Key Jo Lee
Associate Curator of American Art
Cleveland Museum of Art
Cleveland, OH • www.clevelandart.org

What event (gallery show, museum exhibit, etc.) in the next few months are you looking forward to, and why?
I’m really excited to see Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces, organized by Thomas Jean Lax and Lilia Rocio Taboada, that’s opening at MoMA in October. I’m very keen to see how they are able to translate a sense of place and the importance of relationality that drove JAM gallery, and which fuels its legacy.

What are you reading?
I’m reading about the biology of seeing art, or how the eye and brain process an artwork, because just as I’m interested in how the materiality of an artwork contributes to its meaning, I’m also interested in how the architecture of the body shapes our experiences of artworks.

Interesting exhibit, gallery opening or work of art you’ve seen recently.
We’ve recently acquired Untitled (1958), by Beauford Delaney, at the Cleveland Museum of Art and it is a gorgeous example of the artist’s skill with color and texture. Pictures cannot do justice to the painting’s luminosity; each shift in light transforms its surface.

What are you researching at the moment?
Right now, I’m focused on the life and art of Beauford Delaney—particularly his inspirations and community in Paris. Delaney left the United States in 1953 in search of greater personal and creative freedom. His life there was shaped by light and dark, both literally and figuratively, and his paintings—especially his abstracts—began to flourish.

What is your dream exhibit to curate? Or see someone else curate?
What an enormous question! There are so many, but one that recurs is an exhibition that deeply examines the “dark-side” of the Janus-faced sublime in American landscape painting. I would consider how enlightenment notions of darkness and danger, and their entanglements with ideas of race and inferiority, elided the liberatory potential of the tenebrous sublime.

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