Current Exhibitions
This installation invites visitors to experience new conversations among works created after 1960 by a diverse range of artists. The galleries will feature longtime favorites alongside more recent additions and a selection of foundational video artworks. Together, these works demonstrate the various perspectives that animate contemporary art.
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; and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.
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.
Currents and Constellations: Black Art in Focus puts art from the CMA’s permanent collection in conversation with a vanguard of emerging and midcareer Black artists, as each explores the fundaments of art making, embracing and challenging art history.
In times of a pandemic, migration crises, and frequent natural and humanitarian disasters, the theme of Escaping to a Better World may resonate with many of us. In fact, this idea has long been part of China’s culture, embedded in the country’s religious and philosophical thinking. China’s legendary eccentrics and immortals often exhibit unconventional appearances and behaviors, expressing supernatural power and a rejection of everyday norms. By doing this, they embody the longing for an ideal world. This installation presents paintings, porcelain, and metalwork, all mediums in which these popular figures and their stories were depicted throughout the ages, including today.
Creating Urgency: Modern and Contemporary Korean Art sparks a stimulating discussion about contemporary Korean artists and their expressive language of defining diasporic artistic identities. Korean-born French painter Ungno Lee (1904–1989) reimagined traditional Korean ink painting and its conventional methods through his exploration of Art Informel (French Abstract Expressionist approaches of the 1940s and ’50s). The Berlin-based Korean artist Haegue Yang (b. 1971), on the other hand, invites the audience to critically explore issues of identity, migration, and displacement. The selected works on display share each Korean artist’s experiences and challenges in the global art scene.
A significant share of paintings, prints, and decorative arts made in Japan from the mid-1700s to mid-1800s captured artists’ responses to urban sex and entertainment districts unofficially known as the ukiyo (浮世), or “floating world.” The term “ukiyo” was repurposed in the late 1600s from its much older use in Buddhism, where it described human frailty in the face of constant change. The new floating world, designed as an escape from the constraints of daily life for male government servants, thrived on ephemeral experiences and suggested a kaleidoscope of enjoyable possibilities. In addition to paintings, prints of courtesans and musicians vie with those of Kabuki actors and a sumo wrestler for attention in the spring installation (April 8–July 10), while prints of boating parties on the Sumida River feature in the summer installation (July 12–October 9).
Cycles of Life: The Four Seasons Tapestries offers visitors an in-depth look at a rare, complete set of tapestries in the museum’s collection that has not been displayed since 1953 because of the tapestries’ fragile condition. Each tapestry depicts seasonal activities: fishing and gardening (Spring), grain harvesting (Summer), wine making (Autumn), and ice skating (Winter). When viewed together, the tapestries represent a full cycle of life.
Scenes of battles and portraits of soldiers in Indian painting include both historical and mythical, real and idealized images—and often in combination.
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 have been installed in the African arts galleries. 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 20 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.
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.