In a hurry to get some caviar? This vending machine can help.Google Maps 'Street View' now shows Great Barrier Reef.Empire State Building gets flashy new lighting system.Some photos of the exhibition:įourth floor gallery Related on SmartPlanet: The biographical note was fine, but for me the smell of rubber, the invitingly disarrayed interior and the sense of looking into an exploded Lee Bontecou sculpture was sufficient to create a compelling piece.Īnd the rest of the exhibition was compelling, showing that both inside and out, Cleveland has, in MOCA, a cultural attraction to draw both local and out-of-town visitors. The exterior wood scraps come from Oliveira's native Brazil the interior materials were salvaged from the streets of Cleveland. One side of the sculpture, turned toward another wall, is open, revealing a cave-like interior lit with bare bulbs and lined with scraps of rubber and wood, bits of rusty metal and other refuse. Carambóxido is a roughly eggplant-shaped form, about 50 feet long, that rests on the floor, clad in scraps of wood, with a stem that seems to burst through a neighboring wall. Oliveira's installation is a highlight of the show. ArtInfo named it "Cleveland's new power museum."Īnd Archpaper said, " The bold new building not only resembles a dusky diamond on its surface but also shares with the gemstone a remarkable intensity that is the product of a lengthy incubation under high pressure."īut while the building will initially draw people to the museum, the strength of the first exhibition should keep them coming back. Art in America called the building "striking," and praised the stair as well as the matte blue walls. In its first five weeks, the museum attracted more than 10,000 visitors in its old location, it got only 20,000 annually.Ĭritics have already praised the building - and we don't just mean the Plain Dealer (which did that too). Though the building hasn't even been open two months, it is already seen as a success. "But more than anything, perhaps, MOCA's re-establishment in University Circle epitomizes the transformation of Cleveland from an aging blue-collar factory town into a city that is eager to embrace innovation and forward-leaning creativity, no matter what the field," says the Plain Dealer. MOCA, sitting amidst these other attractions, will easily pick up a culturally interested crowd, as well as university students. Surrounding Uptown are some of the other city's cultural landmarks: The Cleveland Orchestra, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Cleveland Clinic. (Talalay, who had previously owned a gallery in New Haven, had done business with him, and Sundell was Castelli's daughter.) The Plain Dealer reports: The irony is that this "new Cleveland" is being built with the old: MOCA Cleveland is actually the newest incarnation of a 44-year-old art center, initially called the New Gallery when it was founded by Marjorie Talalay and Nina Castelli Sundell, who were both connected to famed New York art dealer Leo Castelli. "MOCA will be a kind of draw that we really haven't had." "I think it's the new Cleveland," Stewart Kohl, a MOCA board member and co-chair of the museum's capital campaign, told the Cleveland Plain Dealer. And the financial crisis of the past few years has hit the city hard, with a foreclosure rate that was among the highest in the country. What MOCA means for ClevelandĪlready, the museum's mere existence sends the message that Cleveland is intent on revitalizing itself after having been sapped by population loss, job declines and poverty.
But the biggest reason that Cleveland can now consider itself part of the culture circuit is that the new MOCA Cleveland is good: And when I say that, I mean both building and art.
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