Keen on learning about local heritage as a new Clevelander, I took up an invitation from our conservators Beth Edelstein and Colleen Snyder to visit the Rose Iron Works studio in October 2023. The Cleveland Museum of Art’s (CMA) collection of decorative arts, the care of which I had assumed two months prior, includes the Muse with Violin Screen(1930) by […]
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Eighty years after Karamu Artists Inc.’s 1941 exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art, CMA highlights the collective’s role in shaping Cleveland’s Black arts scene and its broader cultural influence, with Karamu Artists Inc.: Printmaking, Race, and Community. The exhibition opens March 23. In 1938, the United States was enmeshed in unflinching racial segregation and widespread poverty. Black Americans, already […]
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The Cleveland Institute of Art’s Love Is Resistance, which opened on Valentine’s Day at Transformer Station, is in a multitude of ways The Kind Of Show We Need Right Now. After a year with no visual art programming at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s West side exhibit space, after decades during which Cleveland artists have pined for any measure of […]
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In 2025, Greater Cleveland’s vibrant artistic community is on full display at the Transformer Station. The exhibition schedule includes collaborations with the Cleveland Institute of Art, FRONT Fellows, and CMA Staff in three major art exhibitions: Love Is Resistance, CMA Artists at Work, and FRONT Fellows Show, along with a series of performances highlighting a talented array of regional artists. […]
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Like lovemaking, being photographed by one’s lover is an intimate, collaborative act. This is the subject matter explored by American photographer Kelli Connell in Pictures for Charis (pronounced care-iss). Over the past ten years, Connell researched and reconsidered the lives and relationship of writer Charis Wilson and photographer Edward Weston as Connell photographed her partner at the time, sculptor Betsy […]
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In several scenes in the film Como agua para chocolate[1] (Alfonso Arau, 1992, based on the book of the same name by Laura Esquivel), the De la Garza sisters cross the border between Mexico and the United States, like those who cross the street: without so much drama or paperwork. They cross for a variety of reasons: They go to […]
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En más de una escena de la película Como agua para chocolate[1] (Alfonso Arau, 1992), basada en el libro homónimo de Laura Esquivel, las hermanas De la Garza cruzan, por diferentes motivos, la frontera entre México y los Estados Unidos, como quien cruza la calle: sin tanto drama ni papeleo. Van a visitar al Dr. Brown, quien vive en la […]
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“Photographs look like the truth, but they feel like a memory.” This quote, by photography scholar Alison Nordstrom, well articulates the evocative realism depicted by more than four dozen photographs featured in Picturing the Border. The exhibition aims to spark vital conversations of what constitutes citizenship, as well as complex negotiations of personal identity as it relates to the border. […]
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A signet ring that might hold an inside joke. Tessellated mosaics comprised of stolen chips of ancient marbles. A delicate bowl with its gilt rim dappled by wear. Twenty-one artworks are presented in Beneath the Beautification: Selections from the Education of the Cleveland Museum of Art, curated by the 2023-2024 cohort of high school fellows from CMA’s Currently Under Curation […]
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“I think in clay,” said Rose B. Simpson in an interview with The New York Times. One of their Breakout Stars of 2023, the Native American sculptor has envisioned a site-specific project for the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Ames Family Atrium this summer. Commissioned specifically for the museum’s expansive, light-filled space, the two monumental figural sculptures, titled Strata,are constructed from […]
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