COLUMBUS, OH.- The Columbus Museum of Art presents Clare Rojas: Returning, the first major hometown exhibition of Columbus-born artist Clare Rojas. On view from September 18, 2026 through February 7, 2027, the exhibition is curated by Anna Katherine Brodbeck, Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs, and brings together more than 70 works made over the past fifteen years.
A painter, sculptor, installation artist, and musician, Rojas has built a cross-disciplinary practice that bridges abstraction, folk imagery, feminism, ecology, spirituality, music, and storytelling. Born and raised in Columbus, Rojas spent much of her career in Northern California before recently returning to Ohio. Returning considers this homecoming not only as a geographic event, but as a metaphor for cycles of memory, selfhood, and renewal—themes that have long animated her work.
At CMA, the exhibition reflects the museum’s commitment to presenting nationally recognized artists with deep ties to Ohio, and to illuminating how local histories, communities, and landscapes shape broader cultural conversations. For Columbus audiences, Returning offers an opportunity to encounter Rojas’ work through the lens of the place where her life and imagination first took root, while tracing how themes of connection and growth recur across her practice.
“I am honored to work on Clare Rojas’ first exhibition in her hometown, which explores the rich resonances of coming home to not only a place, but to oneself,” says Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs Anna Katherine Brodbeck. “We look forward to sharing an exhibition that allows audiences to move through her work in an intuitive and personal way.”
Rather than offering a linear retrospective, Returning is organized non-chronologically, unfolding through thematic groupings which trace the recurring motifs, symbolic languages, and narrative structures that reappear across Rojas’ practice. Across painting, sculpture, works on paper and performance, archetypal forms drawn from nature—birds, moons, suns, tides, flowers, and landscapes—appear and reappear throughout the exhibition. These symbols reflect the internal states of both maker and viewer, inspiring kinship with the natural world and evoking shared rhythms of destruction and growth, death and birth.
The exhibition begins with abstracted imagery that references universal and ancestral origins. Drawing from forms with both natural and cultural resonances, these works often call to mind motifs connected to Rojas’ Peruvian heritage. From there, the exhibition expands outward into narrative works that draw from portraiture and landscape. A keen observer of relationships, Rojas often depicts figures alone, with a partner, or within family units, shaped by the dramas and intimacy of daily life. As the exhibition progresses, landscape and animals become their own protagonists, representing wisdom and refuge as well as conflict and destruction. The final paintings evoke a homecoming, bringing together domestic dwellings, Midwestern landscapes, and migratory birds, completing a life cycle that takes us back to the beginning.
This sense of return is also rooted in the landscapes that have shaped Rojas’ life and work. The artist draws a visual connection between the flat horizon line of the Ohio heartland and the low coastal horizon of Northern California. Since returning to Columbus, she has planted California poppies in her garden and formed bonds with a new pack of crows that reminded her of the animal neighbors of her former home. Birds, who travel back and forth long distances in the borderless skies, abound throughout the exhibition as symbols of departure and return.
As a songwriter and musician, Rojas brings a lyrical approach to storytelling that resonates throughout the show. For the opening, Rojas will perform as Peggy Honeywell for the first time in over a decade. While she has continued to write songs and poetry throughout that time, this performance marks a return to sharing that work publicly, making a connection between visual and sonic modes of meaning-making.
“This exhibition recognizes the larger significance of an artist who has continually expanded the boundaries of narrative abstraction and feminist image-making,” says Brooke A. Minto, Executive Director and CEO of the Columbus Museum of Art. “We see Returning as a defining opportunity to bring one of Columbus’s important artistic voices into fuller view, and to consider how her work speaks to both intimate and widely shared experiences.”
Clare Rojas: Returning invites audiences to experience the artist’s work across visual art, music, and performance, and to consider how place and time shape an evolving creative practice. Additional details about related programs and opening events will be announced in advance of the exhibition.
