Currents and Constellations: Black Art in Focus puts art from the Cleveland Museum of Art’s permanent collection in conversation with a vanguard of emerging and mid-career Black artists, as each explores the fundaments of art making, embracing and challenging art history.
The exhibition’s works will be on display through June 26.
Nine thematic groupings, five in the Julia and Larry Pollock Focus Gallery and four in the permanent collection galleries, place Black American art and artists at the center of discussions about the relevance of art history to contemporary artists.
“Currents and Constellations features a series of thematic vignettes that emphasize how Black artists have drawn from conventional art historical narratives to generate new ones,” says William M. Griswold, director of the Cleveland Museum of Art. “The exhibition creates conversations among contemporary art and historical objects in our encyclopedic collection, inviting visitors to bring their own interpretations to these multifaceted objects.”
In the exhibition, “Currents and Constellations,” is used as a navigational phrase that helps visitors explore the meanings of complex artworks, especially those that engage histories suppressed or erased from conventional narratives.
The phrase marks both direct art historical links, or currents, which represent connections supported by written or recorded archival research, and indirect connections, or constellations, which represent what’s missing from an archive or account. Together, “currents and constellations” describes the interpretive potential of an artwork. The exhibition’s nine thematic groupings illuminate some of the ways that Black artists address essential perspectives, questions and ideas.
The thematic groupings in the focus gallery include Black Cartographies, where each artwork uniquely maps Black experiences and histories; Turning Away and Turning Toward, both of which engage the history of portraiture; The Sacred Mundane, featuring works by artists who show how what they cherish
The museum is supported in part by residents of Cuyahoga County through a public grant from Cuyahoga Arts & Culture and made possible in part by the Ohio Arts Council (OAC), which receives support from the State of Ohio and the National Endowment for the Arts.
For more information about the museum and its holdings, programs and events, call 888-CMA-0033 or visit cma.org