CMA galleries are temporarily closed for a lighting update project. We are still open for events and rentals, and will begin reopening galleries on May 24 with Sam Gilliam: Printmaker. Learn more about the project here.
October 5, 2024 - January 5, 2025
Realism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Symbolism, Fauvism, Cubism, and Surrealism are represented in remarkable examples by the era’s leading artists, including Paul Cézanne, Marc Chagall, Camille Corot, Edgar Degas, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, and more.
July 23, 2024 - January 20, 2025
In intimate images exploring love, loss, faith, and family, Constantine Manos prompts reflection on the nature of human relationships and the connections between land and labor.
June 15, 2024 - September 8, 2024
From natural wonders to the open road, the landscape has long been a muse in American art. (Un)Settled questions the shaping of national identity through objects from the colonial era to present. The variety of media and makers helps to redefine whose view is considered and expands on landscape’s relevance and resonance in art. This is one in a series of American art exhibitions created through a multi-year, multi-institutional partnership formed by the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art as part of the Art Bridges Cohort Program.
February 17, 2024 - May 12, 2024
Over the course of his career, Darrel Ellis developed a distinct studio practice that merged the formal vocabularies of drawing, photography, painting, and printmaking to redefine Black male identity and family within the constructs of art history and mainstream culture.
Interior Lives engages notions of how our spaces affect us from both material and psychological perspectives. Presenting works by William Merritt Chase, Hilda Belcher, Luigi Lucioni, Theresa Pollak, and many others, the exhibition investigates domesticity, class, labor, and the complexities of modern life.
November 18, 2023 - July 7, 2024
This exhibition showcases the remarkable moments of a designer who fell in love with fashion at 4 years old while living in Ridgeway, South Carolina, and has become one of the biggest names in the industry. Sergio Hudson’s high-profile clients include Michelle Obama, Serena Williams, Rihanna, Kamala Harris, Kendall Jenner, Issa Rae, Rachel Brosnahan, and Keke Palmer, a close friend whom he has called a muse.
October 7, 2023 - January 21, 2024
Rendez-Vous offers a rare glimpse into the life and mind of one of the most renowned fashion designers of our era, Lee Alexander McQueen. This exhibition features key garments from McQueen's most celebrated fashion collections along with photographer Ann Ray's intimate portraits and behind-the-scenes photographs of McQueen's runway shows, taken over the course of their 13-year friendship.
June 10, 2023 - September 3, 2023
For over 40 years, Tina Williams Brewer has created quilts that tell stories of vision and grace. Her work incorporates unique fabrics and inspirations drawn from her travels, including time spent at St. Helena Island in South Carolina. The resulting vibrant, hand-stitched quilts explore themes relating to African diasporic history, spirituality, migration, and shared heritage.
Featuring a range of arts and artists of the Catawba Nation from 1973 to present, this exciting exhibition centers around Catawba pottery, the oldest continuous ceramics tradition in North America, dating back thousands of years. Basketry, quilt works, and photography round out the exhibition to showcase the living traditions of Catawba arts, culture, and heritage.
April 7, 2023 - October 22, 2023
Born in Columbia to Greek immigrant parents in 1934, Constantine Manos traveled to Greece in the early 1960s, where he photographed the everyday lives of villagers over a period of three years.
March 25, 2023 - June 30, 2024
These installations highlight the stories behind singular objects, one from each of four museums, through an in-depth presentation of its artistic, social, and historical frameworks.
March 2, 2023 - September 3, 2023
Inspired by veterans from across North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, Bullets and Bandaids: A Veteran Anthology features stories and art that look at returning home after war to the newly unfamiliar “normalcy” of civilian life after the chaos of combat, asking: “What is my next step?”
February 18, 2023 - May 14, 2023
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
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
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
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 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
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
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
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
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 15, 2022
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.
February 19, 2022 - May 29, 2022
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.
December 2, 2021 - May 22, 2022
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
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 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
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 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
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
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
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
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
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 (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 presents a breathtaking sweep of 21st-century painting, sculpture, and multimedia works from India and its diaspora.
October 10, 2020 - January 10, 2021
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 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 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
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
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
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
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 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
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, 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.
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
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
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 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.
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
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
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
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 brings together winners and honorees from 1974 to 2018.
December 5, 2018 - May 19, 2019
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
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.
September 28, 2018 - January 20, 2025
Come see the newly organized collection! We've gathered ancient and modern works of art, together in one space, that explore our shared archetypes, myths, and ideals.
August 17, 2018 - October 28, 2018
Katie Pell embraces the beauty in imperfection and the humor in insecurities, welcoming the downtrodden and enveloping them affectionately in oversized art.
Hiroshi Sugimoto's Time Exposed is a haunting portfolio of images that offer a primordial, nonlinear sense of time.