Past Exhibitions | Columbia Museum of Art

February 18, 2023 - May 14, 2023

Reverent Ornament: Art from the Islamic World

Comprising works of fine glassware, ceramics, metalwork, painting, weaponry, weaving, and much more, Reverent Ornament shares timeless Islamic treasures that celebrate everyday life, history, and culture in Iran, Egypt, India, Syria, and Turkey.

January 21, 2023 - May 21, 2023

Our Own Work, Our Own Way: Ascendant Women Artists in the Johnson Collection

This exhibition brings together 42 women artists of the 20th century who had connections to the South — including Emma Amos, Beverly Buchanan, Elaine de Kooning, Zelda Fitzgerald, Gwendolyn Knight, and Columbia’s own Laura Spong — while shining a spotlight on several other regional artists.

October 19, 2022 - April 2, 2023

Forward Together: African American Art from the Judy and Patrick Diamond Collection

This exhibition highlights a selection of works by African American artists, drawn from the esteemed collection of Judy and Patrick Diamond. The works on view here — by artists such as Benny Andrews, Romare Bearden, and Jacob Lawrence — touch on a variety of themes relating to African American life, history, and humanity.

October 14, 2022 - January 22, 2023

The Art of Elizabeth Catlett: From the Collection of Samella Lewis

This exhibition featuring 30 prints and sculptures celebrates artist Elizabeth Catlett and honors a half-century of her artistic activism in support of women, African Americans, and Mexican laborers.

October 1, 2022 - January 1, 2023

European Splendors: Highlights from the Kress Collection

European Splendors offers a chance to re-experience the CMA’s Kress Collection — largely off view since 2017 — in a luxurious new way. It includes an exciting arc of Italian art from the late medieval to the Baroque period shown alongside apothecary mortars and furniture pieces.

June 29, 2022 - October 16, 2022

Sigmund Abeles: Shades of Life

Throughout his career, Sigmund Abeles (b. 1934) has maintained a commitment to realism. Though an accomplished painter and sculptor, Abeles has long been active as a printmaker. His graphic work demonstrates a uniquely intimate approach to figural subjects as well as remarkable draftsmanship. Drawn entirely from the CMA Collection, this selection of works on paper explores the artist’s perceptive renderings of daily life.

June 18, 2022 - October 2, 2022

Amanda McCavour: Bright Little Day Stars

Poet Martha Lavinia Hoffman describes flowers as “bright little day stars scattered all over the earth.” Artist Amanda McCavour lifts those stars up into the air in this exhibition, creating hovering constellations of colorful flora.

June 11, 2022 - September 4, 2022

In the Shadow of Monet: Giverny and American Impressionism

American artists traveled to Giverny and home again for four decades at the turn of the 20th century, transforming the American art scene. This exhibition features over 40 artists, including Giverny Colony founders Willard Metcalf and Theodore Wendel, as well as Richard Edward Miller, Lilla Cabot Perry, John Singer Sargent, Mary Fairchild MacMonnies, and Guy Rose.

March 16, 2022 - June 26, 2022

Richard Tuttle: Loose-Leaf Notebook Drawings

An important post-Minimalist artist, Richard Tuttle (b. 1941) began working in the 1960s when Minimalism emerged as a major art movement. These humble notebook pages, softly marked with watercolor gestures, are like stray thoughts caught in midair, quiet haikus, or restrained fireworks.

February 19, 2022 - May 29, 2022

Anila Quayyum Agha: Let A Million Flowers Bloom

Pakistani American artist Anila Quayyum Agha’s immersive installations upend traditional ideas about sculpture. Brilliantly lit from within, they cast their own images onto the walls around them like lanterns and create intricate patterns that dance over visitors as they move through the exhibition.

February 19, 2022 - May 15, 2022

Rodin: Contemplation and Dreams

Auguste Rodin saw the body as an envelope for the human spirit. The poses of his figures and the flickering surfaces of the modeled forms capture the human condition in all of its elation and anguish.

December 2, 2021 - May 22, 2022

22 South Carolinians

Many artists call South Carolina home, carrying with them connections to a place that has had an indelible influence on their creative practices. Taking inspiration from the featured fall exhibition 30 Americans, 22 South Carolinians highlights remarkable Black artists who have been shaped by their experiences in South Carolina, revealing unique portraits of creativity, culture, and visual storytelling.

October 21, 2021 - March 13, 2022

Michael Kenna: Venezia

While there are millions of travel photographs of Venice in existence, artist photographer Michael Kenna infuses his with distinct magic. Prowling the city while it sleeps, he shoots in black and white. His long, extended exposures drink in the electric lights and add a blurry quality at times, capturing the buoyancy of gondolas rocking gently on the water. Elsewhere, stone sculptures twist lithely in their architectural niches.

