By Emily J. Peters, Curator of Prints and Drawings — Prized for its brilliant coloring and matte surface, the pastel medium was used by artists in Europe as early as the 16th century. But it was the 18th century that saw the zenith of the medium, coinciding with the enormous rise in popularity of portraiture as an artistic genre. Made…

By Robin Hanson, Conservator of Textiles, The Cleveland Museum of Art, and Holly Witchey, Adjunct Professor, Department of Art History and Art, Case Western Reserve University —

By Dean Yoder, Senior Conservator of Paintings and Head of Paintings Conservation — Venus Discovering the Dead Adonis, one of the most important and powerful Italian Baroque paintings in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA), is undergoing a multiyear conservation effort (fig. 1). The mythological story of Venus and Adonis owes its origin to Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This interpretation is probably…

Benjamin Levy, Guest Curator and PhD Candidate at Case Western Reserve University The exhibition Photographs in Ink, on view through April 2, 2023, looks at the intersection of photography and printmaking. Whether used for visual communication or creative expression, photographic images produced in printer’s ink have increasingly saturated our daily…

By Stefanie Lima Taub, Director of Community Arts — When everyone has finished their drawings and gone home, and all the supplies have been packed up for next year, I love to take a moment and stand at the top of the Fine Arts Garden to bask in the abounding creativity that has just occurred in front of my…

By Justin Willson, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Art History Leadership, The Cleveland Museum of Art / Case Western Reserve University — Seating arrangements shape many of our activities, from business meetings, concerts, and meals to car rides, graduation ceremonies, and weddings. One might go so far as to say that where we sit is a fundamental human concern. However, for many cultures, seating arrangements are also a theological belief, shaping views…

By Sarah Scaturro, Eric and Jane Nord Chief Conservator — I’ll let you in on a well-kept secret of museum work: fashion is difficult to display! You might find this unbelievable, as we dress ourselves every day and everyone knows how to put clothes on. Surely it must be no big deal to throw a dress onto a mannequin and…

By Emily Liebert, Curator of Contemporary Art — The Cleveland Museum of Art was honored to add He was meant for all things to meet of 2022 by Amy Sherald (American, b. 1973) to its contemporary collection this past March (fig. 1). Sherald, one of the leading contemporary figurative painters, is widely celebrated for her portraits documenting Black…

By Sonya Rhie Mace, George P. Bickford Curator of Indian and Southeast Asian Art — Articulated in seductive colors with intriguing details, hunting scenes in paintings from India celebrate more than the coup de grâce. In the startlingly expansive scenes created during the 1700s and 1800s at the court of Udaipur in southern Rajasthan, the tense and thrilling moments — often laced with extreme danger…