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Rose B. Simpson: Strata

Tags for: Rose B. Simpson: Strata
  • Special Exhibition
  • Featured
Sunday, July 14, 2024–Sunday, April 13, 2025
Location:  ATRM Atrium
Ames Family Atrium
Free; No Ticket Required
a statue of a person with a cross on the head

Strata (detail, installation view), 2024. Rose B. Simpson (Santa Clara Pueblo, b. 1983). Ceramic, foam, riveted aluminum, hardware, steel armature, pumice, concrete, and bronze; 792.5 x 152.4 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Jessica Silverman, San Francisco, and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. © Rose B. Simpson. Photo: Kaitlin K. Walsh

About The Exhibition

Rose B. Simpson (b. 1983) has envisioned a site-specific project for the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Ames Family Atrium titled Strata. Simpson’s installation was commissioned specifically for the expansive, light-filled space. According to the artist, Strata is inspired by time spent in Cleveland, “the architecture of the museum, the possibility of the space, tumbled stones from the shores of Lake Erie,” as well as her own Indigenous heritage and the landscape of her ancestral homelands of Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico, where she was born and raised and where she lives and works. 

Strata comprises two monumental figural sculptures constructed from the artist’s signature clay medium, in addition to metalwork, porous concrete, and cast bronze. The figures’ layers mimic rock eroded through geologic time and the structural materiality of man-made architecture. Intricate welded metal structures mounted to the heads of each figure, intended to cast shadows, mimic the structures of the mind in relationship to time and space.  

Simpson’s identity as a Native woman has greatly impacted her work. She is from a long line of women working in the ceramic tradition of her Kha’po Owingeh (Santa Clara Pueblo) tribe dating back to the 500s CE. Her large-scale sculptures represent a bold intervention in colonial legacies of dependency, erasure, and assimilation, and balance her tribe’s inherited ceramic tradition with modern methods, materials, and processes. Her work asserts a pride of place and belonging on land where Native residents have been forcefully dispossessed of their territories and cultures.

Simpson has had solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, ICA Boston, the Wheelwright Museum, and the Nevada Art Museum, and is represented in museum collections including the Cleveland Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Princeton University Art Museum, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. She is the recipient of several prestigious awards, including a Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship, a Women’s Caucus for Art President’s Award for Art & Activism, and was recently appointed by President Biden to the Institute of American Indian Arts Board of Trustees.  

The CMA’s presentation of Rose B. Simpson: Strata includes a richly illustrated catalogue with contributions by Nadiah Rivera Fellah, the CMA’s associate curator of contemporary art; Anya Montiel, curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian; Karen Patterson, executive director at the Ruth Foundation; Natalie Diaz (Mojave / Akimel O’odham), Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University; and artists Rose B. Simpson and Dyani White Hawk (Sicangu Lakota).  

