The Cleveland Museum of Art’s Upcoming Exhibitions through Winter 2020
- Press Release
Contact the Museum's Media Relations Team:
(216) 707-2261
marketingandcommunications@clevelandart.org
Cleveland (January 21, 2020) –The Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) today announced 13 major exhibitions scheduled through winter 2020. This year’s roster includes a robust selection of blockbuster exhibitions and scholarly projects, including many collaborations with national and international peer institutions.
Featured exhibitions include Picasso and Paper, showcasing more than 300 works spanning the artist’s entire career and highlighting his desire to manipulate diverse materials. The exhibition is organized by the CMA and the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in collaboration with the Musée national Picasso-Paris. Additionally, Revealing Krishna: Journey to Cambodia’s Sacred Mountain integrates art with experiential digital design in revealing the CMA’s newly restored masterpiece of Cambodian sculpture, Krishna Lifting Mount Govardhan. The exhibition is organized in cooperation with the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts of the Government of the Kingdom of Cambodia. PROOF: Photography in the Era of the Contact Sheet includes approximately 180 works from the collection of late Cleveland collector Mark Schwartz and his wife, Bettina Katz, that examine the aims and methods of a broad range of photographers at work during the second half of the 20th century. Highlights include rare photographs of celebrities including Marilyn Monroe, the Beatles and Groucho Marx.
Textiles are the subject of two upcoming exhibitions. Co-organized with the Seoul Museum of Craft Art, Gold Needles: Embroidery Arts from Korea celebrates the inventive expression of Korean women in the Joseon period (1392–1910) through embroidered works of art. Fashioning Identity: Mola Textiles of Panamá features a selection of hand-sewn molas, or cotton panels that are sewn into blouses. A key component of traditional dress among the indigenous Guna (sometimes spelled Kuna) women of Panamá, individual panels and complete blouses from the collections of the CMA and Denison University in Granville, OH, will be on view.
There will be two exhibitions in the museum’s Prints and Drawings Galleries. Latin American prints and drawings from the museum’s collection and local collections are being showcased for the first time in A Graphic Revolution: Prints and Drawings in Latin America. The exhibition highlights works on paper produced in Latin America over the past century, featuring several important recent acquisitions. Additionally, Gustave Baumann features color woodcuts by the artist inspired by the landscape, architecture and cultures of New Mexico, Arizona and California.
The museum will show several exhibitions dedicated to photography and the work of national and international contemporary artists. Bruce Davidson features the artist’s photographs of a teenage street gang in New York City from his 1959 series Brooklyn Gang; Signal Noise: Aaron Rothman focuses on the contemporary artist’s digitally manipulated photographs of the American West; and Ilse Bing: Queen of the Leica surveys the career of the German avant-garde artist whose work appeared in the first modern photography exhibition at the Louvre in 1936.
Second Careers: Two Tributaries in African Art explores the connections between historical African art and works of art by six leading contemporary African artists; and Laura Owens: Rerun features new and existing work by Owens juxtaposed with works from the CMA’s Education Collection. The exhibition was developed in collaboration with the artist and high-school students participating in the CMA’s Arts Mastery program, Currently Under Curation, a component of the CMA’s Diversity Leadership Initiative.
Finally, Variations: The Reuse of Models in Paintings by Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi unveils the recently conserved Italian Baroque painting Danaë by Orazio Gentileschi.
Please note, the information provided is a partial listing and is subject to change. Please confirm scheduling and details by calling Kelley Notaro Schreiber at 216-707-6898 or by emailing knotaro@clevelandart.org.
Exhibitions are in chronological order by opening date.
Featured Exhibition
PROOF: Photography in the Era of the Contact Sheet
February 7 through April 12, 2020
The Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation Exhibition Hall
For much of the 20th century, contact sheets (also called proof sheets) were vital to the practice of photography. The rising popularity of roll film encouraged more and more exposures; the best frame would be chosen later. The photographer first saw positive images on the contact sheet, which was marked up for printing and served as a lasting reference. Digital technology has put an end to that era: the photographer now sees the image instantly, and systems of storage, retrieval, and editing have become increasingly sophisticated.
