Here’s what’s happening starting in September at the Cleveland Museum of Art:
In 2017 major museums in Europe and America are celebrating the centennial of Auguste Rodin’s (1840–1917) death with traveling exhibitions, permanent collection installations and educational activities.
The Cleveland Museum of Art marks the centennial of Rodin’s death with a display of works from the museum’s permanent collection. During World War I, while the museum’s original building was still under construction, trustee Ralph King began negotiations to acquire works from Rodin. The first work to enter the collection was a monumental Thinker, acquired by King in 1916 and donated the following year. Rodin also agreed to cast a special version of his great breakthrough sculpture The Age of Bronze for the museum. Other lifetime casts were donated by civic-minded Clevelanders, and one by Rodin himself. The museum eventually acquired more than 40 works spanning the artist’s career in a wide variety of materials, including the magnificent, larger-than-life plaster sculpture Heroic Head of Pierre de Wissant. The monumental Thinker, one of the museum’s signature works, has graced the south entrance since 1917 and was severely damaged by a bomb in March 1970.
Mourners from the Tomb of Isabella of Bourbon
Tuesday, September 26, 2017, through Sunday, February 4, 2018
Gallery 109
Cleveland’s celebrated alabaster mourners from the tomb of Philip the Bold will be part of a major exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam this fall. In exchange, the Rijksmuseum has offered the Cleveland Museum of Art a rare opportunity to exhibit four bronze mourners from the tomb of Isabella of Bourbon (1436–1465). Traveling to North America for the first time, these renowned sculptures will be on display from September 26, 2017, to February 4, 2018.
CMA at Transformer Station
Scott Olson
Friday, September 1
Scott Olson’s abstract paintings conceal the deliberate decisions and elaborate processes used in their making. By employing a broad range of techniques and materials, Olson traces the history of painting back to the early Renaissance. At the same time, through subtle shifts and the gradual introduction of new methods and concepts, his small-scale works re-examine many of the medium’s long-established boundaries.
“Gesture is very important. It doesn’t have to be bombastic or incorporate your entire body. For me, it’s often my fingers or wrist resting on a bridge I’ve created above the painting. I’ve made some forms by gravity, dropping paint or flowing paint as I’ve worked on a flat surface. It’s organic or natural, a play between that and something more controlled or synthetic. I don’t think about it so much. It becomes an intuitive thing, a means to an end for achieving something else that may even undermine the formal aspects—the forms, figures, shapes.
More recently, and in small ways throughout, there have been subtle introductions of dimensionality or shadow or light––the optical mixing of paint through thin layers or the juxtaposition of dark and light. I think of that not as an inhabitable space, but rather something textural and shallow like the weave of a fabric. It’s still space, there’s dimensionality to that, but it’s not the most alluring or deceptive kind of space that draws you in.”
—Scott Olson
Scott Olson, born 1976, lives and works in Kent, OH. His work has been shown at galleries in New York, Milan, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Stockholm, and Berlin as well as the Österreichisches Museum für angewandte Kunst (Vienna), White Flag Projects (St. Louis), Museum of Contemporary Art (Cleveland), and the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis) among other venues. The Cleveland Museum of Art is presenting Olson’s first institutional solo exhibition.
Jerry Birchfield: Stagger When Seeing Visions
Friday, September 1
Jerry Birchfield’s practice revolves around the question of how images emulate or subvert the sources from which they came. Through complex photographic and sculptural processes, his works go through various stages of transformation, from surrogate to self-reference. The making of meaning is synonymous with the search for the beginning and the end.
“Debris, leftovers, the aftermath of other efforts, materials only partially identifiable––like the scene after an accident or disaster, only too clean for that, too controlled. And not the kind of unidentifiable that happens in real life after the car crash or flood, not the kind with real loved ones and family. This is the kind that happens on a primetime drama––the kind where nothing graphic is ever shown or seen, nothing vulgar, and if it is, it is theatrical enough that we know it isn’t real, it couldn’t be, not like this. It is too clean because it is contained. We can see its edges, we can see where it ends.
