The Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland opened its 2026 winter season on January 30 with four exhibitions that collectively examine humanity’s relationship to nature, Indigenous memory, racial history, and environmental futures. The opening night event at the museum’s Euclid Avenue location drew visitors with a performance by poet Morgan Paige and free admission to all four shows.

The centerpiece of the programming is Ohio NOW: State of Nature, a statewide collaboration with Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center featuring 15 Ohio-based artists. The show incorporates materials drawn directly from the environment — pollutants extracted from local waterways, plant-based dyes derived from lived experience — to address questions of sustainability and food justice. Running alongside it is Sky Hopinka: The Myth Is Now, a body of work in film, photography, and text by artist Sky Hopinka of the Ho-Chunk Nation and Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians, tracing Indigenous cultural identity through memory and language.

The other two exhibitions occupy distinct registers. Artist KING COBRA’s When You Are Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea presents a bisected Great White shark suspended in fluorescent tubing as a memorial to Black Africans forced to choose between enslavement and death during the transatlantic slave trade. Homing Instinct: Letting Go of the Shore, a 26-minute multi-screen science fiction film by Lydia Dean Pilcher based on a short story by writer Dani McClain, imagines a climate-changed future in which two friends face forced relocation from the coast.

Source: FreshWater Cleveland