Studio Access w/ Manabu Ikeda Mar 30, 2024 Experience the artist create onsite at moCa as he develops a new monumental artwork over the course of the Winter/Spring season. About Experience the artist create onsite at moCa as he develops a new monumental artwork over the course of the Winter/Spring season. Experience the artist create onsite at moCa as he develops a new monumental artwork over the course of the Winter/Spring season.

Press Release DOWNLOAD PDF Tuesday, January 30, 2024 moCa Cleveland unveils new Mission, Vision, and Values Museum sets an exciting new tone and future focused guide ahead of a dynamic year of exhibitions and projects in 2024 Contacts: Adam Zuccaro SVP Client Strategy Falls & Co. azuccaro@mocacleveland.org 216.408.5717 Tom Poole Creative Director moCa Cleveland tpoole@mocacleveland.org 216.658.6938 Cleveland, Ohio—(January 30, 2024) The Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (moCa) announces the completion of new Mission, Vision, and Values statements for the 55-year-old organization. Kohl Executive Director Megan Reich led the process, and she notes, “I am incredibly proud of our staff and board, all of whom collaborated thoughtfully to embrace concepts and create language that both draws from moCa’s rich history and articulates our exciting new tone and direction for our future. The words we have chosen crystalize our core intentions and beliefs in true moCa fashion, as we lean into new work and new ambitions. This language frames ongoing visioning and planning that will continue to unfold and reinforce moCa’s essential value.” MISSION Following a 15-month process, moCa’s new mission streamlines its previous 65-word statement into four memorable words: Art Now, in progress. Art Now, in progress succinctly spells out moCa’s purpose. ◼ Art is and will always be at the forefront of all moCa’s endeavors. ◼ Now highlights moCa’s commitment specifically to contemporary art, emphasizing a sense of immediacy and active engagement from its audience. Now also is an invitation to experience, reflect, and be present in the moment. ◼ Progress , meanwhile, represents the museum’s aspiration for continuous advancement and growth. This part of the statement signals moCa’s values, which include a commitment to experimentation, upholding integrity, and fostering an inclusive environment. Far from stationary, “i n progress . . . ” also reminds us that, like contemporary artists and audiences, moCa is always adapting and evolving. The phrase makes room for failure, learning, and growth, and emphasizes the museum’s active, “real time” focus. Like artists, moCa develops and modifies its practices to reflect the current moment, specific needs, and unique opportunities. Together, these components blend into a mission that defines moCa’s identity and direction, illustrating its devotion to the evolving world of art and audiences. VISION As its formal aspiration, moCa’s new vision statement is both immediately feasible and always reaching, achievable at various magnitudes from personally meaningful to society altering: Artists & art lead us to the unfamiliar, where we open and connect to new possibilities. Like the new mission statement, moCa’s new vision statement centers artists and art as catalysts for growth and adaptation. In response and exchange, moCa’s audiences—be them visitors, neighbors, staff, board members, donors, or other artists—bring to life the exciting potential found in experiencing the unfamiliar. moCa is the conduit for this creative exchange. VALUES The key beliefs that shape and drive moCa’s behaviors are presented in pairs to remind us that moCa exists in the shared space of “both/and” as opposed to “either/or” or simply “this.” Our values are: ◼ Curiosity & Experimentation Artists ask questions. Like them, being curious about the world is our starting point. From this place of wonderment, we experiment. Nimble, courageous, and deliberate, our explorations lead us to new potential and create innovations that drive culture forward. ◼ Exchange & Relationships Our work is relational. We make meaning through exchange. By sharing, we form and nurture relationships that build trust. These connections undergird our work, bringing value and relevance to our mission. ◼ Integrity & Inclusion We ground our work in care, love, and trust. We use ethical and responsible business practices. We are boldly inclusive, always pursuing equity, justice, and belonging. We embrace difference, celebrate diverse perspectives, and create spaces for support and wellness. ◼ Cleveland & Everywhere We ground our work in our home city and serve our local community. We also inform and engage