CLEVELAND.- The Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland presents the exhibit The Persistence of Geometry: Form, Content and Culture in the Collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art through August 20, 2006. This engaging and atypical survey of the permanent collection of The Cleveland Museum of Art uses the common threads of geometric expression to highlight artwork from around the globe and throughout history. Using the opportunity of the closing of The Cleveland Museum of Art for their expansion, MOCA Cleveland and the CMA invited Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims, President of The Studio Museum in Harlem, to curate an exhibition of the CMA's comprehensive collection in MOCA's galleries.

The resulting exhibition, The Persistence of Geometry: Form, Content and Culture in the Collection of The Cleveland Museum of Art, presents paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, ceramics, textiles, utensils and furniture from historic and contemporary cultures worldwide that show how geometric structures and abstract visual vocabularies have communicated meaning throughout history. In the modern era, these geometric forms have served as vehicles for revolutionary distillations of form and narrative and as the foundations for conceptual and social models of new societal values.

During her career as Executive Director of The Studio Museum in Harlem and Curator of 20th century art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Sims developed a series of influential exhibitions addressing issues of multiculturalism and diversity. Continuing this interest, The Persistence of Geometry presents the objects without the hierarchical
positionings that prejudice "high art" over "decoration," or Western art over tribal or primitive creations, reflecting the emergence of diversity and multiculturalism as prominent theoretical modes in art history over the last three decades. Sims has "re-patterned" the usual methods of organizing ideas about art to allow the viewer to recognize the centrality of cultures considered peripheral, and to see how cultures influence and transform each other.

"I didn't want to do the usual 1990s identity-based analysis," she says; instead, she began "following certain visual forms through this collection. My initial intent was to deal with abstraction, but pretty soon I was looking at everything from gourd pots to Jackson Pollock. The experience has demonstrated how geometry is so very much more than what I studied in high school. Until I got immersed in this project I hadn't really been aware of the extent to which geometric forms carry spiritual and cultural meaning."