News + All image at Cleveland Scene Monday, July 1, 2024 Photos by Emanuel Wallace The Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland recently opened its doors for the Summer/Fall season. The newest exhibitions are: " Message from our Planet: Digital Art from the Thoma Collection ," ; " Skinchangers: Begotten of my Flesh " and " A PLACE meant ." Previous Next

News + Read more at CAN Journal . 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 . Previous Next

Title Round Jacob Koestler Untitled (Multiple Exposure of buildings (Chicago, IL)) , 2017 Black and white photograph, archival pigment print on Universal Photomatte, 260 gsm, bright white From the Collection of Fred and Laura Ruth Bidwell Estimated Retail Value: $1,000 Starting Bid: $500 Jacob Koestler creates immersive, long-form multi-media projects that unfold through exhibitions, artist books, screenings, and live performance. Rooted in close observation and a documentary sensibility, his work often explores memory, place, labor, language, and the emotional texture of everyday life. Koestler applies this focus to collaborative film works through the collective Blurry Pictures and original live scores composed under the name Rural Carrier. Presented in an exhibition called Everybody Wants Somewhere —a line from the 2001 song Cashout by the band Fugazi— this photograph scrutinizes one’s vantage point on the Chicago cityscape, layering imagery to disrupt any “single-point” notion of place and suggest place instead as always unfixed and “in motion.” +sign up to proxy bid return to auction menu More: Jacob Koestler Jacob Koestler (b. Johnstown, Pennsylvania; lives and works in Oberlin) earned his MFA in Photography and Integrated Media from Ohio University. His work has been exhibited and screened nationally and internationally at venues and programs including the CAN Triennial, Transformer Station, The Print Center, FotoFocus, and Silver Eye Center for Photography. His feature documentary ᏓᏗᏬᏂᏏ (We Will Speak ), chronicling efforts to preserve the Cherokee language, has screened at more than 30 festivals internationally since premiering at the Cleveland International Film Festival in 2023. Koestler currently oversees the media lab and 4D technologies in the Studio Art Department at Oberlin College.

Title Round Tomory Dodge Lover , 2021 Oil on canvas 30 x 25 inches Courtesy of the Artist and Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles Estimated Retail Value: $20,000 Starting Bid: $12,500 Tomory Dodge begins his paintings with patterns of stripes and shapes. Over this structure, he lays in expressive marks and gestures that he builds up, scrapes off, and manipulates over weeks, even months. Works like Lover draw us in with their directional lines and buoyant color, presenting allusive abstract forms that activate the surface and, with the titles, invite creative interpretation. About his work, Dodge notes: "I have long been fascinated by the alchemy of modern image creation, having realized as a child that the pictures on my family’s old analog TV set were composed of little dots. Since then, I have been interested in the image in painting on both the 'molecular' and 'macro' levels - how one can show and see both the forest AND the trees at the same time.” +sign up to proxy bid return to auction menu More: Tomory Dodge Tomory Dodge (b. 1974, Denver, CO; lives and works in LA) received his BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and his MFA from California Institute of the Arts. He has recent and upcoming solo and group exhibitions at Philip Martin Gallery (Los Angeles, CA); Miles McEnery Gallery (New York, NY); LUX Art Institute (Encinitas, CA); Rhode Island School of Design Museum; Pizzuti Collection (Columbus, OH); National Museum, Oslo, Norway; Neuberger Museum of Art; and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, among others. Dodge’s work is in the collections of museums such as Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA); Orange County Museum of Art (Newport Beach, CA); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, (San Francisco, CA); Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley, CA); Henry Art Gallery (Seattle, WA); Dallas Museum of Art (Dallas, TX); Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (Overland Park, KS); Weisman Art Museum (Minneapolis, MN); Minneapolis Institute of Art (Minneapolis, MN); Orlando Museum of Art (Orlando, FL); Knoxville Museum of Art (Knoxville, TN); Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (Birmingham, AL); Weatherspoon Art Museum (Greensboro, NC); Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, DC); RISD Museum, Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI); Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, CT); and Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY). Dodge's work is the subject of several monographic catalogs and has been discussed in such publications as Artforum, Flash Art, Modern Painters, Art Review, Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times.

Title Round Joanne Greenbaum Untitled , 2007 Oil and flasche on linen 20 x 16 inches From the collection of Steve Shane, NYC, in honor of Joanne Cohen Estimated Retail Value: $10,000 Starting Bid: $5,000 Through her use of vibrant color and intuitive composition, Joanne Greenbaum’s work achieves balance through the unconventional layering of forms in a complex pictorial space. In her dense, improvisational abstractions, Greenbaum layers different materials into vibrant, highly worked surfaces that balance spontaneity and control—combining gestural marks, scribble-like forms, and graphic elements that suggest both drawing and writing without settling into one. Often built through accumulation and revision, the paintings foreground process, with color and line interacting in unpredictable, almost musical ways. This work stems from a series that reflects Greenbaum’s commitment to pushing abstraction beyond fixed systems, creating works that feel immediate, intuitive, and visually complex. +sign up to proxy bid return to auction menu More: Joanne Greenbaum Joanne Greenbaum (b. 1953, New York, NY; lives and works in New York) received her BA from Bard College. Over the past two decades, she has exhibited widely at institutions including MoMA PS1, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, and Haus Konstruktiv, which mounted a career-spanning survey of her work in Zurich in 2008. Her work is held in the collections of the Hammer Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Museum Abteiberg, Haus Konstruktiv, the Rose Art Museum, and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, among others.

