With Love+Imagination: DJ Hellerman returns home to inspire a new curatorial vision and ethos at moCa

It is the morning after moCa’s new Curator and Deputy Director DJ Hellerman’s first curatorial project opened to a crowd of more than 700 widely diverse art lovers. DJ and I meet over Wojtila’s pastries and coffee at 10 am on Saturday, January 25; he was one of my first students in Cleveland, and we’ve not seen one another in person since he left in 2012 to–as he aptly says–“do the curator job hustle.”

DJ’s art career began in 2003, first as intern/gallery assistant at B.K. Smith Gallery (where I was director from 2002–2006), then as registrar (2007–2012) at Progressive’s extensive corporate contemporary art collection. Given the opening of his first curatorial effort at moCa, Harminder Judge: Bootstrap Paradox, and longest “four-day-MLK, Jr.-week” of the year that we’ve all collectively endured (temperatures in the sub-zeroes, 45 returns as the 47th president, LA was burning, etc.), I expect DJ to be exhausted and bleary-eyed. Instead, he shows up energized from the opening party and his time with Harminder, whose work he only recently encountered in a group show at Pace Gallery in New York.

After DJ sends one last text to Harminder, we take a few bites of Russian tea biscuits and swigs of coffee, and we get down to it.

LB: You are back in Cleveland after twelve years. What’s that like?

DH: I never thought I would get to come back here. When I left Cleveland for [Burlington] Vermont in 2012, I assumed I wouldn’t necessarily get to “choose” my location of residence, as I went where the jobs took me. Burlington City Arts had a curator [and director of exhibitions] position and so I went there to learn until I was ready for the next job adventure. Three positions later, I’ve landed at moCa, feels surreal (in a good way).

LB: With your experiences across three institutions, over twelve years, what unique vision do you bring back with you for moCa and the Cleveland community?

DJ: The way I envision my role as curator is to make space and bring objects and ideas to it that open people up to the world and to what is going on in themselves, and getting them to connect themselves [and their experiences] to humanity locally and globally through art.

MoCa did this for me when I was a student [at Lake Erie College] and it’s a feeling I look for in exhibitions now; again, it’s what I work to create for people in the shows I curate.

LB: Which artists or what moCa exhibition moved you in that way, “back in the day?”

DJ: I wrote a review of a show at moCa for the art practicum you led at Lake Erie College in 2004. The assignment was to read several art reviews and then choose a show in the Cleveland area and write a 750-word review of it.

I went to moCa—it was in the old space on Carnegie then—to see Material Witness and I remember walking right to one of Johnny Coleman’s pieces—I can’t remember the title now, but his choice and use of materials—repurposed fabric, stone, and old-growth wood, connected me to his experience, his world. The materiality of the work, his use of stone, which is more stable, and fabrics that are beautifully worn, more fragile, engaged my senses.

This is what I want to create in people as a curator. Art is a visual experience, yes, but if people want to touch the art, want to have a multi-sensory connection with it, we’re doing our work. The next step is to create installations and programming that allows for fuller sensory engagement.

LB: It’s important for contemporary art institutions to think radically about the patrons’ bodies in space right now. Our bodies are surveilled, stuck with needles, cut up in surgeries for enormous profits. People need more spaces where they have bodily agency, not to be told “don’t touch!” That’s going to be a hard sell, though…

DJ: In some ways but also work like Gala [Porras-Kim’s A Hand in Nature, now also on view at moCa] is doing some of this work for us. We’re not the Cleveland Museum of Art, we do art differently—we’re moving quick, we’re moving new, we’re moving unresolved. And we’re doing it in collaboration with artists, community members—working across disciplines, backgrounds, and perspectives. We’re also simultaneously thinking and engaging in national and global art worlds.

LB: Thinking in these expansively nuanced ways is inspiring, but we’ve also just made it through 47’s first four-day week and are witnessing the elimination of Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs at the federal level, a culturally conservative political climate, and threats to funding for PBS—not to mention threats to social programs that keep people housed and fed. Contemporary art was a target of the extreme right in 1980–90s, and this will likely continue to be so amid the current culture wars.