in a global art ecology. Collaborating with artists living in Cleveland or beyond, we present work and ideas that matter. We advance culture everywhere by basing our work here. moCa Vice President Marcella Brown , who served on the task force that shepherded the process and is leading its implementation by the board of directors, reflects: “I am so proud to be part of moCa during this exciting time of transformation. This experience drew our dynamic board and staff together in dialogue to address tensions, ask questions, and push around possibilities. Our new mission, vision, and values set a fresh feel for the museum, one that reflects our leadership, creative workforce, and goals for impact, relevancy, and value.” The task force included members of moCa’s board and staff, including Reich, Brown, Nadya Haider, Ben Guess, Jim Stone, and Natalie Grave. Carter Global consulted on a foundational strategic visioning process. The George Gund Foundation provided special support for moCa’s strategic visioning process. moCa Cleveland's Winter/Spring 2024 Season These new guiding statements inform three upcoming exhibitions at moCa. Opening Friday, Feb 2 and running through May 26, 2024 , the shows include the United States debut of Manabu Ikeda’s acclaimed Flowers from the Wreckage retrospective and new commissions, installations, and artworks by Northeast Ohio-raised artist Andrea Bowers and Cleveland-connected collaborative BlackBrain Group . Activating on moCa’s mission ( Art Now, in progress ), Manabu Ikeda will be working onsite for an in-gallery studio residency at moCa at various times throughout the exhibition season. Visitors can experience Ikeda’s creative process for themselves as he creates a monumental new drawing inside moCa’s Mueller Family Gallery. Engagement Guides and CIA students will be available to discuss and answer questions about the artist’s practice during these sessions. Additionally, and in alignment with moCa’s values, collaboration is key this season–from BlackBrain Group’s immersive installation done with our institutional residency partner Julia de Burgos Cultural Art Center (JDBCAC) to collaborations with Great Lakes Science Center (GLSC) and Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) in support of Andrea Bowers’s new monumental neon in downtown Cleveland and multi-gallery exhibition at moCa Cleveland. These three exhibitions explore the power of nature and human nature–asserting our obligation to protect the Great Lakes, envisioning rebirth that comes after climate devastation and symbolizing our existential journeys–they elevate our shared experiences to encourage connection and change. For additional information about the Winter/Spring 2024 Season, visit moCa’s website. Free Admission & Hours Daily Admission at moCa Cleveland is always free to all. Thursdays-Sundays, 11AM-5PM; Holiday hours available at mocacleveland.org About moCa Cleveland For more than 50 years, the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (moCa) has played a vital role in the city’s cultural landscape. moCa is a conduit and catalyst for creativity and inspiration, offering exhibitions and programs that provide public value and make meaning of the art and ideas of our time. Since its founding in 1968, moCa has presented the works of more than three 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, Simon Denny, Aleksandra Domanović, Michelle Grabner, Byron Kim, Ragnar Kjartansson, Tony Lewis, Kirk Mangus, Catherine Opie, Adam Pendleton, Sondra Perry, Joyce J. Scott, Do Ho Suh, Liu Wei, Renée Green, and Nina Chanel Abney, among many others. 2024 Institutional Sponsors All current moCa Cleveland exhibitions are funded by leadership gifts from Doreen & Dick Cahoon, Joanne Cohen & Morris Wheeler, Margaret Cohen & Kevin Rahilly, Grosvie & Charlie Cooley, Becky Dunn, Harriet Goldberg, Agnes Gund, Jan Lewis, and Toby Devan Lewis*. * In memory moCa Cleveland receives lead institutional support in part by The Cleveland Foundation, the residents of Cuyahoga County through a public grant from Cuyahoga Arts & Culture, the George Gund Foundation, the Nord Family Foundation, the Leonard Krieger Fund of the Cleveland Foundation, the Ohio Arts Council, which receives support from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency, PNC, and the continuing support of the museum’s Board of Directors, patrons, and members. ### Previous Next

