Liu Wei’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States, Invisible Cities, takes its title from Italian writer Italo Calvino’s novella of the same name. Presented across two institutions (moCa and the Cleveland Museum of Art) and developed in direct response to both spaces’ architecture, Invisible Cities presents a constellation of works that employs abstraction and fragmentation to create new narratives. Like Calvino’s book—an imagined set of conversations between traveler Marco Polo and the emperor of the thirteenth-century Mongol Empire, Kublai Khan—Liu’s work exami
September 13, 2019 — January 5, 2020
September 13, 2019 — January 5, 2020
Every Sunday for the past eighteen years, Byron Kim has taken the time to look upward and capture a portrait of the sky onto a fourteen-by-fourteen-inch canvas. The ongoing series—aptly titled Sunday Paintings—captures the ever-changing colors of our shared sky while simultaneously operating as a record of Kim’s life. In addition to soft washes of color—vibrant blue, stormy gray, wispy white—each painting contains a short rumination on the day or week, which Kim writes directly onto the surface of the canvas, alongside the specific time and place where the painting was created.
April 27, 2019 — January 5, 2020
Catherine Opie’s site-responsive work The Outside-Inside, Installation for moCa Cleveland (2019) reimagines the interior architecture of moCa as a window onto the larger landscape of Lake Erie. Applied directly to the surfaces of moCa’s Gund Commons and Kohl Atrium & Monumental Staircase, Opie’s installation consists of eight different images, each of which was shot in Cleveland as part of a 2011 commission for the Cleveland Clinic.
April 27, 2019 — January 5, 2020
In Louise Lawler’s Birdcalls (1978–81), the names of twenty-nine well-known male artists have been sounded out into birdcalls. Using her own voice, Lawler transforms each artist’s first and last name into a nuanced birdcall, ranging from a shrill squawk to manic chatter.