CIA 2025 Faculty Exhibition Highlights Work by New (and Longtime) Faculty

Interdisciplinary artist Laura Camila Medina will start her second year as a Cleveland Institute of Art (CIA) faculty member this fall. When she isn’t teaching students in the college’s Foundation program, she’s focused on her studio practice—as evidenced by her busy summer.

Medina had work in La Casa Compartida | The Home We Share, a group show at The Sculpture Center in Cleveland and in El Encuentro (The Meeting), a two-person exhibition at The Luminary in St. Louis. The latter had been in development for more than two years and evolved into a collaboration with Colombian master ceramicist Cecilia Vargas Muñoz.

“My piece, everything becomes small from up here, is my largest sculptural video installation to date,” Medina says of her work in El Encuentro. “An ode to Cecilia’s Chiva bus ceramic pieces, it takes the form of a double-fronted bus that viewers can enter to experience transparent silk paintings, a two-channel video navigation of a 3D memory landscape, and many soft sculpture and ceramic appliques.”

Art enthusiasts’ next opportunity to see Medina’s engaging magical realism is CIA’s 2025 Faculty Exhibition, on view August 28 through October 5 in the college’s Reinberger Gallery. An opening reception will be held from 6 to 8 pm on Thursday, August 28.

“For the Faculty Exhibition, I am showing a new video collage/experimental animation that is connected to El Encuentro,” Medina says. “Busco todos los caminos que me conduzcan de nuevo a ti (I look for all the paths that lead me back to you), like many of my moving-image works, uses collage and stop-motion techniques as a collapse of time and space that allows the past, present and future to exist at once.

“I hope that anyone visiting the exhibition will catch glimpses of something even faintly recognizable, like when you smell something and it brings back a distant memory,” Medina says of her Faculty Exhibition piece.

Nikki Woods, CIA’s director of exhibitions and galleries, says the 2025 Faculty Exhibition will feature art and design that showcases faculty members’ depth of creativity.

“The Faculty Exhibition is an exciting way to get to know the incredible group of artist-educators that make up CIA’s teaching community,” Woods says. “From ranked professors with years of service to faculty members like Laura Medina, who’ve just marked their first year of teaching at CIA, this exhibition offers an expansive range of intergenerational creative practices and perspectives.”

CLEVELAND INSTITUTE OF ART
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EVENTS:

2025 Faculty Exhibition, August 28–October 5. Opening reception 6pm Friday, August 28

2025 Studio Operations Exhibition 6pm August 28