Jody Pinto: Body/Land, at moCa Cleveland

“We must identify the world of antagonistic policies and power relations
by which our bodies are constituted, and rethink the struggles that have taken place
in opposition to the ‘norm’ if we are to devise strategies for change.”
– Sylvia Federici, 2020[1]

In Cleveland we all have access to museums, galleries, and institutions working to inspire us, show us what is still possible in this traumatic era of xenophobia, racism, misogyny, and classism, amplified under the current Presidential administration. We’re searching for truth, meaning, and, above all, at this social-political moment, healing. As much as a segment of the population wants to obliterate the progress and social change garnered in the decades after World War II, we continue to critically interrogate and challenge the classism, greed, misogyny and racism, instigated by the President and his MAGA supporters.

Enter moCa, the curatorial vision of Deputy Director and Curator DJ Hellerman, and the deeply talented Jody Pinto, whose five-decade practice includes sculpture, drawing, ephemeral outdoor installations, landscape interventions, and public art. The artist emerged during the 1970s in the Land art movement, creating what she terms as “living structures,” that are site-responsive, meaning they evolve based on weather, visitors, and found materials.

As the Body/Land title indicates, Pinto’s work is imbued with references to and interrogations of the body, or bodies—human and earthly. Born in 1942, during World War II, Pinto not only came of age during the violence of the Vietnam War, but also amid the incessant racism, misogyny, sexism, and rape culture of white American patriarchy. Like so many artists growing up and working in decades following WWII, Pinto is also an activist: she founded Women Organized Against Rape (WOAR) in Philadelphia in 1973. The moCa retrospective (her first solo show at age 84)* includes printed materials from the early days of the organization, which serve as personal-political fuel for her projects.

Rape is a violent act most often centered on female bodies, and it is common to speak of corporations “raping” the earth with oil spills, deforestation, and mining. Indeed, the latter—mining, is an act of penetration, removal of materials from the earth. Pinto began unearthing abandoned wells in the seventies, creating a series of installations, extending the series to include a transformation of the boiler room of the Queens P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1) into an above ground well, one of “energy generation and circulation.” Visitors could enter “Underground Chamber” (1977) from inside the building or via ladder, carefully entering one careful step down (into the earth body) at a time.

Also a metaphor for the depths of the human psyche, once inside the work, participants in Pinto’s living installation “encountered a hay-lined cinderblock enclosure splattered with red pigment, a fabric-bound bundle installed on the ceiling.” Pinto explains, “The structure is living and bleeding,” the bundles that show up throughout her work are “proxies of her body and containers for memories.”[2] The bundles are shaped like the human body tightly swaddled in fabric. In Pinto’s earlier reclaimed well works, the bundles are lifeless, yet “safe,” in their underground tomb-wombs.

The bundles continue to show up in Pinto’s work, often conveying different feelings and meanings over time and in context. “Tarred and Feathered Structure” created for the 1979 Whitney Biennial (and rebuilt this year for the moCa retrospective), is a tall, slick black structure with a tarred-and-feathered bundle at the top. Pinto visited the town of Hinton, West Virginia and was struck by the industrial “architecture,” the sway these structures hold on the bodies of mine workers and psyches of everyone living among them. Here the bundle/body is tarred and feathered. A form of public torture and retribution, tarring and feathering stands as a critique of the corporate bodies that poison the planet for the sake of profit.

Indeed, rape and torture are ubiquitous tactics in war and in prisons, where power is not only enforced from those of higher rank, but also horizontally in the factions created by unchecked power and ideological hubris. Tarred and Feathered Structure flips this dynamic, it is the corporate fat cats who are covered in tar, rolled in feathers, placed at the top of their own structure as public acknowledgment for their corporeal and psychological crimes.

The retrospective provides a delightfully exhaustive inventory of Pinto’s influences, including her collection of 18^th and 19^th century mouse traps, ranging from those that kill the animals, to “catch and release” models. These devices of control are displayed next to Tarred and Feathered Structure, echoing the foreboding ethos of the enormous coal chute looming nearby.

Pinto’s exhibition includes documentary photos of previous public and site specific, drawings, plans, and inspirational objects, along with paintings and a shirt made partially of hair. Pinto’s 1978 Hair Shirt is a reimagined cilice (a historical garment of penance). Made of pigskin, with strands of hair drawn on the tanned flesh, hair sprouts from the V-neck, explodes from armpits. Hair is a reoccurring motif in Pinto’s work; “it doubles as grass and functions as a metaphor for anger and self-healing, linking the body to the natural world.”[3] Moreover, hair was a cultural obsession in the 1960s and 70s; women’s liberationists eschewed curlers, “hairdos” of their mothers, and even let armpit and leg hair grow wildly, as unruly as the women’s liberationists protesting for equality and an end to white, patriarchal misogyny.

 In the graphite and watercolor rendering, Red Clay Cliffs with Hair Wound of 1975-76, a sprout of black hair rises from a crack in the red clay cliff. This drawing and Hair Shirt are connected visually and physically in the space by Split Tongue Pier: Second Encounter, created for the moCa retrospective. Viewers can traverse the gallery space on two raw wood planks. Originally created in 1980 on the campus of Swarthmore College, the two planks end in what looks like the split tongue of a snake. As the planks split, appearing to move in opposite directions, they open toward the anthropomorphic hair-wound image of the Red Clay Cliffs.