October 9, 2021 - January 17, 2022

30 Americans

30 Americans features an incredible “Who’s Who” list from among the most acclaimed Black artists of our time, including Nick Cave, Glenn Ligon, Lorna Simpson, Mickalene Thomas, and Kehinde Wiley.

July 15, 2021 - October 17, 2021

Soup to Nuts: Pop Art Prints from the CMA Collection

Fresh from the CMA vault, these Pop Art prints come from the transformational decade between 1966 and 1976. Andy Warhol, Marisol, Edward Ruscha, Robert Indiana, and others on view were relatable, young, witty, even glamorously gimmicky.

July 3, 2021 - September 12, 2021

The Ironic Curtain: Art from the Soviet Underground

The Ironic Curtain features artists who worked under political repression in the decades just before the fall of the Soviet Union, making “official” art by day and their own experimental art in secret.

July 3, 2021 - November 21, 2021

Hindsight 20/20

Taking inspiration from the streets and corners of our communities, Hindsight 20/20 features five photographers of the Carolinas who set out not only to document the extraordinary events of 2020, but also to capture these moments through the eye of an artist.

April 1, 2021 - July 11, 2021

Assembly Required: Collage from the CMA Collection

Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque famously “invented” collage as a fine art in the 1910s, and it is a particularly playful art form. Artists can arrange and affix paper, fabric, photos, and other found ephemera to a surface — the results ranging from purely abstract form to a collision of deliberate messages. This exhibition showcases hidden gems by little-known artists, favorites by art world titans, and recent acquisitions.

March 15, 2021 - June 13, 2021

Art of Healing 2021

In Art of Healing student-artists reflect on what it means to cope and make meaning during life’s most challenging moments, in particular the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

February 6, 2021 - June 6, 2021

The Imaginative Worlds of M.C. Escher

M. C. Escher's mind-bending prints include subjects like infinite staircases, tessellating birds changing into fish and back again, and two hands drawing each other. In this exhibition you will see his best-known prints as well as lesser-known works, spanning his entire career from his earliest print to his final masterpiece.

January 30, 2021 - June 6, 2021

Pressing Voices

South Carolina has been home to an impressive array of printmakers creating works in a diverse range of styles. Pressing Voices brings together a group of artists showcasing styles and stories that illustrate how a centuries-old artistic process continues to inspire and endure. Pressing Voices is a companion show to the exhibition The Imaginative Worlds of M.C. Escher.

January 9, 2021 - March 28, 2021

Kristina Rogers: Memento Mori

Kristina Rogers (1945–2011) believed all photographs were memento mori — traces and reminders of things already lost. Studying art in London in the early 1960s, she fell under the spell of 19th-century Romanticism and leaned into its poetic sense of the macabre throughout her career. Rogers went on to build complex photographic images, visiting museums and incorporating great works of art into her dreamily layered images for decades.

October 17, 2020 - January 10, 2021

Visions from India

Visions from India presents a breathtaking sweep of 21st-century painting, sculpture, and multimedia works from India and its diaspora.

October 10, 2020 - January 10, 2021

Island Nations / Lands Divided

Sara Schneckloth uses drawing to question how science, imagination, and the body inform one another. The works in this exhibition combine the visual languages of biology and geology into mixed-media drawings.

August 28, 2020 - January 3, 2021

The Mind of a Renaissance Man: A Celebration of Dr. Randy Mack

The Mind of a Renaissance Man: A Celebration of Dr. Randy Mack focuses on the life and generosity of Charles Randall Mack. His connection with the museum began in 1970, and over the course of three decades he not only shared his expertise, including writing many of the essays in the CMA’s Renaissance art catalogue, but he and his family also donated over 135 art works to the collection, ranging from Renaissance pieces to contemporary works on paper and photography to Bunzlauer ceramics.

July 25, 2020 - September 26, 2020

Anima: The Essence of Blacknuss

Anima: The Essence of Blacknuss is a community companion show to the exhibition Black Is Beautiful and features the photography of Columbia creative Dalvin “Mustafa” Spann.

July 18, 2020 - September 13, 2020

Design by Time

Cutting-edge international designers explore how objects can embody the element of time in this poetic exhibition. Garments that grow, trees that sing, and objects that become their own miniature worlds encapsulate nature’s growth and decay.

June 27, 2020 - September 6, 2020

Black Is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Brathwaite

In the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, Kwame Brathwaite used photography to popularize the political slogan “Black Is Beautiful.” This exhibition — the first ever dedicated to Brathwaite’s remarkable career — tells the story of a key figure of the second Harlem Renaissance.