News + Read more at Inside Climate News Sunday, February 4, 2024 Fighting for a Foothold in American Law, the Rights of Nature Movement Finds New Possibilities in a Change of Venue: the Arts The celebrated artist Andrea Bowers grew up in Ohio on Lake Erie. Her exhibit at MoCa makes a case that the lake and its tributaries possess the legal rights to “Exist, Flourish and Evolve. By Katie Surma CLEVELAND—The ailing Cuyahoga river, bloated with industrial pollution, erupted into flames reaching as high as a five story building on June 22, 1969. The river, one of several heavily polluted waterways that feed Lake Erie, had caught fire at least a dozen times over the course of a decade, the horror of which helped spark the nascent U.S. environmental movement, leading to the enactment of landmark legislation like the 1972 Clean Water Act. Fast forward nearly a half century to 2014, when Lake Erie, after having endured decades of pollution from industrial, agricultural and other human activities, was stricken with toxic algae blooms so intense that roughly 500,000 people living near the lake lost access to drinking water for three days. Those residents were left questioning what 50 years of environmental laws actually protected: ecosystems or industry’s right to pollute. Such are the bookends of Andrea Bowers’ new “ Exist, Flourish and Evolve ” exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland (MoCa), showing now through May 26. Bowers, an Ohio native and internationally acclaimed artist, named the exhibit for three of the legal rights that activists enshrined into a 2019 law known as the Lake Erie Bill of Rights. The idea was, in part, to level the legal playing field between the interests of the lake, on one hand, and those of industry, on the other. Ecuador, Panama, Bolivia and Spain are some of the countries where lakes, rivers, forests, wild animals and Earth itself have been recognized as rights-bearing entities. The so-called rights of nature laws typically provide a higher form of protection than conventional environmental regulations and usually give human legal guardians the ability to enforce the rights on behalf of rivers, forests and wild animals. Exist, Flourish and Evolve provokes visitors to confront philosophical arguments behind the rights of nature movement: principally, that nature is not a thing, or merely human property as conventional law treats it. Rather, Earth and its ecosystems are complex living communities to which humans belong. Modern science confirms this fact and legal systems ought to catch up to that reality, advocates argue. The exhibition takes place across two locations. The first, a giant red, green and blue neon sculpture installed outside Cleveland’s lakefront Great Lakes Science Center and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame declares: “Lake Erie Has the Right to Exist, Flourish, & Naturally Evolve.” The second, at MoCa, holds Bowers’ drawings, additional neon light installations, a documentary film and activists’ posters and campaign paraphernalia, including a sign boldly asking the question: “If Corporations Have Rights, Shouldn’t Mother Nature?” In between displays of Bowers’ drawings are photographic images of the 1969 Cuyahoga fires and algae blooms of the 2010s, raising questions about the effectiveness of environmental protection efforts in the intervening years. Nuclear power plants, offshore wind farms, and factory farming are some of the region’s other industrial activities highlighted throughout the exhibit. For Bowers, who grew up splashing in Lake Erie’s waters, working on Exist, Flourish and Evolve has been deeply personal. Her first word was neither mom nor dad, but “lake,” and her family lived closely to the land with her father, an avid fisherman and hunter, running the police boat on the lake. A quintessential advocate, Bowers is known for using her art to amplify the plight of feminists, Indigenous communities, environmentalists, immigrants, workers and others. She spends lengthy periods of time in the field with activists, learning about their work and how she can be of service to their cause. She’s embedded with Indigenous communities at Standing Rock and was arrested in 2011 alongside fellow activists for “tree sitting” in protest of the razing of trees in her current home town of Los Angeles. “I always ask the simplest question which is, ‘How can my art be in service to you?’” Bowers said of her approach to working with other activists. “They are the driving force in terms of content and I try to create and use my access to institutions to bring attention to their issues.” For Exist, Flourish and Evolve , Bowers teamed up with the U.S.-based nonprofit Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), an organization that helped enact the world’s first rights of nature law in 2006 in a rural Pennsylvania town . Bowers spent most of 2019 talking with CELDF’s consulting director Tish O’Dell and learning about the organization’s thwarted efforts to make U.S. rights of nature laws more than symbolic—despite nearly 20 years of effort, no U.S.