by Karin Connelly Rice

When the Museum of Contemporary Art (moCa Cleveland) opens its winter exhibitions this Friday, Jan. 30, visitors will be stepping into conversations that span nature, memory, survival, and responsibility—spanning centuries, ecosystems, and lived experiences.

moCa’s new season brings together four exhibitions—"Ohio NOW: State of Nature,” “Sky Hopinka: The Myth Is Now,” “KING COBRA’s “When You Are Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea,” and the museum premiere of the film installation “Homing Instinct: Letting Go of the Shore.”

ach exhibit has the power to invoke a range of reactions—starting with KING COBRA’s grotesque caged great white shark, suspended in a 13-foot cage and greeting guests on the museum’s ground floor.

“From offering imaginative ways to reuse materials often discarded as waste to creating a VR environment for understanding an insect, all of the artists are making work that helps us rethink our relationship to the natural world,” says DJ Hellerman, moCa deputy director and senior curator.

The exhibits explore the relationship between people and their environments from distinct, often unsettling, vantage points.

“Together, these four exhibitions form a conversation about our relationship with and within nature, across time, memory, and responsibility,” says Megan Lykins Reich, moCa’s Kohl executive director. “Each project approaches this subject uniquely: As material, as platform, as witness, as inherited story, [and] as site of trauma, rupture, or repair.”

That sense of dialogue and conversation anchors moCa’s 2026 season. While climate change and environmental collapse loom large, the exhibitions resist simple binaries of hope versus despair.

“The artworks convey various, even divergent emotions and ideas, revealing the complexity of our personal and collective relationship with and within nature,” Reich says. “None of the works are helpless—instead, many assert the behaviors or recognition (either of past wrongs or future opportunities) needed to repair and sustain our environment.”

Collaborating for sustainabilityIn a statewide collaborative effort between moCa Cleveland and Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center (CAC), “Ohio Now: State of Nature” brings together 15 Ohio-based artists who focus on sustainability, agriculture, food justice, and natural ecologies using materials drawn directly from lived experience—reflecting on pollutants harvested from waterways, plant-based dyes, and organic matter as potential tools for identifying common ground across diverse practices.

“We selected a deeply relevant and urgent theme that many artists across the world are pursuing in their work, one that is broad enough to provide latitude for artists working in different ways and with different intentions,” Reich says, adding that the theme also allows for a cohesive experience where the viewer can ask important questions, yet be open to new ideas and possibilities.

A personal exploration

Those connecting themes continue in “Sky Hopinka: The Myth Is Now,” a poetic and personal exploration of Indigenous culture, history, and language using film, photography, and text.

Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent time in Palm Springs and Riverside, California, Portland, Oregon, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In Portland he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin.

Hopinka alternates between documentary and experimental forms, tracing identity through language, memory and myth.Additionally, he draws on the idea of the “arrière-pays”—an unreachable, imagined homeland—as a metaphor for spiritual searching.

The result is work that feels intimate and expansive at once, situating Indigenous histories not in the past, but as living, evolving presences.

Emotional intensity

While Hopinka’s work may invite quiet reflection, KING COBRA delivers a jolt with “When You Are Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.”

Suspended inside a towering cage of fluorescent tubes, a bisected Great White shark, made from silicone, beads, synthetic hair, and ink, appears frozen between life and decay.

The sculpture represents a memorial to Black Africans forced during the transatlantic slave trade to choose between enslavement or death at sea.

Hellerman notes the work is emotionally intense.

“KING COBRA’s ‘When You Are Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea’ is incredible,” he says. “It will be a memorable experience for this season, to say the least.”

Hellerman doesn’t necessarily consider “Devil” intentionally jarring, but he does describe the tension she creates at the exhibit’s core.

“KING COBRA is making exquisitely crafted work that is both gorgeous and grotesque,” he says.

Going sci-fi in nature

Rounding out the new season is “Homing Instinct: Letting Go of the Shore,” a 26-minute multi-screen science fiction film installation written and directed by filmmaker Lydia Dean Pilcher, based on a short story by writer Dani McClain.

Set in a near future shaped by rising sea levels, the film follows two friends facing forced relocation from coastal regions—a narrative that blends science fiction, Afrofuturism and emotional realism.

“Homing Instinct is a film about friendship, trust, fear, and supporting each other during times of uncertainty,” Hellerman says.

In conjunction with the film, Cleveland’s ThirdSpace Action Lab will activate a ground-floor reading room at moCa focused on science fiction and Afrofuturism—extending the exhibition beyond the screen and into collective imagination.

Hellerman says that what unites moCa’s new season doesn’t offer one takeaway but perhaps invites visitors to make a shift in perspective.

“I’m not sure we can simplify an exhibition into a single message,” he observes. “Like all of our programs, it will open up new ways of thinking about the environment, our relationship to it, and, ideally, it inspires people to think a little bit differently about how they perceive the world they live in.”

Opening nightThe public is invited to celebrate moCa Cleveland’s new season at its 2026 opening night celebration tomorrow, Friday, Jan. 20, from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. All four exhibits will be open during the free event, which will feature a spoken word performance by poet Morgan Paige, food vendors, and cash bar.