Mexican arts and culture are on full display at the CMA. Coinciding with the museum’s exhibition Picturing the Border, Grammy-nominated vocalist Magos Herrera makes her Gartner Auditorium debut with her quartet, Wednesday, December 11, 2024, 7:30–9:00 p.m.
Born in Mexico City and currently based in New York City, Magos is a dazzling jazz singer-songwriter, producer, and educator declared as “one of the greatest contemporary interpreters of song” by the Latin Jazz Network. With a sultry voice and an unparalleled presence in the contemporary Latin American jazz scene, she is best known for her eloquent vocal improvisation and her singular bold style, which embraces elements of contemporary jazz with Ibero-American melodies and rhythms in a way that elegantly blends and surpasses language boundaries.
An accomplished artist, Magos has performed in leading international cultural venues—such as Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center (NYC), the Kennedy Center (Washington, DC), the Palacio de Bellas Artes (Mexico City), the Círculo de Bellas Artes (Madrid), Union Chapel (London), and the Palau de la Música (Valencia, Spain)—and has been part of the lineup of some of the most memorable jazz festivals, including the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland and the Montreal Jazz Festival. Featured as one of the most creative Mexicans in the world by Forbes magazine, Magos has garnered important awards and recognitions throughout her career, including a Grammy short-list nomination in the Best Jazz Vocal Album category for her album Distancia (2009), and received the Berklee College of Music’s Master of Latin Music Award.
In 2018, Magos released her album Dreamers (Sony Music) in collaboration with Brooklyn Rider. This highly acclaimed album made the top lists of the New York Times, Billboard classical, and NPR Music, among others, and was nominated for a Grammy for best arrangement for the song “Niña.”
Magos is a spokesperson for UN Women for UNiTE, a campaign to end violence against women, and for HeForShe, a promoter of gender equality. She is also on the faculty at Mannes School of Music at the New School.
In May 2023, Magos released her 11th album, Aire (Sunnyside Records), which is a celebration of our humanity and the healing power of music.
Featured Performers
Magos Herrera: Vocals
Vinicius Gomes: Guitar
Matt Penman: Bass
Alex Kautz: Drums
Tickets available online at www.clevelandart.org/events/magos-herrera
Photo © Shervin Lainez
Continuing Exhibitions
Through Sunday, December 8, 2024
Jon A. Lindseth and Virginia M. Lindseth, PhD, Galleries of the Ancient Americas | Gallery 232
Free; No Ticket Required
Between about 3000 BCE and the early 1500s CE, ancient Andean weavers created one of the world’s most distinguished textile traditions in both artistic and technical terms. Within this time span, the most impressive group of early textiles to survive was made by the Paracas people of Peru’s south coast. Most artistically elaborate Andean textiles served as garments.
Native North American Textiles and Works on Paper
Through Sunday, December 8, 2024
Sarah P. and William R. Robertson Gallery | Gallery 231
Free; No Ticket Required
On display from the permanent collection are two Diné (Navajo) textiles from the late 1800s and early 1900s, both of them rugs woven for the collector’s market, modeled on the Diné shoulder blanket. Also on view is a watercolor from the 1920s by the Pueblo artist Oqwa Pi (Abel Sanchez), who was key to a major development in Southwest Indigenous arts as Native people took control of representing their own cultures after centuries of marginalization.
This exhibition is made possible with support from the Simon Family Foundation, a supporting foundation of the Jewish Federation of Cleveland.
PICTURED: Masked Figure, 1930s
Oqwa Pi (Abel Sanchez) (San Ildefonso Pueblo, 1899–1971). Watercolor; paper: 27.9 x 35.6 cm (11 x 14 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of Amelia Elizabeth White 1937.804 © Oqwa Pi (Abel Sanchez)
Through Sunday, January 5, 2025
Mark Schwartz and Bettina Katz Photography Galleries | Gallery 230
Free; No Ticket Required
Picturing the Border presents photographs of the US-Mexico borderlands from the 1970s to the present taken by both border residents and outsiders. They range in subject matter from intimate domestic portraits, narratives of migration, and proof of political demonstrations to images of border crossings and clashes between migrants and the US Border Patrol. The earliest images in this exhibition form an origin story for the topicality of the US-Mexico border at present, and demonstrate that the issues of the border have been a critical point of inquiry for artists since the 1970s. Many serve as counternarratives to the derogatory narratives of migration and Latino/as in the US that tend to circulate in the mass media.
Capitalizing on the prevalent issues of the border today, Picturing the Border aims to spark vital conversations of what constitutes citizenship, as well as complex negotiations of personal identity as it relates to the border. The exhibition shows through these images that Latinx, Chicano/a, and Mexican photographers have significantly rethought what defines citizenship, nationality, family, migration, and the border beyond traditional frameworks for decades.
This exhibition is made possible with support from Anne T. and Donald F. Palmer.
Rose B. Simpson: Strata
Through Sunday, April 13, 2025
Location: Ames Family Atrium
Free; No Ticket Required
About The Exhibition
Rose B. Simpson (b. 1983) has envisioned a site-specific project for the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Ames Family Atrium titled Strata. Simpson’s installation was commissioned specifically for the expansive, light-filled space. According to the artist, Strata is inspired by time spent in Cleveland, “the architecture of the museum, the possibility of the space, tumbled stones from the shores of Lake Erie,” as well as her own Indigenous heritage and the landscape of her ancestral homelands of Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico, where she was born and raised and where she lives and works.
Strata comprises two monumental figural sculptures constructed from the artist’s signature clay medium, in addition to metalwork, porous concrete, and cast bronze. The figures’ layers mimic rock eroded through geologic time and the structural materiality of man-made architecture. Intricate welded metal structures mounted to the heads of each figure, intended to cast shadows, mimic the structures of the mind in relationship to time and space.
Simpson’s identity as a Native woman has greatly impacted her work. She is from a long line of women working in the ceramic tradition of her Kha’po Owingeh (Santa Clara Pueblo) tribe dating back to the 500s CE. Her large-scale sculptures represent a bold intervention in colonial legacies of dependency, erasure, and assimilation, and balance her tribe’s inherited ceramic tradition with modern methods, materials, and processes. Her work asserts a pride of place and belonging on land where Native residents have been forcefully dispossessed of their territories and cultures.
Simpson has had solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, ICA Boston, the Wheelwright Museum, and the Nevada Art Museum, and is represented in museum collections including the Cleveland Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Princeton University Art Museum, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. She is the recipient of several prestigious awards, including a Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship, a Women’s Caucus for Art President’s Award for Art & Activism, and was recently appointed by President Biden to the Institute of American Indian Arts Board of Trustees.
The CMA’s presentation of Rose B. Simpson: Strata includes a richly illustrated catalogue with contributions by Nadiah Rivera Fellah, the CMA’s associate curator of contemporary art; Anya Montiel, curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian; Karen Patterson, executive director at the Ruth Foundation; Natalie Diaz (Mojave / Akimel O’odham), Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University; and artists Rose B. Simpson and Dyani White Hawk (Sicangu Lakota).
PICTURED: Rose B. Simpson working on Strata in her studio at Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico. Photo by Kate Russell