As photography proliferated in galleries and museums in the 1970s, photographers occasionally printed all the images from one roll of film together and presented the result as a finished work of art. Typically, however, the contact sheet remained within the working process, out of public view. That is why it is remarkable that the late Cleveland collector Mark Schwartz was able to build a comprehensive collection of contact sheets. The collection opens a fascinating window on the aims and methods of a broad range of photographers at work during the second half of the 20th century. PROOF features approximately 180 works from the collection, notably by Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Harry Benson, Harry Callahan, Robert Frank, Philippe Halsman, Irving Penn, and Albert Watson as well as by Schwartz’s friends Arnold Newman, Larry Fink, and Emmet Gowin.
CONTACT SHEET: After a roll of film was developed, the negatives were cut into strips and printed by contact. The 36 exposures of a roll of 35 mm film or the 12 exposures of 2¼-inch film fit comfortably on an 8-x-10-inch sheet of paper. With an 8-x-10-inch enlarger, the same array of negatives could produce a so-called enlarged contact, often measuring 16 x 20 or 20 x 24 inches.
Support provided by
Fred and Laura Ruth Bidwell
Sally and Sandy Cutler
Viki and Al Rankin
February 15 through May 17, 2020
CMA at Transformer Station
Signal Noise: Aaron Rothman surveys 10 years of Aaron Rothman’s studies of the American West landscape. Through analog and digital photography and digital processing and printing, he transmutes unpretentious fragments of nature into sensuous, sublimely beautiful images that hover between two- and three-dimensional space, vacillating between representation and abstraction.
Transformer Station
1460 West 29th Street
Cleveland, OH 44113
For hours and other information, visit transformerstation.org.
The Cleveland Museum of Art is funded in part by residents of Cuyahoga County through a public grant from Cuyahoga Arts & Culture.
This exhibition was supported in part by the Ohio Arts Council, which receives support from the State of Ohio and the National Endowment for the Arts.
March 7 through June 28, 2020
Mark Schwartz and Bettina Katz Photography Gallery
In 1929 Ilse Bing (1899–1998) acquired a Leica, a new small, lightweight camera that took 36 shots per roll of film. Its technical characteristics, revolutionary at the time, encouraged spontaneity, experimentation and boldness. The first professional to wholeheartedly adopt this 35 mm single-lens camera, Bing was soon dubbed by a critic as the “Queen of the Leica” for the inventiveness and originality she brought to this innovative technology.
Born and raised in Germany, Bing developed a successful career in Paris in the 1930s as an avant-garde and fashion photographer. Daringly surreal even in her commercial work, she brought a fresh approach to fashion in assignments for Harper’s Bazaar and designers like Elsa Schiaparelli. For other magazines, Bing captured the nightlife, amusements, and unique character of her adopted city, producing images that crossed the boundary between commerce and art. Her photographs were included in exhibitions at the Louvre and New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
In the mid-1970s, a renewed fascination with 1930s modernism and a newfound interest in women artists sparked Bing’s rediscovery. Enthusiasm for her work has remained high over the ensuing decades. Drawn largely from the museum’s collection, this exhibition comprises around 50 photographs spanning her career; most are recent gifts and purchases on view here for the first time.
The Cleveland Museum of Art is funded in part by residents of Cuyahoga County through a public grant from Cuyahoga Arts & Culture.
This exhibition was supported in part by the Ohio Arts Council, which receives support from the State of Ohio and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Gold Needles: Embroidery Arts from Korea
March 8 through July 26, 2020
Arlene M. and Arthur S. Holden Textile Gallery
Co-organized with the Seoul Museum of Craft Art, Gold Needles: Embroidery Arts from Korea celebrates anonymous women artists and their inventive creations that triumphed over the conventions of the patriarchal Joseon society (1392–1910). Through stunning examples of embroidery and patchwork, this exhibition explores Korean embroidered works of art as tools of empowerment to overcome social and cultural constraints.
