Cleveland Collects Contemporary Art

November 8, 1998 - January 10, 1999

When passing over time-tested art for the very new, the contemporary art collector must exercise judgment and discernment built on a historical understanding that is blended with a heavy dash of daring.
--Cleveland Museum of Art curator Tom E. Hinson, on Cleveland-area collectors.

Seventy works of art created between 1982 and 1997 and privately owned by thirty individuals and businesses in the greater Cleveland area go on view Nov. 8, 1998, at the Cleveland Museum of Art. This exhibition in CMA's major exhibition galleries, Cleveland Collects Contemporary Art, is free, and will remain on view through Jan. 10, 1999. The exhibition has two Cleveland-based sponsors: the law firm of Hahn Loeser & Parks and the accounting and consulting firm of Ernst & Young.

These paintings, sculptures, and photo-based objects normally essential ingredients of the day-to-day environments of homes and offices encompass styles ranging from precise realism to geometric abstraction, and media ranging from traditional oil paint on canvas to inflated vinyl sheeting. From the first gallery to the last, the show brings together some of the most compelling artists of the past decade and a half, both "blue chip" mid-career artists and younger emerging ones.

Commenting on the high caliber and considerable variety in Cleveland Collects Contemporary Art, CMA director Robert P. Bergman expresses in his foreword to the exhibition's catalogue: "Implicit in the significant breadth and depth of interest in contemporary art in Cleveland is a fundamental, if underappreciated, truth: that this community provides fertile ground for the contemporary creative spirit. This is confirmed by the mix of area-based, nationally based, and internationally based artists in the present exhibition." In fact, the studios of the 60 artists represented in the show can be found from America's east coast to its west, and from Osaka, Japan, to Karlsruhe, Germany.

Tom E. Hinson, CMA curator of contemporary art and photography, organized Cleveland Collects Contemporary Art. He has been on the CMA staff since 1973, and integrally involved with Cleveland's Contemporary Art Society, a CMA auxiliary group, since then. This veteran of the Cleveland art scene says, however, that although his knowledge of the available resources led him to have high expectations for his show, there were a few surprises in store even for him when he began to really plumb northeast Ohio's collections. He conveys his profound delight in the depth of the riches in the area and the superior quality of the works. "The biggest challenge," Hinson says, "was whittling my wish list down to a group that could fit into the CMA's exhibition space. Chief designer Jeffrey Strean has met the nearly overwhelming demands presented by the penchant of these lenders to collect art of museum size as well as museum quality. In so doing Jeffrey has also deftly drawn our attention to harmonies among works of art that haven't been shown together before and probably never will be again."

Gallery "Tour"

"It is hard to single out highlights in this show," continues Hinson, although some of the works command attention more forcefully than others." It was vexing to categorize them, too, he comments, though he has given the exhibition a sense of order under the four headings "figuration," "abstraction," "words and images," and "landscape."

The pervasiveness of the figure especially the human form in recent art is undeniable (and is the impetus for a public symposium, details below). This first section of the exhibition fills three of the six total galleries.

Samson, a life-sized fiberglass sculpture by John Ahearn of a combative, dreadlocked African-American 10-year-old in pink boxer shorts, confronts exhibition visitors as they enter from the lobby. Samson, says Hinson, could be the poster child for any good contemporary art show. "He's self-aware and in-your-face, all about human emotion and what's happening right now, whether it's pleasant or amusing or disturbing."

All the works in the first gallery are portraits. Their inspiration ranges from Samson, a neighbor of Ahearn's in the Bronx, to the discovery in 1991 of a 5,300-year-old corpse, frozen with his tools and weapons in an Alpine glacier, here recreated as a wall-mounted bronze sculpture by Kiki Smith. As Hinson says in his catalogue entry for the over-life-sized Ice Man, Smith "has transformed the desiccated cadaver into a haunting being of alarming grace in its elongated proportions and flowing curves. ... The clenched fists are all that remains of the struggle with impending death as the prehistoric man clung desperately to his weapons or clawed into the deepening snow." Eric Fischl's exotic model was a Holy Man the artist saw in India, engaged in an upside-down meditation ritual, performed nude, his legs crossed as they reach upward, head and shoulders hidden behind a mound of sandy earth.

Several of the paintings in the second gallery hint at the recurring theme of British or German roots or training among artists working today. These individuals include European-born Frank Auerbach, Simon Edmondson, and Peter Howson, to name a few; they also include R.B. Kitaj, who spent part of his Cleveland childhood studying in the CMA's children's classes, pursuing his formal art education in New York, Vienna, Oxford, and London.

The third and largest room in the exhibition includes one of the finest early works by Sandro Chia, according to Hinson, a "menacing and turbulent landscape" called Sight Knight Plight. Its principal figure is an orange-red horse galloping across the canvas with a nude figure riding bareback, pursued by a swarm of disembodied bright blue eyes. Hinson believes that Yellow Bread, comprising four joined canvases, is similarly strong in the oeuvre of David Salle, who has taken his cues in mixing sources of imagery from the likes of Pablo Picasso and Jasper Johns, combining in this painting such seemingly disparate images as African jugs, partially nude female figures, and a loaf of twisted bread.

The increasing importance of photographic methods among today's artists becomes apparent in this gallery. Sandy Skogland's Cibachrome print Walking on Eggshells captures a surreal bathroom tableau she has sculpted and arranged. The scene is populated by two women at toilette, gingerly making their way across a floor covered with eggshells, a bunch of lifelike snakes, and a trio of cast resin rabbits with hands for forepaws. Conceptual artist John Baldessari's Hands/Horses (To Agree) combines stills from the 1961 movie The Misfits with blow-ups of hand-shaking businessmen, in which the artist has colored or blocked out portions of each picture to provoke ambiguous reactions and multiple interpretations.

