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 is the second artwork 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 25-foot-tall figural sculptures that tower above the heads of visitors. 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 heritage and identity as a Native woman has greatly impacted her work. She is from a long line of women working in her Kha’po Owingeh (Santa Clara Pueblo) tribe’s ceramic tradition dating back to the 500s CE. Her ceramic figures represent a bold intervention in colonial legacies of dependency, erasure, and assimilation. Simpson balances her tribe’s inherited roots of a ceramic tradition with modern methods, materials, and processes, incorporating elements like metalwork and concrete.  

Simpson has had solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, ICA Boston, the Wheelwright Museum, 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).