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Press Release

Thursday, July 9, 2026

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE


Media Contacts


Tom Poole

Sr. Operations Officer

tpoole@mocacleveland.org

Tel: 440.364.8805


Matthew Dennis

Marketing & Communications Manager

mdennis@moCacleveland.org

Tel: 216.399.0077


◼CLEVELAND, OHIO (July 9, 2026)—moCa Cleveland has received a $100,000 grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts to support artist commissions and exhibitions over the next two years. The award strengthens the museum’s mission to support the ambitious visions of exceptional contemporary artists and to connect Northeast Ohio audiences with boundary-pushing art and ideas from around the world.


Under the curatorial vision of Deputy Director & Senior Curator DJ Hellerman, the museum continues to be a risk-taking commissioning agent, working with artists whose practices expand contemporary discourse and introduce new models of expression and exchange.


“moCa is championing artists whose work is critically valuable yet often underrecognized,” said moCa Cleveland Kohl Executive Director Megan Lykins Reich. “Most of the artists supported by this award have never exhibited work in our region, and several will have their first museum exhibition with moCa. These projects offer new, incisive perspectives on our world, inviting audiences to engage with urgent questions and expansive possibilities.”


Opening Friday, August 28, 2026, moCa’s next season is anchored by Jody Pinto: Body/Land, the first retrospective and first solo museum exhibition dedicated to the groundbreaking and underrecognized artist whose work bridges Land art, feminist activism, public sculpture, and environmental design. Body/Land spans new and historic works at the exhibition at moCa’s Cleveland as well as a newly commissioned outdoor sculpture presented in partnership with Art Lot in Brooklyn, New York. 


"The exhibition is a conversation, a collaboration, an experiment recognizing the Body/Land again and again." –Jody Pinto


Additional exhibitions feature pioneering artist Tishan Hsu, whose work anticipated today’s conversations around technology and the body, internationally acclaimed filmmaker Rachel Rose, and emerging painter Faye Wei Wei. 



◼Jody Pinto: Body/Land

2026 Toby’s Prize Recipient

Opening: August 28, 2026


Jody Pinto: Body/Land is the first retrospective and first solo museum exhibition devoted to the artist’s groundbreaking five-decade practice. Co-curated by Hellerman and independent curator Marie Catalano, the exhibition surveys Pinto’s work from her leadership in rape crisis activism and early outdoor sculptures to major public art commissions, landscape interventions, and urban design projects.


"Since the late 1960s, Jody has developed a distinctive visual language to explore her enduring interest in people and places. The majority of her work was created without centering the expectations of the gallery, the market, or the museum. Long before questions of embodiment, ecology, power, and our relationship to place became defining concerns of our time, Jody had already been engaging the complexity of these issues with incisive clarity, depth, and wonder. Only now (finally) is a broader audience developing the sensibility to fully recognize and engage the significance of Jody’s work."  –DJ Hellerman, Deputy Director & Sr. Curator


The exhibition will restage several significant installations and bring together drawings, unrealized proposals, archival materials, and a newly commissioned outdoor sculpture presented in partnership with Art Lot in Brooklyn, New York. A major publication, the artist’s first monograph, will accompany the exhibition.


Emerging within the Land art movement of the 1970s, Pinto developed what she described as “living structures,” site-responsive works shaped by weather, participation, and natural processes. As founder of Women Organized Against Rape (WOAR) in 1973, she links feminist activism with a lifelong commitment to public space. Her concept of “body/land” connects bodily and environmental systems, revealing parallels between cycles of injury and healing. Since the 1990s, Pinto has completed more than 50 public commissions internationally, exploring civic space as a site for transformative encounters.


"For decades, Jody Pinto has pursued a sustained exploration of the relationships between bodies and landscapes, and structures that inflict harm or make healing possible. By bringing together her work across Land art, activism, education and civic design for the first time, this exhibition reveals the continuity of that inquiry across her singular practice." –Marie Catalano, Independent Curator


Body/land is a Toby’s Prize presentation, a biennial award by philanthropist and longtime moCa trustee Toby Devan Lewis that supports new commissions by underrecognized artists. The award includes an unrestricted artist honorarium, funding for new work, a solo exhibition, and an accompanying publication. Previous recipients include Sondra Perry (2018); Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo (Puppies Puppies) (2022); and Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya (2024).


Lead support for Jody Pinto: Body/Land is provided by Margaret Cohen & Kevin Rahilly and the John P. Murphy Foundation.

Also opening at moCa Cleveland on Friday, August 28:



◼Tishan Hsu: permeable surface


For more than four decades, Tishan Hsu has explored the evolving relationship between the human body and technology. A prescient voice in contemporary art, Hsu began examining the psychological and physical effects of digital systems long before the rise of smartphones, social media, and artificial intelligence.


permeable surface presents a career-spanning selection of works that trace Hsu’s ongoing investigation into perception, embodiment, and technological mediation. Bringing together sculpture, painting, and video—including his first and most recent moving-image works, Folds of Oil (2005) and emergent mesh (2025)—the exhibition reveals how Hsu anticipated many of the questions that define contemporary life today. Through biomorphic forms, industrial materials, and digitally inflected imagery, Hsu’s work offers a compelling vision of humanity’s increasing entanglement with technological systems.