-based rights of nature law has been enforced. Courts have struck down the laws on a variety of grounds, including state law preemption . O’Dell explained to Bowers how 61 percent of Toledo voters, fed up with toxic algae blooms and other environmental degradation, enacted the Lake Erie Bill of Rights (LEBOR) into law in February 2019, and how a day later, an industrial farm challenged the constitutionality of the law. In February 2020, a federal court in Ohio struck down LEBOR, reasoning that it was unconstitutionally vague and exceeded the authority of a municipal government. Since then, O’Dell and her CELDF colleagues have entered a period of reflection, wondering how to advance their movement in light of the roadblocks erected in U.S. legal and political systems. Working with Bowers and learning about the power of art, O’Dell began riffing on a longstanding question in the legal world: Does law influence the culture, or does culture influence the law? “We had been so focused for so long on using the law to change our culture,” O’Dell said. “Andrea gave us a different way of thinking about organizing and how we can use cultural change to shift mindsets and use that to shift the laws.” And so CELDF, in partnership with Bowers, rolled out a two-phase “ Truth, Reckoning, and Right Relationship ” conference in late 2023 and April 2024. The fall 2023 meeting at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame convened doctors, lawyers, activists, Indigenous people, students and others to reckon with how existing legal, political, educational, economic and cultural systems have contributed to the “ill health” of the Great Lakes. A gathering in April 2024 will focus on how, beyond changing laws, humanity can come back into “right relationship” with those ecosystems. “Maybe then we won’t need laws to instruct us to not poison ourselves,” O’Dell said. Still, she and her CELDF colleagues have not given up on their work in the legal realm. In March 2022, New York state Assemblyman Patrick Burke, with the help of CELDF, introduced the Great Lakes Bill of Rights , aimed at “securing legal rights” for the Great Lake’ ecosystems. The bill is pending in committee, with Democrats currently in control of the legislature and governorship. As exhibit attendees exit Exist, Flourish and Evolve , a final neon and painted installation underscores that unfolding effort in bold letters: “The Great Lakes Ecosystem Shall Possess the Inalienable and Fundamental Rights Not to be Owned or Privatized or Monetized.” Previous Next

AIR: Joyce Morrow Jones Artist-in-residence Jul 1-Nov 30, 2021 Left: Joyce Morrow Jones; Right: Joyce Morrow Jones, Strength of the Ancestral Realm (Part of Ancestors are Our Strength triptych) , 2018. Mixed media relief covered with African Ankara fabric collage, 16 x 30 in. (40.64 x 76.2 cm). Courtesy the artist Joyce Morrow Jones is a mixed media fiber and sculpture artist weaving the art of storytelling through her creations. Her work is inspired by transformational stories of women in their journey through life, history, and cultural traditions. African and Diaspora themes reflecting cultural traditions often with multicultural images are also prominent in her artwork. Born in Cleveland, Joyce acknowledges her Jamaican and African heritage. Those influences will continue throughout her residency with moCa as she expands “Ancestral Tributes” in both oral tradition of storytelling and creative expression. Select exhibitions include shows at BayArts in Bay Village, OH; Artists Archives of the Western Reserve, Cleveland, OH; and the Sculpture Center, Cleveland, OH. She was a 2019 Artist-in-Residence at Karamu House. Find out more about Joyce Morrow Jones at joycemorrowjones.com The AIR program is generously sponsored by Margaret Cohen and Kevin Rahilly, with additional support from Char and Chuck Fowler. About moCa AIR: Developed to support and highlight the work of emerging or early-career artists in Cuyahoga County, moCa AIR allows the museum to work alongside artists through 5-month, long-form onsite engagements. Artists-in-residence receive an honorarium, program support, a dedicated studio space inside the museum, professional development opportunities, access to the museum’s production studios, and administrative support. During their time in residence, each artist will develop a site-specific project that activates a site in the building outside of the traditional gallery spaces with production funds provided by moCa. Related Exhibition ▶ Joyce Morrow Jones: Black Butterfly

