Upcoming Exhibitions
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.
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.
The wig shops in the artist’s Brooklyn neighborhood inspired the nine monumental paintings of wigs on mannequin heads in Derrick Adams: LOOKS.
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.
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.
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.
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).
The vibrant portraits and conceptual images in The New Black Vanguard fuse art and fashion photography in ways that break traditional boundaries between genres.