Since the 1990s, Pinto created more than fifty international public commissions, exploring municipal space as a form of public theater. Light is central to Pinto’s practice and is both subject and medium in her stunningly brilliant Light Cylinders, Ft. Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport of 2003. Commissioned by Broward County’s Cultural Affairs Division, Public Art and Design program and in collaboration with Morris/Sato Architects, the work transforms the utilitarian interior of the airport parking garage into an experience of light, color, and movement.

Travelers become part of the light spectacle as they rush through the normally bland space, and the colors function to help travelers navigate the space. Imagine returning to CLE from some tropical paradise in January be guided to the “red” level of the parking garage. It may be frigid, but you found your car by following the light, instead of scrambling to find the parking exit pass (which you left on the dash of your car). There’s something calming, utterly human about the airport project that counters every aspect of air travel post-9/11 Aviation and Transportation Security Act (ATSA), which was signed into law on November 19, 2001, bringing with it the Transportation Security Administration and the security measures that we now take as de rigueur.  

The most ambitious piece in Body/Land is an enormous site-specific and interactive installation on the first floor of moCa. An ode to Pinto’s 1980, “Serpentine Corridor” series, which was inspired by a visit to “Serpent Mound” in Peebles, Ohio, the town of her mother’s birth. Between 1979 and 1980 she made three versions of the piece—all of them situated outdoors, one in nearby Wooster College.[3] The moCa installation is indoors, yet it nonetheless melds with the architecture of the space, and—most importantly, the light that makes its way (in slivers) from the windows above. It is comprised of cement block, earth, seed, hay, and indigenous plants, and is a tunnel that people can move through.

Indeed, the corner of Ford and Euclid in Cleveland’s bustling University Circle is an alien spot for a ton or more of hay and a sprinkling of indigenous plants, and the paradox of that sweet smell co-mingling with the exhaust fumes and better-curated fast-food establishments outside on the Case Western Reserve University campus complicates the content and context of this immersive installation. In the installation all senses are active. In art galleries we expect to rely on our eyes, but here all senses are active; the smell of hay is present on the first floor, for example.

Light is central to Pinto’s indoor spaces, and it reveals itself through triangular and rectangular silhouette-shadows and hazy-dusty beams. The air moves around you, the space is activated, as the artist compels us to think of ourselves as the part of this serpent-body—the muscle-meat of the snake, the movement beneath the skin. Pinto worked closely with staff to make a space that, when experienced, feels “elsewhere,” and she accomplishes this in part by creating an obvious entrance-point, with a much apparent exit.

Pinto’s career is expertly charted at moCa, and we are witness to, even part of, her long examination of power and oppression, as well as how humans and the earth challenge agents of dominance (ICE, tyrannically corrupt politicians, racist police, for instance). While she is engaged with philosophical questions raised by Michel Foucault (who overlooked gender oppression while letting men’s experience stand in for all), she is lesbian, and also a feminist activist. Creation/destruction are physically and emotionally messy affairs; Pinto embraces this and centers human and earth bodies as utterly powerful energies.

Jody Pinto: Body/Land
Aug 28, 2026-Mar 7, 2027

moCa Cleveland
11400 Euclid Ave.
Cleveland, Ohio 44106

NOTES:

[1]Sylvia Federici, Beyond the Periphery of the Skin: Rethinking, Remaking, and Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2020), 10.

*The Guerilla Girls took up this sexist phenomenon in 1988 in their AGITPROP piece, “THE ADVANTAGES OF BEING A WOMAN ARTIST (now printed on tea towels, postcards, and coffee mugs). These three “advantages” are apropos: “…Knowing your career might pick up after you’re eighty… Seeing your ideas live on in the work of others… Being included in revised versions of art history… –A public service message from Guerilla Girls.”

[2] DJ Hellerman, “Underground Chamber, 1977,” moCa didactic wall text (Cleveland, OH: 2026-27).

[3]Hellerman, “Hair Shirt, 1978,” moCa didactic wall text (Cleveland, OH: 2026-27).

[4] “Serpent Mound” (circa 800 B.C.E.-100 A.D.) is an internationally known National Historic Landmark built by the Adena and Fort Ancient American Indian cultures of Ohio. The mound, approximately a quarter-mile in length, is an effigy to the snake, which bends like a moving serpent with its tail curled (see https://www.greatserpentmound.com/, accessed October 21, 2026).

[5]French theorist Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (translated to English in 1977) historically frames the “docile body” as one that conforms to strictures and structures—it is efficient and upright, gets better at producing, marching, and “toeing the line.”

Foucault consistently overlooked sex/gender in his critiques and theories of power and oppression—as “seminal” as his work was to the fields of history, philosophy, and cultural studies, he let men’s experiences stand in for all, without considering the agency of female reproductive power, much less of “Man’s” utter dependence on the earth-body. Pinto takes this up in her work, not only exploring apparatuses of power, but imagining and expressing a more holistic and healing agenda for the planet and its inhabitants.