MOCA's promise to envelop visitors in art will begin before the first guest sets foot inside a gallery. A painting installation by Berlin-based artist Katharina Grosse will climb three stories of the building's interior and flow across the entryway and into the gift shop.
"Looking through the curtain wall of windows from Euclid, you will see this very large painting that stretches over the skin of the interior architecture," says David Norr, MOCA's chief curator. "But when you're walking through the building, you're experiencing those colors up-close. You're walking through fields of color."
The piece is part of the museum's inaugural exhibit, Inside Out and From the Ground Up. On display Oct. 8-Feb. 24, it features works by 16 artists exploring space and the building's architecture.
"We wanted to find a way to present our vision of what we are going to be doing in the future," Norr says. "But we also wanted to think very specifically and deeply about the building itself and how it functions."
In the main gallery, guests will find Brazilian installation artist Henrique Oliveira's cave-like environments created from wood gathered on the streets of São Paulo.
"It becomes the skin for these large cavernous installations that you can walk through and around," Norr says. "Henrique is masterful in building these spaces, but he is also masterful at making them interact with the architecture that exists so they almost become interventions or a kind of parasitic relationship."
The main gallery will also feature works by Cleveland-based photographer Barry Underwood, who staged temporary light installations inside the building during various points in the construction process.
"It has created results that are magical, beautiful and ghostly," Norr says. "[The photos] also represent a moment in time that we will never have back again."
From First Fridays to lunchtime concerts, there are dozens of events already on MOCA's calendar. Here are three we'd suggest putting on yours.
Oct. 18 & 19 //
Daniel Bernard Roumain presents Gilgamesh on the Crooked River: The composer, bandleader and violinist known as DBR fuses genres in his music.
Nov. 29 //
Still/Moving: Groundworks DanceTheater explores the new space with a full-museum event.
Dec. 1 //
Musicircus: American composer and artist John Cage invented the musicircus, amassing as many musicians as possible to simultaneously perform diverse musical scores. MOCA's marks what would have been Cage's 100th birthday.
For a full schedule, visit mocacleveland.org.
Known for his performative installations, this Virginia-based artist will build a laboratorylike environment inside the Toby Devan Lewis Gallery while working in-residence at MOCA. "He is interested in change and decay," says Norr. "He is interested in presence — what an artist's role at the gallery does to an exhibition and audiences."
This commissioned performance project will be captured on HD video and shown in the Cohen Family Gallery. "Kate is known for doing endurance-based performance work," says Norr. "She has a rambunctious, powerful and physical sensibility. ... She brings this kind of consciousness about gender and identity of a woman in our culture."
Created by a collaborative duo from Canada, this video debuted at the Venice Biennale in 2001 and has rarely been seen in the U.S. "It's a piece that uses sound to stretch our perceptional envelope and to make us think that something else is happening, even when it's just sound."
Artists investigate systems of distance and relay — astronomy, art history, familial narratives — and the malleability of time. "The exhibition's title refers to the phenomenon of a dead star's light continuing to travel through space, appearing to a remote viewer long after it has burnt out," says assistant curator Rose Bouthillier.
A look at Cleveland culture by visual artists, musicians and performers with conceptual as well as geographic ties. Co-curator Megan Lykins Reich says the idea is to explore the region "more as an idea of what conceptually is happening in art practice that speaks to something not just about the place, but the sensibility."