Most of the loaned pieces—ceremonial robes, folding screens, gift-wrapping cloth, and wedding fans—are borrowed from the Seoul Museum of Craft Art and once belonged to Mr. Dong-hwa Huh (1926−2018) and Ms. Young-suk Park (b. 1932). The couple shared a passion for preserving Korean textiles and presenting their artistic distinctions to the world and donated their entire collection to the Seoul Museum of Craft Art in May 2018. The exhibition honors the couple’s lifelong collecting legacy and philanthropic bequest. An English-Korean bilingual gallery guide including essays and illustrations will be available.
Presenting Sponsors
Cathy Lincoln
John D. Proctor Foundation
Seoul Metropolitan Government
Supporting Sponsor
Textile Art Alliance
A Graphic Revolution: Prints and Drawings in Latin America
March 14 through August 2, 2020
James and Hanna Bartlett Prints and Drawings Gallery | Gallery 101
A Graphic Revolution: Prints and Drawings in Latin America is the first exhibition to highlight the museum’s collection of works on paper produced in Latin America over the past century. Representing a wide range of countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, and Mexico, the works survey how artists have explored national and cultural identity during periods of political upheaval and dramatic social change. Prints and drawings provided artists such as Roberto Matta, José Clemente Orozco, Jesús Rafael Soto, and Rufino Tamayo with a means of self-expression well suited for formal experimentation and reaching the broadest possible audience.
A Graphic Revolution begins with the realist style of Mexican muralists such as David Alfaro Siqueiros and Diego Rivera. Artists in their generation and in the ones that followed used the themes of people, politics, and abstraction to express the complexity of Latin American identity. Featuring approximately 50 works from the museum’s collection, the exhibition also highlights several important recent acquisitions by modern and contemporary Latin American artists, including León Ferrari, Gego, Wifredo Lam, and Liliana Porter.
Presenting Sponsors
Linda and Jack Lissauer
Print Club of Cleveland
Featured Exhibition
May 24 through August 23, 2020
The Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation Exhibition Hall and Gallery
Pablo Picasso’s prolonged engagement with paper is the subject of the groundbreaking exhibition Picasso and Paper organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in collaboration with the Musée national Picasso-Paris.
Featuring more than 300 works spanning the artist’s entire career, the exhibition offers new insights into Picasso’s creative inventiveness and working methods. Nowhere is his protean spirit more evident than in his relentless exploration of working on and with paper. He drew incessantly using many different mediums on a broad range of papers. He assembled collages of cut-and-pasted papers, created sculptures from pieces of torn and burnt paper, produced both documentary and manipulated photographs on paper, and spent decades investigating an array of printmaking techniques on paper supports.
Presented in a series of chronologically unfolding themes, the works are displayed together with closely related paintings and sculptures to provide a deeper context for understanding their meaning. Preparatory studies for Picasso’s Blue Period masterpiece, La Vie (Life), are presented together with the painting; drawings related to his first Cubist sculpture, Head of a Woman (Fernande), are shown with the sculpture; and recently restored drawings made during the filming of Le Mystère Picasso are displayed with the film. The exhibition also includes photograms made collaboratively with Dora Maar and André Villers, and drawings on a wide range of materials including newspaper, envelopes, antique laid papers, and personal ephemera.
Major Sponsors
Gertrude Kalnow Chisholm and Homer D. W. Chisholm
Bill and Joyce Litzler
Anne H. Weil
Supporting Sponsors
Gail and Bill Calfee
Florence Kahane Goodman
Tim O’Brien and Breck Platner
Dr. Conrad and Patricia Simpfendorfer
Carol Yellig Family Fund
June 6 through September 6, 2020
CMA at Transformer Station
Images not available
Laura Owens: Rerun is the artist’s first exhibition in her native Northeast Ohio. Currently based in Los Angeles, Owens is internationally recognized for her wide ranging and experimental approach to the medium of painting. Her work embraces a breadth of sources from the avant-garde to the popular to the decorative. Owens grew up in Norwalk, Ohio, and as a teenager spent many hours studying the CMA’s encyclopedic collections. Owens has developed the exhibition’s concept and checklist in collaboration with high-school students participating in the CMA’s Arts Mastery program, Currently Under Curation (CUC), as a way to honor the formative impact of Cleveland’s culture. The participating students are Jamal Carter, Skylar Fleming, Yomi Gonzalez, Joseph Hlavac, Agatha Mathoslah and Deonta Steele.
