution, or luxuriousness of materials. The centerpiece of the display is a unique cloth that experts regard as one of the greatest paintings to survive from South American antiquity. One of the museum’s masterpieces, it was created by an artist of the Nasca culture (100 BC–AD 650) and depicts a procession of figures who may represent humans dressed in the guises of supernatural beings thought to control nature’s fertility. Other textiles in the rotation include a panel covered in the radiant feathers of the blue-and-yellow macaw, made by artists of the Wari Empire (600–1000), and several fragments that are rare survivors of catastrophic rains that destroyed much of the Moche culture’s (AD 200–850) textile legacy.
Works from the permanent collection newly on display in the Native North American gallery include a group of objects from the Great Plains—a child’s beaded cradle; a woman’s hair-pipe necklace, one of the most memorable of Plains ornaments; and several beaded or painted bags that served varied purposes. A basket rotation features creations that Timbisha Shoshone (Panamint) weavers of California’s Death Valley made for the early 20th-century collector’s market; most dramatic are three fine, large presentation bowls modeled on Native food service bowls. Finally, for the first time in at least twenty years, two works by contemporary Inuit artists of the Canadian Arctic make an appearance. One is a 1972 stonecut print by Alec (Peter) Aliknak Banksland, a founding member of the Holman Eskimo Arts Cooperative, now the Ulukhaktok Arts Centre in Ulukhaktok, Canada.
平沙落雁 — 音樂的詩意與力量
An installation by Peng Wei in collaboration with the Cleveland Museum of Art
In the 1960s, practitioners of Pop Art looked toward everyday commodities and commercial images for inspiration. Such an artistic spirit that challenged the rigid concept between high- and lowbrow arts in fact had long existed in Korean art, flourishing in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Rendered in dazzling colors, Korean still-life paintings called chaekgeori (pronounced check-oh-ree), for example, are replete with mass-produced utilitarian items and trendy luxuries. Polychrome folding screens, such as chaekgeori, often complemented familial festivities and reunions, beyond simply furnishing the living space of middle-class households. Blue-and-white porcelain, which features the abundant use of expensive cobalt blue and floral decor, is another artistic expression drawn from the emerging consumerism in early modern Korea. By the late 1800s, Korean art was becoming more inclusive and diverse, no longer exclusively for the elites.
Japan is known today for anime and manga (animations and graphic novels) and has a long tradition of storytelling in the visual arts. This gallery explores Japanese narrative art with diverse examples from the 1300s to the 1900s. The majority of the works include text elements, from a chapter title done in raised gold lacquer on a writing box to poems or dialogue inscribed next to figures in ink on handscroll fragments. A pair of screens features long anecdotes in loose calligraphy with capping illustrations. Another handscroll contains written passages preceding painted scenes peppered with conversation. These works demonstrate some of the different ways Japanese artists have combined visual imagery with written stories over the centuries.
This special installation of three works by Vincent van Gogh is intended to provide visitors with direct experience of the artist’s actual paintings and graphic art to coincide with the Immersive Van Gogh experience of video and sound projections. The installation is free to the public and on view in the Nancy F. and Joseph P. Keithley Gallery (222).
Twenty-one works from the Indian subcontinent, made between the mid-1600s and mid-1900s, place the pivotal moment when Krishna raised Mount Govardhan in the context of the conquests, miracles, and pastimes of his early life story.
Gold and silver reliquaries, jeweled crosses, liturgical garments, and illuminated manuscripts are among the rare treasures kept in the Cathedral of Saint Paul in Münster, in northwestern Germany.
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.