◼Rachel Rose: Lake Valley


Lake Valley is an eight-minute animated film by Rachel Rose that explores loneliness, imagination, and the search for connection. Drawing on imagery sourced from nineteenth- and twentieth-century children’s books, Rose combines collage, found materials, and experimental sound to create a dreamlike narrative.


The film follows a solitary rabbit-like creature that leaves its suburban home in search of friendship in a nearby forest. Through its distinctive visual language and unexpected soundscape, Lake Valley transforms familiar storybook imagery into a poignant meditation on belonging, adventure, and the universal desire for companionship.


Support for Rachel Rose: Lake Valley is provided by Art Bridges.



◼Faye Wei Wei: Draw in your head and sleep the whole way home.


Faye Wei Wei is among the most closely watched emerging painters of her generation. Drawing inspiration from poetry, mythology, literature, and memory, she creates luminous figurative paintings that move between dream and reality.


Characterized by expressive brushwork, unexpected color relationships, and fluid compositions, Wei Wei’s paintings evoke themes of love, longing, transformation, and emotional vulnerability. Her distinctive visual language has earned growing international attention and established her as an important new voice in contemporary painting.


These exhibitions will be at moCa Cleveland from August 28, 2026 through March 7, 2027.■



+more on Jody Pinto

Jody Pinto (b. 1942, New York, NY) lives and works in New York, NY. Her work was recently featured in Groundswell: Women of Land Art at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, TX (2023) and in the exhibition Underground at MoMA (2022-2023). Pinto’s work has been included in the Whitney Biennial, the Venice Biennale, and in exhibitions at Artpark, Lewiston, NY; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia; the New Museum, and the Queens Museum (both in NY). From 1971-74 she founded and directed Women Organized Against Rape (WOAR), the longest operating rape crisis center in Philadelphia, PA. She has collaborated on over 50 public works including for bridges, gardens, parks, and transit systems. She is the recipient of numerous awards and grants for her work, including the NEA Federal Design Achievement Award, A.I.A. Honor Award: National Design for Transportation Award, Art in Public Spaces and two National ASLA Design Honor Awards. Her public works include Fingerspan Bridge (1987) in Fairmont Park, Philadelphia PA, Tree of Life/ City Boundary (1992) at Papago Park, Phoenix, the redesign of Santa Monica State Beach and Palisade Park in Los Angeles (2001), the Fort Lauderdale International Airport (2002), and Land Buoy (2014) in Philadelphia, PA. Pinto received her BFA from Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA)in 1973, and taught there for four decades at Pennsylvania Academy for Fine Arts (PAFA).


+more on Tishan Hsu

Tishan Hsu (b. 1951, Boston, MA) lives and works in New York, NY. Recent solo exhibitions include Tishan Hsu at MAMCO, Geneva, Switzerland (2024); Secession, Vienna, Austria (2023–24); and Liquid Circuit at SculptureCenter, New York, NY (2020), which traveled to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2021). Hsu’s work has been featured in major international exhibitions including The Milk of Dreams, the 59th Venice Biennale (2022), the Carnegie International (2022), and the Gwangju Biennale (2021), and it is included in the New Museum’s large group exhibition New Humans: Memories of the Future that inaugurated their expanded building in 2026. Hsu’s work is held in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, both in New York, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Tate Modern, London, UK; M+, Hong Kong; and numerous other international institutions. Hsu received a B.S. in Architecture and Environmental Design (1973) and a Master of Architecture (1975) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he also studied film at Harvard University’s Carpenter Center. He has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Pratt Institute, and Harvard University.


+more on Rachel Rose

Rachel Rose (b.1986, New York, NY) works in film, painting, sculpture and drawing. Her practice explores how landscape shapes storytelling and belief systems, and investigates from different vantages how the everyday holds the sublime. She has held numerous solo exhibitions throughout the world and her work is held in major public collections including the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, NY; Julia Stoschek Foundation, Düsseldorf; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles; LUMA Foundation, Arles; Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris; Ishikawa Foundation, Tokyo; Tate Modern, London; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, among many others. She was the recipient of the Frieze Artist Award in 2015 and the Illy Present Future Prize in 2014. She participated in the 57th Venice Biennale, 57th Carnegie International, 32nd São Paulo Biennial, and 3rd Jeju Biennale. Rose lives and works in New York, and is represented in New York, Brussels, and Seoul by Gladstone Gallery and in London by Pilar Corrias Gallery.