The central theme for Laura Owens is time travel, represented through new and existing work by the artist as well as work held in CMA’s Education Collection. Time travel has taken many forms throughout Owens’s work and relates to the premise of this project, which is rooted in the artist looking back to imagine, with her collaborators, new and future possibilities.
Transformer Station
1460 West 29th Street
Cleveland, OH 44113
For hours and other information, visit transformerstation.org.
The Cleveland Museum of Art is funded in part by residents of Cuyahoga County through a public grant from Cuyahoga Arts & Culture.
This exhibition was supported in part by the Ohio Arts Council, which receives support from the State of Ohio and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Second Careers: Two Tributaries in African Art
July 11 through November 29, 2020
Julia and Larry Pollock Focus Gallery
Second Careers explores the connections between historical African art and contemporary practice through a selection of exemplary highlights from the museum’s African collection and loaned works. CMA objects from nine cultures in Central and West Africa––male and female figures and masks, masquerade costume, a hunter’s tunic, and a prestige throne––are juxtaposed with large-scale installations, sculptures, and photographs by six leading contemporary African artists.
The exhibition considers the status of canonical African art objects when they begin their “second careers” upon entering museum collections. It simultaneously explores contemporary modes of artistic production in Africa that employ mediums that once served other purposes in everyday life.
Focusing more on the conceptual connection between the two contexts of African art, the exhibition considers how contemporary African artists from different generations draw inspiration from and seek transformative encounters with the historical canon. These contexts provide a critical understanding of African art, past and present.
The Cleveland Museum of Art is funded in part by residents of Cuyahoga County through a public grant from Cuyahoga Arts & Culture.
This exhibition was supported in part by the Ohio Arts Council, which receives support from the State of the Ohio and National Endowment for the Arts.
Bruce Davidson
July 18 through November 29, 2020
Mark Schwartz and Bettina Katz Photography Gallery
Images not available
Bruce Davidson, one of the most highly respected and influential American documentary photographers of the past half century, offered an independent look at America in the age of visual and social homogenization presented by Life and Look magazines. Davidson’s 1959 series Brooklyn Gang—his first major project—was the fruit of several months spent photographing the daily lives of the Jokers, one of the many teenage street gangs worrying New York City officials at the time. Bruce Davidson features 50 photographs from that series, which are part of a recent anonymous gift to the museum of extensive selections from the artist’s archives. Included are several sets of variant images, affording a rare glimpse into the photographer’s working process.
The Cleveland Museum of Art is funded in part by residents of Cuyahoga County through a public grant from Cuyahoga Arts & Culture.
This exhibition was supported in part by the Ohio Arts Council, which receives support from the State of the Ohio and National Endowment for the Arts.
August 22, 2020, through January 10, 2021
James and Hanna Bartlett Prints and Drawings Gallery
Images
Like many Chicago artists in the first years of the 20th century, Gustave Baumann discovered the beauty of rural Brown County in Indiana, and, while living nearby in Nashville from 1910 to 1916, he produced his first important set of color woodcuts. In 1917 he headed east before traveling the next year to New Mexico, where he spent the rest of his life. Exhilarated by the state’s natural beauty, he settled in Santa Fe and over the next five decades produced complex color woodcuts that captured the area’s intense sunlight and arid atmosphere. Baumann’s prints portray not only stunning mountain scenery but also indigenous adobe architecture and scenes representing Native American and Hispanic cultures. Over the years, Baumann made numerous trips around New Mexico, Arizona, and California searching for additional picturesque views, such as the Grand Canyon and the giant sequoias of California, all of which became subjects of beautiful color woodcuts.
The exhibition also illustrates how Baumann worked. He began by making tempera paintings on paper in front of the subject. The outlines of the main forms were transferred to woodblocks, one for each color. The museum owns a set of blocks and the proofs for his Summer Clouds (1926) woodcut, allowing visitors to understand how he printed layers of color to achieve rich effects.