Message from Our Planet Digital Art from the Thoma Collection Jun 28-Dec 29, 2024 Penelope Umbrico, 48,586,054 Suns from Sunsets from Flickr (Partial) 11/05/20, 2020. Wall installation of 1,440 color photographs on paper, and tape. Message from Our Planet brings together 19 software, video, and light-technology artworks from 17 international artists working at the forefront of digital and electronic art. The exhibition proposes that media technologies, from vintage devices to cutting-edge digital algorithms, offer distinct ways for artists to communicate with future generations. Themed like a global time capsule, the group of artworks reflect the artifacts and ambitions of contemporary life. Curated by the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Foundation Exhibition Images Select images: Robert Wilson, LADY GAGA: Mademoiselle Caroline Riviere , 2013. Digital video (with sound); Jenny Holzer, Red Tilt , 2002. Custom electronics (silent), double-sided light-emitting diode signs with Taitron diodes, stainless steel housings and bezels; Claudia Hart, The Ruins , 2020. Digital video (with sound); Paul Pfeiffer, Caryatid (Stiverne) , 2018. Digital video (silent), chrome 32" CRT monitor Featured Artists: Brian Bress, Sabrina Gschwandtner, Hong Hao, Matthew Angelo Harrison, Claudia Hart, Jenny Holzer, Lee Nam Lee, Christian Marclay, Paul Pfeiffer, Tabita Rezaire, Michal Rovner, Jason Salavon, Elias Sime, Skawennati, Penelope Umbrico, UVA (United Visual Artists), and Robert Wilson

J.J. Adams Flowers in Temporary Hands Jan 28-Jun 5, 2022 J.J. Adams, Booker (by the creek) , 1959. Courtesy the artist's family archives J.J. Adams’s Flowers In Temporary Hands explores the role that privilege and race play into an assemblage of any one identity. With four distinct iterations–an artist book, video performance, sound, and sculptural landscape–Flowers In Temporary Hands abstractly layers images as language, culling from a steeply personal and concealed post generational memory. Through a staircased soundscape, the audience is guided into a layered installation of images mounted on a labyrinthine chain-link fence, an echo of the artist’s most significant detainment as a teenage child. Flowers In Temporary Hands addresses legacy through photographs from Adams’s estranged grandfather’s archive, pages from Adams’s teenage journal while institutionalized, and newly produced poems that reflect on the artist’s past state of mind. All come together to reveal a striking but not uncommon portrait of a boy whose narrative of self has been mostly shaped by their single white mother. A series of tender gestures paired with visceral critical inquiry, Flowers In Temporary Hands reminds us that identity, just like history, is both contingent and incomplete. This series of stories has been built from a myriad of people, places, and moments in time. About the Book J.J. Adams’s first publication, Flowers In Temporary Hands , pairs images with language to establish a symbolic universe that mixes personal memory, loss, and desire. Composed of three sections that address different periods in the artist’s life, Flowers in Temporary Hands acts as a timestamp to closure. ​ In The Toothpaste Diaries , Adams shares pages of their journal: a collection of drawings, collages, and writing created during a defining moment of teenage incarceration. These richly layered pieces are juxtaposed with works from the Gregory Adams Archive . This collection of black and white photographs taken by the artist’s estranged grandfather document his own collegial life, from the playing field to the classroom. Poignantly capturing two distinct moments in time, The Toothpaste Diaries and the Gregory Adams Archive are threaded together by Boys Like Us: Part One , a series of formatted and densely layered poems that reflect on J.J. Adams’s past and the construction of family vs. identity. J.J. Adams’s Flowers In Temporary Hands is organized by Puppies Puppies (Jade Kuriki Olivo) as part of Toby’s Prize, a biennial award made possible by Toby Devan Lewis. About the Artist Jesse Hoffman Jesse Hoffman (b. 1989, San Francisco, CA) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles, CA. Hoffman’s practice is rooted in the examination of the transitional passages of self-acceptance, belonging, and image over time. With a background in performance, still life photography, and commercial set design, Hoffman uses the archive, the object, and the portrait as form. Hoffman’s work lays bare the complication inherent in identity, emphasizing the poignant resilience and fugue in image/world making.

