CLEVELAND, OH.- Featured Exhibitions

Takashi Murakami: Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow
May 18–September 7, 2025
The Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation Exhibition Hall and Gallery

Discover an incredible new exhibition of works from the Japanese artist known for his unique style that simultaneously honors the rich tradition of Japanese art and deploys the cultural energies of anime, manga, otaku, and kawaii in singular contemporary artworks. Visitors can explore how—after shared historical events and trauma—art can address crisis, healing, outrage, and escapist fantasy. In addition to works more than 30-feet wide on view, the centerpiece of the exhibition is the recreation of the Yumedono or Dream Hall from the Horyuji Temple complex in Nara, Japan, in the CMA’s magnificent atrium space. The museum’s deep holdings of Japanese art lead you even more profoundly into the exhibition’s original themes. Originating at the Broad in Los Angeles, the exhibition, Takashi Murakami: Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow, is presented with expanded scope at the Cleveland Museum of Art.


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Renaissance to Runway: The Enduring Italian Houses
November 9, 2025–February 26, 2026
The Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation Exhibition Hall

The medium of fashion undeniably addresses ideas that transcend time. Through the majestic creations of more than 100 modern and contemporary Italian fashions and accessories in dialogue with Italian fine, decorative, and textile arts from the 1400s to the early 1600s, Renaissance to Runway examines the art historical inspirations that fuel recent creative Italian lexicon, expanding fantasies of the Renaissance, Mannerist, and early Baroque periods.

More than 500 years ago, families, or “houses,” who ruled the states across the Italian peninsula, such as the Medici of Florence and the Sforza of Milan, used fashion as a form of power and influence, from dictating fashionable styles that were immortalized through painted portraits to controlling textile production as a form of currency. Conversely, since the turn of the 1900s, rising Italian fashion companies, also called “houses,” have been founded by prolific individuals and families who dominate global style with unmatched design craftsmanship, quality fabrics, and enthralling aesthetics. From Versace and Valentino to Ferragamo and Capucci, these houses have interpreted Italian early modern aesthetics to develop fresh perspectives throughout the fashion landscape.

This exhibition illustrates how fashion, in all its change, is a continuous thread that uncovers history’s complexities as it materializes contemporary beauty.

Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior
February 14–June 8, 2025
Julia and Larry Pollock Focus Gallery | Gallery 010

Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior premiered to international acclaim as a Collateral Event during the 60th International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia—a globally significant platform for contemporary art—at the Palazzo Soranzo van Axel. Following this presentation, complementary iterations of the exhibition are on view concurrently in Ohio at the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) and Cincinnati Art Museum (CAM) beginning on February 14, 2025.

The exhibition, the largest and most comprehensive presentation of the artist’s career, explores Sikander’s role as an American artist, a Pakistani artist, a Muslim artist, a feminist artist, and—perhaps most significantly—a global citizen engaging with a disrupted historical narrative. The CMA presentation of Collective Behavior focuses on Sikander’s art in relation to historical South Asian works from the museum’s collection that have inspired her. It carries forward in time the rich histories that are encompassed in the CMA’s renowned South Asian collection, while situating contemporary artistic practice in relation to the global history that precedes it.

Newly Announced

Kelli Connell: Pictures for Charis
January 26–May 25, 2025
Mark Schwartz and Bettina Katz Photography Galleries | Gallery 230

American photographer Kelli Connell reconsiders the relationship between writer Charis Wilson and photographer Edward Weston by weaving together the story of their romance with that of her own relationship with her partner at the time, Betsy Odom. Weston’s figure studies and landscapes from 1934–45 are juxtaposed with photographs that Connell created with Odom between 2008 and 2022 at sites where Wilson and Weston lived, made art, and spent time together.

Karamu Artists Inc.: Printmaking, Race, and Community
March 23–August 17, 2025
James and Hanna Bartlett Prints and Drawings Galleries | Galleries 101A–B

Printmaking played a groundbreaking role at Cleveland’s Karamu House, one of the best-known sites for Black American culture. This exhibition brings together more than 50 prints created by Karamu Artists Inc.—including works by Elmer W. Brown, Hughie Lee-Smith, Charles Sallée, and William E. Smith—a group that came together over a shared interest in the democratic possibilities of the graphic arts.