This un-identification deals in senses, or things already known. Specificity without. . . . It doesn’t matter that we don’t have more, that we don’t know. Broken pieces of wood and dust and dirt don’t have much more to offer anyway. Here they are the filler, the stand-in, and the placeholder. They are the articulation of their representation, an acknowledgment of what they do now rather than what they used to be. To know more about their past is both pointless and beside the point.”
––Jerry Birchfield
Jerry Birchfield, born 1985, lives and works in Cleveland, OH. He holds an MFA from Cornell University (2014). In Cleveland, Birchfield has exhibited at SPACES Gallery, Zygote Press, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the sunroom, and the Cleveland Foundation as well as the Print Center in Philadelphia. Stagger When Seeing Visions is Birchfield’s first institutional solo exhibition.
Liz Roberts and Henry Ross: Death Knell
Performance: September 9, 2017, 2–4 p.m.
Outside Installation: Begins September 9, 2017
A performance, installation and audio piece
“The death knell of American industrialism manifests and mirrors its legacy, starting with a bang and gradually fading to nothing. Death Knell frames the codependency of process and product by showing a vehicle’s remains with documentation of its dismantling recorded on hundreds of contact microphones. Destruction encompasses the reversal of thousands of years of progress; it can be methodical, meditative, or aggressive.
Cars are explicitly bound to their relationship with organized labor. The vehicle’s make and model are inconsequential because all are complicit in decline through use—a car’s significance is contained in the reversal of its creation rather than in the car itself.
No future, no potential? An audio instruction manual for insurrection. The audio ends without sound, representing an opening wherein the people have the tools to create. It is they who possess the potential to alter context from within. The parts are there; they can be assembled differently.”
—Liz Roberts and Henry Ross
Liz Roberts is an artist and a visiting full-time faculty at the Columbus College of Art & Design.
Henry Ross is a student-artist, writer, and musician. Both are located in Columbus, OH.
Chaekgeori: Pleasure of Possessions in Korean Painted Screens
Now through Sunday, November 5, 2017
Julia and Larry Pollock Focus Gallery | Gallery 010
Chaekgeori: Pleasure of Possessions in Korean Painted Screens is the first international exhibition in the US to explore the artistic evolution of a distinctive pictorial genre called chaekgeori (pronounced check-oh-ree). Translated as “books and things,” chaekgeori refers to a style of still-life painting first developed in Korea around the late 1700s that featured writing implements, exotic luxuries, symbolic flowers, and gourmet delicacies. By the late 1800s, chaekgeori screens had become a popular furnishing item to decorate the Korean collector’s studio, displaying the owner’s aesthetic taste and socioeconomic status.
From Riches to Rags: American Photography in the Depression
Now through Sunday, December 31, 2017
Mark Schwartz and Bettina Katz Photography Gallery | Gallery 230
The Jazz Age gave way to the Great Depression on October 29, 1929, when the American stock market crashed. The following decade was marked by massive unemployment, deepened by a drought that created the Dust Bowl, which transformed tens of thousands of farm families into migrants. Drawing from the museum’s superb holdings of early twentieth-century photography, From Riches to Rags examines photographers’ responses to the social upheaval and economic distress that characterized American life in the 1930s.
Gods and Heroes: Ancient Legends in Renaissance Art
Now through Sunday, December 31, 2017
James and Hanna Bartlett Prints and Drawings Gallery | Gallery 101
Ancient gods and goddesses, daring heroes, and magnificent rulers star in this exhibition of drawings and prints by Renaissance artists. Literally meaning rebirth, the term Renaissance describes a period of renewed interest in ancient Greek and Roman knowledge, literature, and art in Europe during the 1400s and 1500s. As Renaissance artists endeavored to emulate and surpass renowned ancient masters, they studied antique sculpture and architecture, using them as models in the portrayal of the human body, classical myths, and historical events. Artists also adapted ancient legends to create moral and political allegories, and depicted Renaissance royalty in the guise of ancient rulers. The exhibition includes engravings of Raphael’s Apollo on Parnassus and Michelangelo’s Fall of Phaeton, a frieze of chiaroscuro woodcuts reproducing Andrea Mantegna’s Triumph of Caesar, and a group of prints dedicated to the ever-popular hero Hercules.