Presenting Sponsors
Kenneth F. and Betsy Bryan Hegyes
Leon* and Gloria Plevin and Family
Print Club of Cleveland
Fashioning Identity: Mola Textiles of Panamá
Opens August 22, 2020
Arlene M. and Arthur S. Holden Textile Gallery
The mola is a key component of traditional dress among the indigenous Guna (formerly Kuna) women of Panamá. Guna women have been sewing mola blouses since the turn of the 20th century, and they have become powerful symbols of their culture and identity. During the Guna Revolution of 1925, Guna people rallied around their right to make and wear molas as a statement of their independence. They ultimately gained sovereignty over their territory, an archipelago of small islands along Panamá’s Atlantic coast, known collectively as Guna Yala.
Molas are masterfully hand-sewn cotton panels that are made in pairs and sewn into blouses. They feature a wide array of vibrantly colored compositions, with designs ranging from geometric abstraction to imaginative scenes inspired by popular Western culture. This exhibition presents both individual mola panels and complete mola blouses from the collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art and Denison University in Granville, Ohio. The molas on display span distinct periods of Guna history, from the era of the 1925 revolution to the 1980s.
The Cleveland Museum of Art is funded in part by residents of Cuyahoga County through a public grant from Cuyahoga Arts & Culture.
This exhibition was supported in part by the Ohio Arts Council, which receives support from the State of the Ohio and National Endowment for the Arts.
Featured Exhibition
Revealing Krishna: Journey to Cambodia’s Sacred Mountain
October 18 through January 3, 2021
The Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation Exhibition Hall
Revealing Krishna: Journey to Cambodia’s Sacred Mountain is the first exhibition dedicated to the art of one of the earliest major Hindu sites in Southeast Asia, established around 1,500 years ago during the country’s Pre-Angkorean period. Through a series of immersive digital experiences, the exhibition presents the Cleveland Museum of Art’s monumental sandstone sculpture Krishna Lifting Mount Govardhan in the context of the landscape and sacred space from which it came. The newly restored Cleveland Krishna is showcased with nine important related stone sculptures on loan from the National Museum of Cambodia and the Musée national des arts asiatiques-Guimet.
The exhibition provides visitors with an entirely new and revelatory experience in which digital media supports the understanding and appreciation of exceptional works of Cambodian art.
The exhibition is organized in cooperation with the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts of the Government of the Kingdom of Cambodia.
Official Technology Partner
Microsoft
Presenting Sponsor
Rebecca and Irad Carmi
Major Sponsor
Mary Lynn Durham and William Roj
Supporting Sponsors
DLR Group | Westlake Reed Leskosky
John D. Proctor Foundation
Mr. and Mrs. Paul E. Westlake, Jr.
Variations: The Reuse of Models in Paintings by Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi
December 20, 2020, through March 28, 2021
Julia and Larry Pollock Focus Gallery
Recent conservation of the CMA’s Italian Baroque painting Danaë by Orazio Gentileschi (1563–1639) has revealed a more vibrant and refined painting than has hitherto been possible to perceive. It is an extraordinary work now conveying the artist’s trademark virtuosity in painting drapery and flesh tones. Danaë is the second version of a picture painted in Genoa around 1621–22 by Orazio, who often copied his own works; these subsequent versions can rival the original in quality.
While issues of attribution are still very much alive in several works by Orazio and his daughter Artemisia, it is clear that both artists returned to and reworked certain themes and compositions throughout their careers. In content and form, Orazio’s Danaë is a key example of this phenomenon. In the exhibition, Danaë will be at the center of an intimate group of paintings by father and daughter that will beautifully distill the artists’ capacity to modify and manipulate forms across subjects.
The Cleveland Museum of Art is funded in part by residents of Cuyahoga County through a public grant from Cuyahoga Arts & Culture.
This exhibition was supported in part by the Ohio Arts Council, which receives support from the State of the Ohio and National Endowment for the Arts.
The Cleveland Museum of Art is open Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays 10:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.; Wednesdays and Fridays 10:00 a.m.–9:00 p.m.; closed Mondays.