by Michael Gill

The idea that Ohio’s art scene looks to New York for validation has some sad truth, but sometimes Ohio brings both the spark and the fuel, and New York is just the place where they meet. Such was the case for an upcoming exhibition at moCa Cleveland, which was conceived during a conversation at Frieze—the international contemporary art fair that draws dealers like Gagosian, Pace Gallery, and Hauser & Wirth, among others, from all over the world. Two museum directors from Ohio reconnected while sitting in the lounge there in May of 2023, when they began to talk about their organizations working together on an exhibition. The directors—Megan Lykins Reich, of moCa Cleveland, and Christina Vassallo, of the Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati—had of course crossed paths before. Vassallo was director at SPACES from 2014 to 2019, when she left Cleveland to lead the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. At that time, Reich was deputy director of moCa Cleveland. But when they reconnected, Reich had been promoted to executive director, and Vassallo had taken a new job as executive director of the Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati: two women with Cleveland in common, now leading major contemporary art centers, in opposite corners of the state.

Very quickly after they began talking about putting together a show, Ohio became its subject. So together they built Ohio Now: State of Nature, which ran from May to September at the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, and opens a Spring 2026 run at moCa Cleveland on January 30. It’s a group show highlighting current practice of artists from around the state, curated by the state’s two largest contemporary art exhibitors, who probably don’t get enough credit for their attention to artists who live here.

Ohio’s natural and unnatural landscape offers plenty of complexity for inspiration. The wide-open spaces are dominated by farmland, and farming and food processing are major industries here. On one hand, the land is a source of sustenance. But the way it is used can also be destructive, as when fertilizer runoff has made the water of western Lake Erie undrinkable. Likewise, by fracking and other mining operations, miners work to sustain their families, and mining companies to provide energy—but the process strips the land and causes horrible damage. And Ohio’s post-industrial cities struggle against sprawl, vacancy and poverty, the result of which is a whole other set of land issues and possibilities—including urban farms. The state of nature in Ohio can be a source of pride, optimism, and alarm. It’s a theme that allows for a broad range of perspectives and ideas.

The Cleveland connections involved in building the show extend beyond Reich and Vassallo. Northeast Ohio native DJ Hellerman—who earned his MA in art history from Case Western Reserve University and worked at the Progressive Collection here—held curatorial positions in Georgia; Syracuse, New York; and Burlington, Vermont before Vassallo hired him to work at the Fiber Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. He returned to Cleveland when Reich hired him as moCa’s senior curator. Similarly, Theresa Bembnister had already been an intern at moCa before she became curator at the Akron Art Museum, then at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, when Vassallo hired her to take that role at the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati. The four tapped their contacts for curatorial connections around the state to find artists whose work related to the theme.

+Read the entire story at CANJournal.org.