CMA Store

Rose B. Simpson: Strata
by Nadiah Rivera Fellah Contributions by Rose B Simpson, Anya Montiel, Dyani White Hawk, Natalie Diaz and Karen Patterson A new and exciting voice in contemporary art that enriches the wider discourse on Native women artists Rose B. Simpson (b. 1983), a mixed-media artist from Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico, is from a long lineage of women working in ceramics in her tribe, dating back hundreds of years. Her signature figures draw heavily on her ancestral Kha’po Owingeh (Santa Clara Pueblo) tribe’s centuries-long ceramic tradition while also integrating modern methods, materials, and processes to express bold interventions in colonial legacies of dependency, erasure, and assimilation. Published on the occasion of a large-scale commission for the Cleveland Museum of Art, this richly illustrated volume features essays that contextualize Simpson’s work in terms of the history of art, Indigenous feminisms, and Native American art in general. It also includes a moderated conversation with the artist that elucidates Simpson’s conceptual framework and practice. 120 pages with 80 color + b-w illus. Published November 2024
Rose B. Simpson: Strata
Lit: The Work of Rose B. Simpson
by Porter Swentzell, Yve Chavez, and Jonathan Batkin (Preface) This catalogue accompanied Rose B. Simpson’s first solo exhibition in 2018 at the Wheelwright Museum. Simpson grew up in a permaculture environment on Santa Clara Pueblo in northern New Mexico among a family of renowned potters and artists―her mother is the famed sculptor, Roxanne Swentzell. Simpson’s self-reflective work has made a big impact on the contemporary art scene. The pieces feature life-size mixed media sculptures, faces, and monumental figures in the traditional medium of clay, combined with welded steel and leather. A range of sculptural styles and sizes reflect the trajectory of Simpson’s recent work. 76 pages Published 2018
Lit: The Work of Rose B. Simpson
Women of the World: A Global Collection of Art
This reissue of Women of the World: A Global Collection of Art presents artworks by women from 174 countries, combining to present an aggregate, powerful statement about the continuity of women’s struggles and accomplishments worldwide. Here, the visionary and the everyday come together to render a global image of female experience. Traditional art in ancient media gleefully joins with multimedia constructions that sing or glow. Individually superb, these works of art together are a moving expression of self from people whose voices have rarely been heard. In the 1990s, artist and world traveler Claudia DeMonte posed a question—What image represents “woman”? She invited women to create a work of art that expressed in their view the essential quality of woman. After three years spent locating the artists through embassies and various professional connections, she assembled the works in a historically unique exhibition that traveled internationally and was documented by this book. First published in 2000, Women of the World is an affirmation of survival of the will, of commonality that subsumes difference, of courage under fire, and of grace in adversity.
Women of the World: A Global Collection of Art
Western Art of the Twenty-First Century: Native Americans
The second book in this two-volume survey, readers are invited to reexamine the history of the West and its art through a multifaceted modern lens. More than 30 artists are included who reflect the tremendous diversity, depth, and breadth of a field steeped in history. While some follow the traditions established by Remington and Russell, others seek to break from tradition, busting myths and bringing new insights and artistic styles to the genre. They come from both sides of the Mississippi and have pedigrees that range from bona fide cowboy or Native American credentials to careers in commercial illustration. The unifying theme is a common concern for and commitment to their art and the West itself. In this volume, contemporary artists are featured whose work revolves around Native Americans. Native Americans still exist, and in many cases are thriving, as they revive or maintain their culture. 144 pp | 156 color images
Western Art of the Twenty-First Century: Native Americans

Sponsors

Major support is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Womens Council of the Cleveland Museum of Art. 

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All exhibitions at the Cleveland Museum of Art are underwritten by the CMA Fund for Exhibitions. Principal annual support is provided by Michael Frank and the late Pat Snyder, the Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation, the John and Jeanette Walton Exhibition Fund, and Margaret and Loyal Wilson. Generous annual support is provided by two anonymous supporters, Gini and Randy Barbato, the late Dick Blum and Harriet Warm, Gary and Katy Brahler, Cynthia and Dale Brogan, Dr. Ben and Julia Brouhard, Brenda and Marshall Brown, Joseph and Susan Corsaro, Richard and Dian Disantis, the Jeffery Wallace Ellis Trust in memory of Lloyd H. Ellis Jr., Leigh and Andy Fabens, the Frankino-Dodero Family Fund for Exhibitions Endowment, Florence Kahane Goodman, Janice Hammond and Edward Hemmelgarn, Robin Heiser, the late Marta and the late Donald M. Jack Jr., Eva and Rudolf Linnebach, William S. and Margaret F. Lipscomb, Bill and Joyce Litzler, the Roy Minoff Family Fund, Lu Anne and the late Carl Morrison, Jeffrey Mostade and Eric Nilson and Varun Shetty, Tim O’Brien and Breck Platner, William J. and Katherine T. O’Neill, Henry Ott-Hansen, Michael and Cindy Resch, William Roj and Mary Lynn Durham, Betty T. and David M. Schneider, Saundra K. Stemen, Paula and Eugene Stevens, the Womens Council of the Cleveland Museum of Art, and Claudia Woods and David Osage.