Refocusing Photography: China at the Millennium
June 8–November 16, 2025
Mark Schwartz and Bettina Katz Photography Galleries | Gallery 230

This exhibition presents eight artists who, working in a newly individualistic and consumerist China around 2000, helped bring photography to the foreground in Chinese contemporary art. Dissolving the boundaries between photography, performance art, and conceptual art, they produced artworks that addressed their country’s swift societal transformation and their own resultant shift in identity as Chinese.

Rose Iron Works: From Art Nouveau to Art Deco
July 6–October 19, 2025
Julia and Larry Pollock Focus Gallery | Gallery 010

In the early 1900s, as Cleveland experienced rapid economic growth and the expansion of its iron and steel industries, Hungarian ornamental blacksmith Martin Rose moved to the city and founded Rose Iron Works. It soon became one of the leading manufacturers of decorative metalwork in the United States. Trained in Budapest and Vienna in the Art Nouveau tradition, Rose was interested in artistic and technological innovations. In 1925, a groundbreaking international exhibition in Paris presented modern decorative arts—a style that later became known as Art Deco. Rose’s compatriot and a designer active in Paris, Paul Feher joined the Rose company in Cleveland a few years later. Their artistic collaboration resulted in some of the best Art Deco ironwork in the country, including the celebrated Muse with Violin Screen (1930), now in the CMA’s collection. This exhibition explores Rose’s transition from Art Nouveau to Art Deco, focuses on his 1930s commissions, and places his work in the European context. It also emphasizes the importance of Rose Iron Works, a family-run Cleveland company that for 120 years has been adorning some of the city’s most notable buildings.

In Vino Veritas (In Wine, Truth)
September 7–January 11, 2026
James and Hanna Bartlett Prints and Drawings Galleries | Galleries 101A–B

For millennia, wine has played a significant role not only in the human diet but also in cultural myths, rituals, and festivities. As a result, wine—its ingredients, making, drinking, and effects on the human body and mind—has been a constant muse for artistic creation. The exhibition In Vino Veritas (In Wine, Truth), a phrase coined by the Roman polymath Pliny the Elder, celebrates the presence and meaning of wine in prints, drawings, textiles, and objects made in Europe between 1450 and 1800. Drawn from the museum’s collection, more than 70 works by artists from throughout Europe explore wine’s myths, symbols, and stories. These images reveal how diverse cultures and religions ascribed meaning and transformational properties to the so-called nectar of the gods.

Filippino Lippi and Rome
November 21, 2025–February 22, 2026
Julia and Larry Pollock Focus Gallery | Gallery 010

Filippino Lippi and Rome reconsiders the impact of the painter’s time in the Eternal City, juxtaposing Filippino’s Roman artworks with their Florentine precursors and successors. The exhibition places 20 paintings, drawings, and antiquities in direct conversation. These related artworks are brought together for the first time, and numerous paintings are reunited with their studies. Each object has been carefully selected to elucidate the evolution of Filippino’s artistic practice before, during, and after his Roman period. The Cleveland Museum of Art’s seminal tondo by Filippino, The Holy Family with Saint John the Baptist and Saint Margaret, is the focal point of the exhibition. Likely commissioned by Cardinal Oliviero Carafa while Filippino was frescoing the cardinal’s chapel, this important painting is the only known independent work produced by the artist in Rome. Filippino Lippi and Rome traces the arc of Filippino’s career across time and media, constituting a unique opportunity for scholars and the public alike to discover the artistic processes and iconographic ingenuities of a preeminent Renaissance painter.

Expressively American: Printed Silks, 1927–1947
November 2, 2025–November 8, 2026
Arlene M. and Arthur S. Holden Gallery | Gallery 234

Between the late 1920s and late 1940s, the US was a leader in printed silk. This exhibition showcases printed silks in the CMA’s collection from four American companies—Stehli Silks, H. R. Mallinson & Co., Silks Beau Monde, and Onondaga Silk Company.

Ann Hamilton: The Tactile Image
December 14, 2025–March 29, 2026
Mark Schwartz and Bettina Katz Photography Galleries | Gallery 230

Internationally renowned artist Ann Hamilton is best known for large-scale ephemeral installations, performances, and civic monuments, but the use of photography and video runs throughout her 35-year career and has become increasingly important to her practice over the past decade. This exhibition juxtaposes past works with new creations, including some related to the museum and its collections. Explored in all this work is the relationship between touch, sight, and language. Hamilton’s interest in tactility recalls her origins as a textile artist. A central theme of her practice is the connection between feeling, understanding, and sensory experience, especially touch.



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