Title Round Sarah Kabot NYT December 2018 , 2026 Collaged newsprint 36 x 24 inches Courtesy of the artist Estimated Retail Value: $4,000 Starting Bid: $2,000 Sarah Kabot reimagines images, spaces, and institutions often viewed as pillars of social stability and public trust. Copying, excising, and re-presenting information, works like NYT December 2018 reveal the subjective expression and inherent fragility within systems we often deem permanent or objective. This work is part of her ongoing series, The Weekly Paper , in which she collages self-selected images sourced from a single week’s newspaper. Hand-cut directly from the print edition, she reassembles these images into intricate, abstracted compositions that create new impressions of the headlining stories. Created specifically for the moCa benefit using newspapers from December 2018—the month of moCa’s 50th anniversary—this work features women Democratic politicians such a Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren, one of the last residents of a Bowery rooming house, a refugee family, a portrait of famed artist Judy Chicago, among others. +sign up to proxy bid return to auction menu More: Sarah Kabot Kabot’s work has been shown nationally and abroad at institutions including The Suburban (IL), SPACES Gallery (OH), Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MI), the Akron Museum of Art (OH), the Museum of Contemporary Art (OH), the Drawing Center (NY), the Peabody Essex Museum (MA), and Tegnerforbundet in Norway. Honors include residencies at the Hambidge Center (GA), Dieu Donne Papermill (NY), the Vermont Studio Center (VT), the Headlands Center for Art (CA), and UCross (WY). Sarah has been the recipient of several grants and prizes, including a Knight Foundation Technology Grant in 2021, a Cleveland Arts Prize for Mid-Career artist in 2017, a 2016 Creative Workforce Fellowship, and 2019, 2015, and 2010 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards. Her work is held in public and private collections, including Progressive Insurance, The Cleveland Clinic, and the West Collection. Public Art projects include permanent installations in the Cuyahoga County Library System, the Avenue District in downtown Cleveland, and a collaborative project with her design partner, Marianne Desmarais, at the Westin in downtown Cleveland. Kabot and Desmarais are currently in production on a project for the Cleveland Clinic Main Campus. She is currently Associate Professor and Chair of the Drawing Department at the Cleveland Institute of Art in Ohio.

News + All image at Cleveland Scene Sunday, November 6, 2022 Photos by Emanuel Wallace The first edition of moCa Connect featured an artist talk with Allen Bozeman, Alexander-John and Emory Jones in addition to DJ sets from DJ Walk, Nic Nacc, MyNameIsBravo and Bobby Booshay. Previous Next

Title Round Lisa Kereszi Girls, Show World Center, Times Square, NYC , 2000 Chromogenic print 20 x 24 inches © Lisa Kereszi. Courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson, New York Estimated Retail Value: $3,500 Starting Bid: $1,750 Lisa Kereszi explores the world of recreation and escapism with a critical eye by accessing sites she has photographed for nearly twenty years. Inspired by environments that transport us into a fantasy realm such as amusement parks, movie theaters, dive bars, strip clubs, and arcades, Kereszi strips away the thinly veiled façade to simultaneously reveal a far more gritty and pedestrian view of these spaces. +sign up to proxy bid return to auction menu More: Lisa Kereszi Lisa Kereszi (b. 1973, Pennsylvania; lives and works in Connecticut) studied at Bard College and received her MFA in photography from the Yale School of Art, where she later joined the faculty. She has exhibited widely and her work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and the J. Paul Getty Museum, among others. Kereszi’s photographs of sites of leisure, fantasy, and faded spectacle have also appeared in editorial and curatorial contexts that extend her visibility beyond the gallery, including projects for The New Yorker and museum commissions.

