CMA Stories

While we underwent our recent physical transformation, the Columbia Museum of Art staff worked thoughtfully behind the delicate scrim of dust and heavy construction barriers to make five new experience promises to our museum guests. These include being playful and vibrant, and I’m not sure that a single exhibition could hit those points any better than Wow Pop Bliss: Jimmy Kuehnle’s Inflatable Art. Jimmy Kuehnle is a Cleveland-based artist who is a bit of a unicorn. On the one hand he is an instructor, community provocateur, and one of the most serious and professional artists I have ever met...

Mimi Kato: Ordinary Sagas is storytelling that brightly interweaves the fantastical and the everyday in imagined landscapes. The action ranges from falling off a bike in the city to epic battles in the woods. Ultra-contemporary and also based on historical Japanese painting, this exhibition is food for the senses and for the brain. I am excited about the different kinds of conversations Kato’s work sparks about culture, humor, landscape, memory, feminism, theater, human activity, and control. At first glance, Kato’s work confronts the viewer with an overload of visual information. This is due...

The CMA went through extensive renovations in 2018 to provide more galleries, more studios, more spaces for programs, and a new entrance on Main Street. As you can imagine, it was quite a lot of work to protect priceless works of art during the construction! Read on for a behind-the-scenes look at what was involved in this massive transformation.

by Peter Chametzky Professor of Art History School of Visual Art and Design University of South Carolina Hello, Old Friend! It’s a wonderful surprise to see Willi Baumeister’s Cosmic Gesture in the CMA’s new installation. First spotted at the preview by my lynx-eyed art historian wife, Susan Felleman, my first sideways glance elicited a premature misattribution: Joan Miró. But no, Miró hangs next to his German friend’s silkscreen print, and beside Miró a work by their common Alsatian/Swiss friend Jean/Hans Arp. Having written my Ph.D. dissertation and various articles and book chapters on...

For more than two decades, The Contemporaries of the Columbia Museum of Art have helped the museum acquire numerous works for its collection. The two pillars of those efforts — Dale Chihuly’s Untitled (Chandelier) and Henry Mandell’s Tatara Fire, both of which were specifically commissioned by the Contemporaries — sit prominently on display in the museum’s upper atrium. In June 2018, the Contemporaries trekked to New York to visit with the artist who was then working on the next piece to join the CMA collection. Daniel Rozin creates interactive digital art, crafting installations and sculpture...

Arts education is important to us here at the Columbia Museum of Art, and we are always happy to work with partners like the University of South Carolina’s Media Arts department to help support creative educational endeavors and projects. So when USC Instructor (and my former professor) Jen Tarr reached out on behalf of her Narrative Production students in need of a location to make their short film, I was excited by the opportunity to host these students at the museum for their shoot. On a quiet Monday in March, a group of young filmmakers-in-training took over our Lobby to create their film...

Have you ever come to Arts & Draughts at the CMA? Have you ever drawn on the walls in the Loft with chalk while it was still an unfinished space? If you have, you can probably technically tell your friends that your art is being preserved on the walls in an art museum. Well, not so much on them as in them. When putting up the drywall in the Loft, there was really no reason to remove the chalk from the cinderblock before framing out the space. So, the metal went up with your drawings still right there and the drywall was hung. Come see our new flexible event space in the Loft next time you...

Representatives of the CMA were thrilled to visit the White House on June 1, 2016, to receive the National Medal from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. First Lady Michelle Obama presented the award to executive director Karen Brosius and community member Joyce-Rose Harris. This prestigious award is the nation’s highest honor given to museums and libraries for service to their communities.