In the Cleveland Museum of Art’s (CMA) newest exhibition, Ann Hamilton: Still and Moving • The Tactile Image, internationally renowned artist Ann Hamilton used a handheld scanner to bring to life objects in the CMA’s collection that are rarely on display: small-scale figurative ceramics and crèche figures from the 1300s to the 1800s. The result is a visually stunning exhibition with monumental images of the diminutive sculptures that explores the relationship between the senses, especially touch, sight, and language through photography, video and sound. In Hamilton’s work, the sculptures become characters joined in a story that is implied but never told.
Born in Lima and living in Columbus, Hamilton is among Ohio’s most influential and best-known artists. Among her many honors are the National Medal of the Arts, the MacArthur Fellowship, the Heinz Award, and the Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship.
The exhibit is open now through April 19. For hours and other details, go to clevelandart.org.
Ann Hamilton: Still and Moving • The Tactile Image spans Toby’s Gallery for Contemporary Art and the Mark Schwartz and Bettina Katz Photography Galleries. This show re-presents the CMA’s objects in an enveloping surround that newly interconnects these objects with our senses.
Visitors will use several senses to experience the exhibition, which begins with 14-foot-tall photographs in the Mark Schwartz and Bettina Katz Photography Galleries.
To create these mammoth depictions of the CMA’s small-scale figurative sculptures, Hamilton used a handheld wand scanner. Due to the nature of the technology, the wand had to remain in physical contact with a surface, so Hamilton rolled it over a thin sheet of plastic, which she placed over or around the sculptures. Moving the wand, the sculptures, or both, Hamilton was drawing with lens and light, a reminder that the scanner is a photographic medium. Through this technology, she brought the complex, twisting shapes of these figurative sculptures to life.
The second of the exhibition’s two galleries, Toby’s Gallery for Contemporary Art, presents examples from Hamilton’s use of photography over her 40-year career, starting with her first photographic project, the body object series from the mid-1980s, and moves on to later photographic projects, including videos, all of which employ the medium in a nontraditional manner.
Three spinning videos, two of which were created for this exhibition, circle the walls. Made with a miniature surveillance camera, all three feature movement of both the subject and the camera, creating a rhythm and sense of animation in the footage. They ask us to consider the act of making, to explore the concept of turning—rotating in space, but also transforming—and the relationship between touch and language.
Image: cadence (detail 1), 2025. Ann Hamilton (American, b. 1956). Pigment print; size variable. Courtesy of the artist.