moCa's building garners various reactions from those in our city. 11400 Euclid Avenue, often used as a personal mirror by passers-by, was designed to inspire dialog centered on creativity. It does so while reflecting a cosmopolitan area of Cleveland and those who bring it to life. The Building The Building About moCa mission The Building Staff & Jobs Board News Contact Us Farshid Moussavi moCa's building garners various reactions from those in our city. 11400 Euclid Avenue, often used as a personal mirror by passers-by, was designed to inspire dialog centered on creativity. It does so while reflecting a cosmopolitan area of Cleveland and those who bring it to life. moCa's physical structure is nearly 34,000-square-foot, 44 percent larger than moCa's former rented space. A museum expansion need not be large in scale to be ambitious. Both environmental and fiscal sustainability were key considerations within the design. Resulting in a landmark that is at once technically inventive and highly practical. Iranian-born, London-based Farshid Moussavi designed the dynamic structure, formerly with Foreign Office Architects (FOA) and now principal of Farshid Moussavi Architecture (FMA). moCa remains her first U.S. commission and her first museum. In addition to FMA, the design team included executive architects Westlake Reed Leskosky , headquartered in Cleveland, and designers of more than 50 cultural buildings throughout the United States. According to Moussavi, "museums today are not just homes for art, but serve multiple functions and host a variety of activities. Our design for moCa Cleveland aimed to provide an ideal environment for artists and visitors to foster creativity in a variety of exhibitions and programs." The four-story building, which anchors the Uptown district, rises 60 feet from a hexagonal base to a square top, where the primary exhibition space is situated. All four floors contain areas for either exhibitions or public programs. The exterior is primarily a mirror-finish of black Rimex stainless steel. Three of the building's six facets, one of them clad in transparent glass, flank a public plaza designed by James Corner Field Operations , a New York-based landscape architecture and urban design firm. The plaza serves as a public gathering place and links moCa to Uptown attractions and amenities. Upon entering the building, visitors find themselves in an atrium where they can experience the dynamic shape and structure of the building as it rises. This space leads to moCa's lobby and a double-height multi-purpose room for public programs and events. From there, visitors may take moCa's monumental staircase, a dominant architectural feature of the building, to the upper floors. On the top floor, the 6,000-square-foot gallery space has no fixed dividing walls, allowing for various configurations. This floor also contains a gallery designed for new media work and the Dick and Doreen Cahoon Lounge, which overlooks Toby's Plaza and Uptown.

Title Round Siwa Mgoboza Les Êtres D’Africadia II , 2015 Archival giclee print on Epson Hot Press; edition 3/10 23 ¼ x 18 ½ inches From the Collection of Fred and Laura Ruth Bidwell Estimated Retail Value: $1,200 Starting Bid: $1,000 Siwa Mgobozais a prominent contemporary South African interdisciplinary artist, curator, and educator known for vibrant, "carnivalesque" works that explore themes of identity, hybridity, and belonging. Mgoboza is celebrated for creating the concept of Africadia, a utopian "future land" where social constructs like race, gender, and nationality are redefined or obliterated. His multidisciplinary practice—spanning performance, installation, and sculpture—engages queer identity, postcolonial politics, and the construction of the self through material experimentation. +sign up to proxy bid return to auction menu More: Siwa Mgoboza Siwa Mgoboza (b. 1989, Mthatha, South Africa; lives and works in Cape Town) studied at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town. He has exhibited internationally at institutions including the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa and Performa Biennial (New York, NY), and has presented solo exhibitions with WHATIFTHEWORLD Gallery (Cape Town) and SMAC Gallery. Mgoboza’s work has also been shown in major international contexts including Art Basel and Frieze.

Title Round McArthur Binion Berkeley: Suite: 11 , 2023 Color aquatint; Saunders Waterford HP paper Image: 36 x 36 inches; sheet: 40 ½ x 40 inches; edition of 40 Courtesy of Paulson Fontaine Press Estimated Retail Value: $15,000 Starting Bid: $9,000 Acclaimed painter McArthur Binion updates elements of Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism in paintings and drawings that combine laborious mark-making and hand-drawn repetition with personal ephemera. He often paints on images of his birth certificate, found and historical photographs, and copies of his hand–written phonebook. A former writer, Binion is highly influenced by language and music, notable in how he layers information to be “read” rather than simply seen. The resulting, often monochromatic works like this one embed symbolism and expressive gestures beneath simple, elegant frameworks. +sign up to proxy bid return to auction menu More: McArthur Binion Binion (b. 1946, Macon, MS; lives and works in Chicago) received his B.F.A. from Wayne State University and his M.F.A. from the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Binion’s works were also featured prominently in the 57th Venice Biennale, VIVA ARTE VIVA (2017). Additional select recent solo exhibitions of his work have been organized at the de la Cruz Gallery at Georgetown University (2025); Library Street Collective, Detroit, MI (2023); Museo Novecento, Florence, Italy (2020); the Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI (2018); Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX (2012); and the University of Maryland University College Gallery, Adelphi, MD (2010). His work is in numerous public and private collections such as the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA; Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH; Art Bridges Foundation, Bentonville, AR; Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; Detroit Institute of Art, Detroit, MI; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, MS; Morehouse College, Atlanta, GA; Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), San Francisco, CA; Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.

News + Read more at Forbes Tuesday, August 6, 2024 By DeMarco Williams "Another area attraction that’s no one’s opening act is Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland. This beautiful building famously avoids having permanent exhibits; instead, the roster of works regularly changes throughout the year." Previous Next