May 1, 2020 - August 23, 2020

Kitchen Originals: 1950s Dish Towel Designs by John and Earline Brice

This collection comes from California-based writer Sarah Horowitz, who saw in a single kitchen towel something worthy of study. This is also a story of home furnishing designers John and Earline Kimbrell Brice, whose dish towel designs helped “this business to skyrocket” in the 1950s.

February 15, 2020 - May 17, 2020

It’s Alive! Classic Horror and Sci-Fi Art from the Kirk Hammett Collection

Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett has put together one of the world’s most comprehensive collections of horror and sci-fi art. It’s Alive features more than 100 pieces including posters, toys, guitars, masks, and sculptures, many hailing back to the days of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi.

February 6, 2020 - July 5, 2020

TRIBE: A Celebration of South Carolina Hip-Hop Culture

TRIBE examines the fluid story of Hip-Hop culture in South Carolina along with the shaping of the art form’s national identity, spanning four decades of historical events and individual contributions from around the state.

January 3, 2020 - April 26, 2020

Notes from the Underground

The designers of these posters created complicated visual experiences with image mashups and vibrating color combinations. This was an intentionally dense style, distinct from the easy-to-read marketing of New York’s Madison Avenue advertising firms.

October 4, 2019 - January 12, 2020

Van Gogh and His Inspirations

Van Gogh and His Inspirations, presented by The Blanchard Family, is an original exhibition organized by the CMA that brings the work of one of the most beloved artists in the world to Columbia, South Carolina.

October 4, 2019 - January 12, 2020

En Plein Air: Scenes of South Carolina

Celebrating the tradition and style of plein air painting seen in Van Gogh and His Inspirations, this invitational exhibition features painters from around South Carolina whose work is as unique and diverse as the state’s landscape.

September 6, 2019 - December 29, 2019

Seeing Through the Layers

Maryanna Williams’ imagery creates a dialogue between simple forms and intricate patterns. Close up and filling the picture plane, her subjects shift between realism and abstraction.

July 2, 2019 - September 15, 2019

Indie Grits Lower Richland StoryLab: Places of Freedom

These works were born of the Lower Richland StoryLab: Places of Freedom, a year-long in-school media program that focuses on the issues faced by rural communities in and around Hopkins, South Carolina, in the 21st century.

June 15, 2019 - September 8, 2019

Mimi Kato: Ordinary Sagas

Mimi Kato draws on the rich history and visual traditions of Japanese culture as well as the absurd everyday elements of contemporary life and merges them in imaginary landscapes.

June 15, 2019 - September 8, 2019

Wow Pop Bliss: Jimmy Kuehnle's Inflatable Art

For this exhibition, Kuehnle is filling four special exhibition galleries with touchable, interactive environments using inflatables that combine sound, light, space, and texture to create unexpected experiences for visitors as they move under, through, and around these works.

May 1, 2019 - September 1, 2019

Latinidad: Latin American Art from the Collection

This exhibition features 20 rarely seen gems from the collection made between the 1950s and early 1990s by artists born in Chile, Cuba, Mexico, and Puerto Rico.

April 4, 2019 - June 23, 2019

Shades of Greene: The Art of Sanford Greene

Exploring his versatility as an artist and illustrator, this exhibition also features Greene’s newest series Bitter Root, an epic tale about a family of monster hunters set in the Harlem Renaissance.

March 8, 2019 - May 19, 2019

A Life with Art

Dwight and Sue Emanuelson have generously given artworks to the CMA for 35 years, and this sweeping four-gallery exhibition celebrates the couple’s ardent engagement with art and artists.

February 15, 2019 - April 26, 2019

Our Voice: Celebrating the Coretta Scott King Illustrator Awards

Our Voice: Celebrating the Coretta Scott King Illustrator Awards brings together winners and honorees from 1974 to 2018.

December 5, 2018 - May 19, 2019

Jackson Pollock: Mural

Jackson Pollock’s 20-foot-wide Mural changed the destiny of modern art. Not only did it catapult Pollock into the spotlight, it also brought audacious new scale and experimentation to abstract expressionism.

November 16, 2018 - February 24, 2019

Midcentury Masters: Jasper Johns’ Gifts to the CMA

In 1999, Jasper Johns gave the CMA 39 works from his personal collection. Some are by Johns himself; others are by artists he admired, like Josef Albers, Marcel Duchamp, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol.

August 17, 2018 - October 28, 2018

The Big Art of Katie Pell

Katie Pell embraces the beauty in imperfection and the humor in insecurities, welcoming the downtrodden and enveloping them affectionately in oversized art.

August 17, 2018 - October 28, 2018

Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto's Time Exposed is a haunting portfolio of images that offer a primordial, nonlinear sense of time.