Aawful Aaron by Aaron D. Williams Jul 16-Aug 15, 2021 Aaron D. Williams, A Reinvented Self I , 2021, Alcohol marker and colored pencil on Bristol paper, 17” X 14” Presented in partnership w/ Museum of Creative Human Art and moCa Cleveland Aawful Aaron uses sports as an entry point to assist audiences in more deeply understanding anxiety and mental health struggles. This exhibition destigmatized open conversations about mental health, especially as they relate to black males. Using mainstream sports including basketball and football, and those often overlooked like chess and sword fencing, Aawful Aaron conveys a “game against anxiety” through different lenses with the intention of bringing together a multiplicity of sports fans to appreciate the nuanced ways in which we experience mental health. Presented in partnership w/ About the Artist Aaron D. Williams Aaron D. Williams More about Aaron D. Williams at instagram.com/aawfulaaron .

Honey Pierre Bloodline Mar 18-Apr 17, 2022 Honey Pierre, Morning Juice , 2022. Acrylic, oil, pastel, and yarn. 48 x 62 in. Presented in partnership w/ Museum of Creative Human Art and moCa Cleveland Cassandra Hickey (b. 1993, Cleveland, OH), also known as Honey Pierre, is one of four children from Rhonda Harris. Cassandra has always been interactive in art activities but her real introduction to art was through fashion magazines, which gave her the urge to draw illustrations everyday. From there, Cassandra learned to express herself through art by learning to work with new mediums and techniques. She was encouraged by a local high school teacher, which grew her confidence. Instead of attending college or an institute for the arts, she chose to join the United States Army. For the next three years, Cassandra’s life was dedicated to serving her country. Once the contract was up, she fed her urge to become an artist full time. Moving from Cleveland to Atlanta was a transition but it supported her journey towards more creative outlets. In two years, Cassandra has participated in over 40 art exhibitions and events and is a part of two community based non-profits. She is a mixed media artist whose practice includes murals, textiles, collage, and painting. Presented in partnership w/ Artist Statement Honey Pierre Honey Pierre The women in our lives are given the often-thankless duty of caring for many people, both physically and emotionally, while maintaining a loving, nurturing spirit. It’s obvious to most that a woman will sacrifice her own aspirations in favor of supporting their loved ones. The women in my family– my aunts, grandmother, and mother–have all had an unmatched influence on my life path. They put me in a position to be myself and develop my natural inclination and passion for the arts. They believed I could do anything I aspired to, and this exhibition has been inspired by these very sacrifices. I have created a series of carefully woven Fiber Portraits of each of these highly influential women in my life. Each piece is unique, with a wide spectrum of bright colors while sustaining a motherly warmth. The most important aspect of this exhibit is that it exudes the love and care that has gone into the work. I’d like you to feel at home when experiencing these pieces as I have, the many times I have explored this museum. I am very excited for my art to reach more souls and hope each individual can find solace here in the same way I have.

Studio Access w/ Manabu Ikeda May 18, 2024 Experience the artist create onsite at moCa as he develops a new monumental artwork over the course of the Winter/Spring season. About Experience the artist create onsite at moCa as he develops a new monumental artwork over the course of the Winter/Spring season. Experience the artist create onsite at moCa as he develops a new monumental artwork over the course of the Winter/Spring season.