In this last gallery devoted to figuration is Rachel Lachowicz's two-foot-long Red Tie, made of melted lipstick and wax a sculpture in which the male wearer is absent but implied with Lachowicz's trademark sense of humor and irony. Central to this same room is the most abstracted human shape in the section (and another of the most whimsical), the eight-foot-plus blue-painted Standing Figure No. 8 by John Buck, carved of jelutong wood the artist discovered through a Montana decoy carver.

The works shown in the "abstraction" section of this exhibition include paintings by Elizabeth Murray. Her works include recognizable imagery, albeit fantastically distorted and, in the case of Rain, jutting beyond the essentially rectangular shape of her canvas; in this painting, huge drops fly from all directions through a bright red window frame onto a violet chair. Pushing the boundaries of two-dimensional art further, to straddle the limits of sculpture, is Merwin III, named for a street in the Cuyahoga River "Flats" district of Cleveland, by Edwin Mieczkowski, a Pittsburgh native who has spent most of his career in Cleveland. Mieczkowski's simple square is layered with hard-edged chunks of wood and masonite, painted in planes of black and vivid colors in forms that evoke the network of streets and bridges in this dynamic part of town.

Other abstract artists focus more completely on the fundamentals of form and color to convey their ideas. Brice Marden's undulating lines of yellow, red-orange, hunter green, and dark gray are all contained though barely within the edges of the square canvas Epitaph Painting 2. Hinson describes his reaction to this work, remarking that "the exquisite web of colored lines floating about its gray background invites contemplative scrutiny of its lyrical mysticism." Sean Scully has been quoted as saying that his own subject matter "is the way the stripe is painted, and that is no different to [him] than Cézanne's apple or his bottle, which he painted over and over again." Scully's Eve comprises three canvases a background of black and white stripes on which black-and-white-striped and yellow-and-orange-striped canvases are superimposed.

One of the most arresting works in the following room, the "words and images" gallery, is Some Nerve (Risk), by Nancy Dwyer, which bears out her long-held interest in the artistic potential of letters of the alphabet and the impact she can make using language and words. She has painted a view from below of the word "NERVE" in big block letters, seemingly making their way across a tightrope-like line against a flaming red background. Clevelanders may recognize Dwyer's work from her more recent furniture-sized letter art that serves as outdoor public seating at the Gateway sports complex downtown, Who's on First? and Meet Me Here.

Art, by Patricia Zinsmeister Parker, features the word "Art," in big black letters, as though blown up from a book or magazine, above a naively drawn still life. "CUM N' GIT IT!," in the self-consciously decorative letters one might envision on a turn-of-the-century snake oil vendor's wagon, is painted across a canvas by Lari Pittman that is chock full of overt references and oblique suggestions about the availability of sex, from glittering lingerie to wildly oversized credit cards. Among the three works on view by mixed media artist La Wilson is Be Prepared; it looks somewhat like a well-stocked writing case with its assemblage of writing and drawing materials implying the importance of words except for a toy pistol stored neatly in the lid.

The "landscape" of the final section takes in waterways, forests, and cities. Among the settings: Jennifer Bartlett's north shore of Long Island, Susan Caporael's Trees Reflected in a silvery pool, and Leon Kossoff's London suburbs.

John Moore, who grew up in Cleveland's Doan Creek neighborhood and taught in the CMA's education department for over a decade, created the painting Bill in this last room by characteristically amassing elliptical elements and other anthropomorphic forms that, as Hinson describes them, "appear like boulders buffeted by rough seas." Hinson continues in his catalogue entry, "The dominance of blues and blacks induces a somber tone and the juxtaposition of shapes provides a dramatic tension." Moore typically names his paintings after he has finished them; when he learned of the death from AIDS of his friend William Olander, former curator and acting director of the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, Moore gave this painting his name.

Background

"Since the 1960s," records Hinson in his catalogue introduction, "there has been a small but ever-expanding nucleus of avid private collectors of current art in northeast Ohio." CMA has presented exhibitions surveying the extent and depth of this collecting in 1972, 1980 and most recently in 1986, plus a survey of Cleveland-area contemporary print collecting in 1989. Additionally, last summer's CMA-only exhibition Glass Today: American Studio Glass from Cleveland Collections focused on works of the past few decades, as collected by individuals in greater Cleveland.

The previous shows did not, as Cleveland Collects does, include corporate collections in addition to those of private individuals. Businesses have been key players in buying contemporary art in the Cleveland region since the mid 1980s, signifying among other things, in Hinson's view, the emphasis they place on "experimentation, risk-taking, and standard-setting." Nor did these earlier shows, except for the print exhibition, include photo-based works of art, which became prominent in the 1980s.

The last CMA exhibition that placed very recent painting and sculpture in its main special exhibition gallery was the 1996 Urban Evidence: Contemporary Artists Reveal Cleveland, co-presented by the CMA with the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art and SPACES gallery. Like Cleveland Collects, the Urban Evidence exhibition brought together works by artists whose renown and whose bases of operation ranged from regional to international. Mark Howard's sculptural relief, Third Precinct, on view in the current show, was commissioned for Urban Evidence.

Catalogue

A catalogue of some 200 pages will serve as the lasting record of the exhibition. Color illustrations of each of the 70 works will be accompanied by write-ups examining each piece, preceded by Hinson's introduction and CMA director Bergman's foreword. The book will conclude with biographies of each of the artists and a complete checklist of the show. (To be available through the Museum Store; paper bound; price TBD at press time for this news release.)

Sponsorship

The exhibition and catalogue are sponsored by Hahn Loeser & Parks and Ernst & Young. Promotional support is provided by Cleveland Magazine, 89.7 WKSU, and The Wave 107.3 FM.