The Cleveland Museum of Art Introduces Six Presentations for FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art

Press Kit

CLEVELAND (July 14, 2022) – For the second iteration of FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art has organized six presentations throughout its galleries, featuring installations and performances by seven internationally acclaimed contemporary artists. The multivenue FRONT International exhibition is on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art beginning July 16. Admission is free.

FRONT International’s Oh, Gods of Dust and Rainbows embraces art as an agent of transformation, a mode of healing and a therapeutic process. The title is an homage to the 1957 poem “Two Somewhat Different Epigrams” by Langston Hughes. A tender, brutal and provocative prayer, the poem meditates on the inseparability of joy and suffering. Expanding on Hughes’s invocation, FRONT 2022 explores how art making offers the possibility to transform and heal people—as individuals, as groups and as a society. 

The exhibition features more than 100 regional, national and international artists working across painting, drawing, sculpture, textiles, ceramics, photography, video, text, performance and other media, demonstrating how aesthetic pleasure—sharing joy through movement, music, craft and color—can bridge differences between people to bring them together. Spanning over 30 sites in Cleveland, Akron and Oberlin, the exhibition suggests ways that art making can speak with power: showing people how to recognize and reimagine the invisible structures that govern contemporary life.

About the Exhibitions at the CMA

Julie Mehretu: Portals
July 16 through November 13, 2022
Julia and Larry Pollock Focus Gallery | Gallery 010

Julie Mehretu: Portals offers a fresh perspective on the Cleveland Museum of Art’s encyclopedic collection through an artist’s eyes. This exhibition, the first of its kind at the CMA, integrates paintings by Julie Mehretu with works from the museum’s permanent collection that Mehretu has selected and curated within the gallery. Spanning a range of cultures, histories and mediums, the works she has chosen reflect images and ideas that inspire her own artistic practice and process.

Firelei Báez: the vast ocean of all possibilities (19°36'16.9"N 72°13'07.0"W, 41°30'32.3"N 81°36'41.7"W)
July 16, 2022, through January 15, 2023
Betty T. and David M. Schneider Gallery of European Sculpture | Gallery 218

Firelei Báez: the vast ocean of all possibilities is part of an ongoing series in which the artist reimagines the archaeological ruins of the Sans-Souci Palace in northern Haiti, underscoring its position as an enduring symbol of healing and resistance. The work’s painted surfaces are adorned with reproductions of traditional West African indigo printing (later used in the American South) and marine plants native to Caribbean waters. In this work, the ruins of the San-Souci Palace appear to travel through both time and place to burst through the gallery’s floor, dripping with brightly colored sea life and the pieces of modern urban waste that now carpet our ocean floors.

Commissioned by FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, with support from the Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation and James Cohan Gallery, New York.

Nicole Eisenman: A Decade of Printing
July 16 through December 31, 2022
James and Hanna Bartlett Prints and Drawings Gallery | 101

Nicole Eisenman: A Decade of Printing presents works made by the artist at three New York-based printshops: 10 Grand, Harlan & Weaver and Jungle Press. In close collaboration with master printers there, Eisenman has experimented with a range of printmaking techniques—including monotype, woodcut, etching and lithography—exploring the unique traits of each. Drawn from the collections of the artist and their collaborators, the works on view reveal how printmaking has emerged as a primary vehicle for Eisenman to explore foundational themes and ideas, considering and translating them inventively across media.

Yoshitomo Nara: Recent Work
July 16 through October 2, 2022
Toby’s Gallery of Contemporary Art | Gallery 229A

Yoshitomo Nara: Recent Work highlights two essential directions within Nara’s art practice. This presentation will include a painting of a child, belonging to a series of work for which the artist is best-known, and a ceramic vessel, which represents a more recent endeavor by the artist, in which he brings together his interests in painted imagery, sculptural form, and language. 

Matt Eich and Tyler Mitchell: Sunlight, Shadow, and A Rainbow
July 16 through November 6, 2022
Mark Schwartz and Bettina Katz Photography Galleries │Gallery 230

Matt Eich and Tyler Mitchell: Sunlight, Shadow, and A Rainbow uses lighting, color and point of view to transform mundane occurrences into magical moments, whether candid or posed. The works evoke sensations and emotions—the wonder of a child discovering nature or a dip into a chilly river on a hot afternoon. Eich and Mitchell set joyful scenes of relaxation, languor and personal contentment into the Southern landscape. Both artists use photography, most often associated with recording fact, to suggest the possibilities of transformation, a delight in the senses and the engaging mystery of the transitory.

Performance at the CMA

Maria Hassabi: CANCELLED
Friday and Saturday, September 16–17, 2022
Ames Family Atrium

Making its debut at the Cleveland Museum of Art, Maria Hassabi’s performative work CANCELLED considers womanhood from perspectives that cross generations. Four female performers move within a vivid soundscape. Their choreography is composed of individual solos that display poses historically associated with women based on everyday mannerisms throughout history and rooted in Hassabi’s signature style of stillness and deceleration. The use of verticality, and its resistance to gravity, is interspersed with more fluid movements that become central to the work. CANCELLED is meticulously crafted, with every action and every look subject to counts and cues. 

CANCELLED was produced by the LUMA Foundation and premiered at LUMA ARLES as a result of the Artist-in-Residency Program. Co-commissioned by FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, produced in partnership with VIA Art Fund.

FRONT is presented by Richard and Michelle Jeschelnig with additional support from the Louise H. and David S. Ingalls Foundation.

The Cleveland Museum of Art is proud to partner with FRONT International. All exhibitions at the Cleveland Museum of Art are underwritten by the CMA Fund for Exhibitions. Major annual support is provided by the Womens Council of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Generous annual support is provided by an anonymous supporter, Dick Blum (deceased) and Harriet Warm, Dr. Ben H. and Julia Brouhard, Mr. and Mrs. Walter R. Chapman Jr., the Jeffery Wallace Ellis Trust in memory of Lloyd H. Ellis Jr., Leigh and Andy Fabens, Michael Frank in memory of Patricia Snyder, the Sam J. Frankino Foundation, Janice Hammond and Edward Hemmelgarn, Eva and Rudolf Linnebach, William S. and Margaret F. Lipscomb, Bill and Joyce Litzler, Carl and Lu Anne Morrison, Henry Ott-Hansen, Tim O’Brien and Breck Platner, Mr. and Mrs. Michael F. Resch, Anne H. Weil, and Claudia C. Woods and David A. Osage.