DJ: Institutions that cultivate imagination and curiosity are systematically under attack, no doubt. This shows in the grant dollars available, and there are certainly financial headwinds coming our way. MoCa has many things going for it—one is our supportive, involved, and financially and socially astute board, which is always an ingredient for success, but even more so now.

LB: You also have the advantage of 700 people showing up on a frigid January night for contemporary art…

DJ: Cleveland has an audience for contemporary art. People are hungry for meaningful experiences right now, which raises another question: “Where can people go to express the ideas and feelings—to express their imaginative selves?” There are few spaces, and contemporary art museums have the potential for being among them.

LB: That requires creating safe space, which doesn’t happen in isolation. And this brings up another side to the question of “embodiment” in public spaces. They have to be safe for everyone, which requires a great deal of community engagement, including uncomfortable discussions. In 2020, long-time director Jill Snyder left after Shaun Leonardo’s work (focusing on police brutality) was cancelled in response to concern from Tamir Rice’s mother about the manner and context in which police violence against Black bodies was on display. This came after the George Floyd murder.

DJ: I can say that Megan [Lykins Reich, moCa’s current director] worked proactively, first as interim director, then, after 2022, as executive director. She brought Joshua Hill in as senior officer of community engagement and programming with the goal of engaging staff and board internally with community building, as well as partnering with people and communities we may not have been effectively reaching.

LB: At any point in the job interview process did Megan talk to you about the unrealized exhibition, or about Gund Foundation curatorial fellow LaTanya Autrey’s claims in Hyperallergic of racism at interpersonal and/or institutional levels at moCa?

DJ: Megan’s interview questions were focused on my interpersonal skills and ability to work with different communities and individuals. My experience in Georgia [at Savannah College of Art and Design], and in various parts of the east, from Vermont to Syracuse, to—most recently, Philadelphia, where I was chief curator & director of curatorial affairs at the Fabric Workshop & Museum, also helped. I held these positions for two to three years before moving on and needing to quickly adapt to very different ways of life, you feel vulnerable every time you relocate… and, it’s an adventure in not just finding the grocery store, but in making friends, finding people to have a laugh, or drink. I learned better listening skills, to talk less, learn more.

The Dear show is a good example of the way we approach partnerships. Megan and CEO of Birthing Beautiful Communities Jazmin Long got the idea to work together because of the George Gund Foundation’s collection of Deana Lawson photographs. That idea was just a starting point, though, and the resulting exhibition became something entirely different. Together they created an installation referencing a soon-to-be-published book on birthing and the installation is stunning.

LB: So, less hierarchy, more collaboration.

DJ: Yes.

LB: Let’s close with what’s ahead for moCa, what projects are you working on, and how do they reflect your vision for artists, in Cleveland and beyond?

DJ: Some of this is a work in progress, but I’m very excited about Jody Pinto, an 83-year-old sculptor who’s never had a solo show, though she’s been working since the late 1960s. She did land work that was intended to erode and disappear over time, so some of what she was doing alongside more well-known land artists of the time [Robert Smithson, Ana Mendieta, Nancy Holt, and Michael Heizer, for instance] is no longer extant. Her exhibition is slated for summer 2026.

Also coming soon are works by Clotilde Jimenéz, a 2010 Cleveland Institute of Art (CIA) graduate, who went to Slade School of Fine Art in London for his Master’s. He was recently commissioned to do a piece for the Olympics and he has international gallery representation. His show is a mid-career retrospective with—hopefully, a performative piece; he did an opera that we hope to have performed in conjunction with the exhibition.

LB: Speaking of “multi-sensory…”

DJ: Right! And then we are also mounting a show of Erykah Townsend’s work. Townsend is a FRONT Fellow and also a graduate of CIA. This will be her first solo museum exhibition. We are engaging artists living in Cleveland, too, tapping into emergent and established talent.

LB: We have covered a lot in ninety minutes. Before we wrap up, is there anything you would like to say in closing?

DJ: In my vision, when people are so engaged with the art in the gallery that we long to touch it, hear it—even smell it. That sense of bodily desire is real. Likewise, I want people coming to moCa to see art and leave the galleries inspired to be creative. Maybe they make a painting or draw in a journal. They might see someone else’s humanity through what they see and/or make, creating new understanding.

LB: Thank you, DJ. Welcome back!