Drawing from the permanent collection at the Cleveland Museum of Art in Ohio, Currents and Constellations: Black Art in Focus aims to highlight work by Black artists but also to start a dialogue with all visitors about artists of color. 
Richard Hunt, Forms Carried Aloft, No. 2, 1960. Brazed and welded steel, 50½ in. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Contemporary Collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art, 1962.52. © Richard Hunt.
The exhibition’s curator, Key Jo Lee, director of academic affairs and associate curator of American art, says the idea for the show has been building in her mind for many years, but some of it developed just from watching visitors at the museum. “As I would stop into the gallery, I would ask guests what work they thought was produced by a Black artist, and unless there was a Black figure presented in the work, they would not be able to guess. They would assume that most of the work was by European white men,” Lee says, adding that she asked the question not to belittle or shame guests, but to start a discussion. “Whether they’re at their most valorous or villainous, wealthy or impoverished…no matter who is there I just want to demonstrate that Black and brown people exist even when we don’t see them.”
Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012), Two Generations, 1979. Lithograph, 22¼ x 30 in. The Cleveland Museum of Art, the Harold T. Clark Educational Extension Fund, 1982.1011. © Catlett Mora Family Trust / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.
Currents and Constellations will feature 25 objects from 19 artists, including works by Sanford Biggers, Elizabeth Catlett, Richard Hunt, Dawoud Bey, Lorna Simpson, Jack Whitten, Darius Steward, Kenturah Davis, Mario Moore, and Torkwase Dyson, among others—“thus placing Black American art and artists,” Lee says, “at the center of a conversation about the relevance of art to life and the relevance of art history to contemporary artists.”
The exhibition also comes at an important time after the 2020 murder of George Floyd and the subsequent protesting and activism that followed. Cleveland was itself part of this narrative at an earlier point when, in 2014, 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot and killed by a police officer while holding a toy gun. “A lot of people are grappling with what happens next. So we want to place Black art in the center of an art historical context, but it also inspires another question with art historical lineage and where do you break it apart and make something new,” Lee says. “So this space is going to be a space for contemplation, to think about the different approaches that Black artists might take, and then also art canon.”
Jack Whitten (1939-2018), Rho I, 1977. Acrylic on canvas, 82 x 84 in. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of Scott C. Mueller and Margaret Fulton Mueller, 2010.1. © Jack Whitten.
As an example, Lee mentions the work of Catlett, who is represented in the show by a work made about 10 years after the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and how aspects once thought to be fixed—voting rights, Roe v. Wade and other social issues—are now being undone again for a new generation. “I think more people are paying attention to what is happening, and they’re slipping more and more nuance into their popular conversations, which is good,” she says. “People are just wanting to unstick the stickiness, because these conversations have been happening for a long time, maybe not in public view.”
What Currents and Constellations is doing is allowing art to help make those conversations more public.
The exhibition opens February 20 and continues through June 26 in Cleveland. —
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