+more on Faye Wei Wei

Faye Wei Wei (b. 1994, London, UK) lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Tiny Melody Chamber at SITUATIONS, New York, NY (2024); The Moon Balloon of New York City at Galerie Kandlhofer, Vienna, Austria (2022); and Moon at Galerie Kandlhofer (2021). Her work has been exhibited internationally and has been recognized as an “artist to watch” by journals including British Vogue and It’s Nice That. The Sunday Times also listed Wei Wei as one of the notable emerging artists of her generation. She is a guest judge for the 2026 Jackson’s Art Prize. WeiWei received a B.A. (Hons) from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, in 2016 and her MFA from Yale University in 2026.


+more on moCa Cleveland

For nearly 60 years, the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (moCa) has served as a living, adaptive platform for artistic experimentation, public exchange, and civic connection. moCa is a conduit and catalyst for creative thinking, generating original programming that pursues the whys of our shared world, pushes the boundaries of artistic expression, and propels Cleveland’s cosmopolitan character.


Since its founding in 1968 by Marjorie Talalay, Nina Sundell, and Agnes Gund as The New

Gallery, moCa has presented the works of more than 3,000 thousand artists, often through artists’ first solo shows. Soon after its founding, moCa was the first in the region to exhibit the works of many vanguard artists such as Laurie Anderson, Christo, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Adrian Piper, and Andy Warhol. Recent artist commissions and solo exhibitions include work by Tauba Auerbach, Aleksandra Domanović, Michelle Grabner, Byron Kim, Ragnar Kjartansson, Tony Lewis, Catherine Opie, Adam Pendleton, Sondra Perry, Joyce J. Scott, Do Ho Suh, Liu Wei, Renée Green, Nina Chanel Abney, Finnegan Shannon, Manabu Ikeda, and Clotilde Jiménez, among many others.


+Museum Hours


Thursday & Friday: 1-8PM

Saturday & Sunday: 11AM-5PM

Holiday hours available at moCacleveland.org


+more on The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts


Following Andy Warhol’s will, the mission of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts is the advancement of the visual arts. The foundation manages an innovative and dynamic grants program while also preserving Warhol’s legacy through creative and responsible licensing policies and extensive scholarly research for ongoing catalogue raisonné projects. To date, the foundation has given $350 million in cash grants to over 1,000 arts organizations around the country and abroad and has donated 52,786 works of art to 322 institutions worldwide.


+more on Art Lot

Art Lot is a not-for-profit outdoor contemporary art space located in Brooklyn, NY that offers a conceptually rigorous exhibition program in a unique, free, and public context. By supporting ambitious and experimental artist projects, Art Lot seeks to broaden accessibility and engagement with contemporary art and expand notions of public art, monuments, and public space.


Since 2022, co-directors Jacob Jackmauh and Lina McGinn have led the program with a particular focus on site-responsive artworks and on creating opportunities for artists to extend their practices into the public realm for the first time. In doing so, they seek to challenge prevailing exhibition and presentation models through work that engages with materials and subjects that can only exist outside of conventional gallery frameworks.


Contact: info@artlotbrooklyn.com


+more on Art Bridges Foundation 

Art Bridges Foundation, the vision of philanthropist and arts patron Alice Walton, creates and supports projects that share works of American art with communities across the United States and its territories. Since 2017, Art Bridges has partnered with a growing network of nearly 400 museums of many sizes—impacting 25 million people

nationwide—to provide financial and strategic support for exhibitions, collection loans, and programs designed to educate, inspire, and deepen engagement with local communities. The Art Bridges Collection represents an expanding vision of American art from the 19th century to present day and encompasses multiple media and voices. For more information, visit artbridgesfoundation.org.


+2026 Institutional Supporters

Leadership donors supporting moCa’s mission include gifts to Art Now: Anonymous, Art Bridges Foundation, the Cleveland Foundation, Doreen & Dick Cahoon, Joanne Cohen & Morris Wheeler, Margaret Cohen & Kevin Rahilly, Dealer Tire, Becky Dunn, the George Gund Foundation and Kim & Steve Myers; Connecting Audiences: Art Bridges, Grosvie and Charlie Cooley, Harriet Goldberg,  Agnes Gund+, John P. Murphy Foundation, PNC, The Callahan Foundation, The Leonard Krieger Fund of the Cleveland Foundation, and The Nord Family Foundation; and Sustaining Pathways: David Barquist and Doug Schaller, Joan Tomkins & William Busta, Leslie DiNovi & Beatty McDonald, Char & Chuck Fowler, Nadya Haider, Stewart Kohl, David C. Lamb, Claire & Sandy McMillan, Roy Minoff, Casey & Garrett Monda, Nicholas & Erin Reif, Marian & Boake Sells, Stephen G. Sokany & Matthew Katz, Kelsey & Alex Wolf, David and Inez Myers Foundation, Drummond Road Capital, Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation, Louise H. and David S. Ingalls Foundation, The Char and Chuck Fowler Family Foundation, and Kulas Foundation. 


All exhibitions are supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. moCa Cleveland also receives lead institutional support in part from Bloomberg Philanthropies, the residents of Cuyahoga County through a public grant from Cuyahoga Arts & Culture, the Ohio Arts Council, and the continuing support of the museum’s Board of Directors, patrons, and members.


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