CLEVELAND — The Cleveland Museum of Art announced “Currents and Constellations: Black Art in Focus” which features works from the museum’s permanent collection by major Black artists alongside works from emerging and mid-career Black artists.
The free exhibition, which is on view through June 26, places Black American art and artists at the center and the discussions about how they challenge art history.
Visitors can expect to see works from major Black artists like Sanford Biggers, Elizabeth Catlett, Richard Hunt, Dawoud Bey, Lorna Simpson, Jack Whitten, Darius Steward, Kenturah Davis, Mario Moore and Torkwase Dyson.
“Through multiple, overlapping themes, visitors are encouraged to consider the vast network of relations borne of a single artwork, to experience the ways that Blackness, broadly speaking, may impact an artist’s process or content and to see challenging artworks as an invitation to delve more deeply,” said Key Jo Lee, director of academic affairs and associate curator of special projects.
The exhibition has nine thematic groups that illuminate some of the ways that Black artists address essential perspectives, questions and ideas. Visitors will find five of the thematic groupings on display in the Julia and Larry Pollock Focus Gallery and four in the permanent collection galleries.
The museum says the thematic groupings in the focus gallery include Black Cartographies, Turning Away and Turning Toward, The Sacred Mundane and Resistance in Black & White.
The four groupings that are in the permanent collection galleries will generate new conversations with works in other parts of the CMA’s collection, including American painting and sculpture, Abstract Expressionism, German Expressionism and contemporary art.
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