News + Read more at W Magazine Tuesday, November 29, 2022 by Kat Herriman Photographs by Jesper D. Lund The artist’s college years are the focus of a new exhibition at the ICA Miami. The New York-based artist Nina Chanel Abney punches eyes out one at a time. Her life-size paper dolls don’t seem to mind. They crowd around the ankles of her standing desk, in blank anticipation, patiently waiting for her to finish their faces so they can go on to their destiny as protagonists in her primary-colored collages. Abney points down at the huddle encircling her feet. “It’s a dance scene,” she says. Assembling her dancers requires meticulous choreography. “One millimeter can shift an expression,” Abney says. Despite the precarity, Abney feels at home in this cut-and-paste world. Over the past decade, her figurative collages depicting the lives and stories of Americans like herself—Black, queer, working class individuals—have become a fixture of the art world. Her exuberantly colored paintings, executed with stencils and spray paint, mimic Abney’s collage aesthetic and make me think of artists like Henri Matisse, Kara Walker, and Lari Pittman—but Abney bats away these art-historical touchstones. She says her mother, who is also an artist, is the one responsible for her love of drawing and collaging. “I’ve been cutting and pasting since childhood,” Abney says. “I like the familiarity of it.” Raised in Chicago by her mother, Abney used drawing as a way to connect. In school, she and her sister invited their mostly white classmates to commission portraits of Black celebrities from them. Abney earned a BFA from Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois before heading to Parsons, where she graduated with a masters degree in 2007. In 2008, she participated in the groundbreaking group show 30 Americans at the Rubell Family Collection in Miami, and as the exhibition traveled around the country her exuberant images depicting Black joy and pain began appearing in museums alongside fellow participants like Rashid Johnson, Renée Green, and Kerry James Marshall. In 2017, she had an exhibition with Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, and after that she was featured in monographic museum shows. Abney vibrates on a cultural frequency all her own and has also collaborated to create Air Jordan sneakers, as well as a version of the classic game card Uno. Her most visible pop cultural moment, an album cover created last year for Meek Mill’s Expensive Pain , was a tearful cartoon portrait of the rapper surrounded by nude women, a yacht, a motorcycle, and dollar signs. The ICA Miami exhibition of Nina Chanel Abney: Big Butch Energy, on view during Art Basel, focuses on Abney’s college years, when the artist was less assured in her queer identity and struggled to find a community that reflected the kind of person she wanted to be. An epic shower scene, notably, dwells on the awkwardness and discomfort of forced group dynamics. Abney was attracted to the universality of coming-of-age scenes; she is devoted to mediums freighted with childhood resonance and stories she knows can be found on the tip of the tongue. The conceptual second half of the Miami presentation opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland on January 27. Those works focus instead on the more positive side of Abney’s collegiate experience, and the energy is festive. “Like coming into myself and the celebration,” Abney says. The keystone work here depicts a raucous dance party like the ones Abney would have liked to attend. After the MoCA Cleveland show and a well-deserved break, Abney will be doubling down on her efforts to focus on public art and shift her language into three-dimensional sculptures. She’s not sure what they will look like yet, but she does know she wants those artworks to depict the lives of those unsung in the Western canon and be accessible to the public at all hours. “I always want the viewer to be able to feel like they have a connection with the work and recall some of their own similar experiences,” she says. “I’m good at finding communities that wants their stories told. I don’t feel like there is enough representation of Black masculine-presenting or queer women in media, so if I can bring my experience to life and it inspires others then I feel like I’m doing a good job. In earlier work, I was trying to make the content more ambiguous—now, it’s leaning toward the opposite.” Previous Next

Studio Access w/ Manabu Ikeda Apr 21, 2024 Experience the artist create onsite at moCa as he develops a new monumental artwork over the course of the Winter/Spring season. About Experience the artist create onsite at moCa as he develops a new monumental artwork over the course of the Winter/Spring season. Experience the artist create onsite at moCa as he develops a new monumental artwork over the course of the Winter/Spring season.

Puppies Puppies (Jade Kuriki Olivo) Jan 28-Jun 5, 2022 Puppies Puppies (Jade Kuriki Olivo), One year performing outside (Stonewall)(protests) 2020-2021. Courtesy the artist Puppies Puppies (Jade Kuriki Olivo) is the second recipient of moCa’s biannual Toby’s Prize. Named after philanthropist Toby Devan Lewis—one of moCa’s long-standing Board members—the prize supports the artistic practices of five artists over a 10-year period. Puppies Puppies’s early conceptual works were created under a pseudonym that avoided specificity of gender, origin, and individualism. Beginning in 2018, the artist embarked on a new series of work that coincided with the beginning of her transition to Jade Kuriki Olivo. Throughout her multilayered practice is a commitment to the rights of Black, Indigenous, People of Color, transgender, gender non-conforming, two-spirit+ communities. The artist is the first to share the Toby’s Prize experience, inviting artists Jerome AB and J.J. Adams to create new works for two simultaneous solo exhibitions opening in January 2022. Her project at moCa also includes the development of a new film and the creation of her first publication, published in collaboration with Remai Modern in Saskatoon, Canada, and Kunsthaus Glarus in Switzerland. Toby's Prize is generously supported by Toby Devan Lewis.