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. 

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. 

by Peter Chametzky
Professor of Art History
School of Visual Art and Design
University of South Carolina

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.

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. 

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.