writing

Reviving the Rust Belt: Hannah Bates’s Aggregate, at The Sculpture Center

The post-industrial landscape of Cleveland is by now a familiar visual and conceptual trope in the city’s contemporary art scene. Even as Cleveland actively rebrands itself beyond its legacy of deindustrialization, the rust belt’s industrial past continues to shape both the physical environment and materials readily available to artists. In her exhibition Aggregate, on view at The Sculpture Center through April 26, Hannah Bates approaches this history with a sensitivity to how these landscapes are still alive—still changing. Her work casts light on the unnoticed moments where the industrial and organic meet, overlap, and regenerate..

Between Earth and Sky: Fall Exhibitions at Kenyon’s Gund

Tucked into the campus of Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, the art venue known as The Gund has steadily grown into a site where the appeal of the exhibitions extends beyond its small campus. The gallery’s five current exhibitions, on view through December 14, may appear disparate at first glance. Yet the more time one spends within them, the more a connective tissue emerges: a meditation on how art not only reflects but enacts care, binding together communities, histories, and futures.

The first encounter, Marie Watt’s Tuning to the Sounds of the Skies sets the tone with works that hover at body level and overhead like dense, shimmering clouds. Made from layers of tobacco tin lids (which Watts calls “jingles”) folded and stitched together and then suspended from the ceiling, the installations catch the light in soft folds. The jingles glimmer like stars while producing a gentle metallic rustle when touched. At once airy and monumental, the forms appear both fragile and resilient—clouds made solid, holding the hum of many voices.

Rose B. Simpson’s Strata: Conversation through Sculpture and Space

Artist Rose B. Simpson (Santa Clara Pueblo, b. 1983) gave the site-specific sculptural duo on view through April 13, 2025, in the Ames Family Atrium at the Cleveland Museum of Art a meaning through its title: Strata.

Strata, the plural term for stratum, can be defined in two ways: It can be rock and earth layered in sheets against each other. It can also be a segment representing an era of development in social history. Simpson adopts both meanings within her sculptural duo. On the inside of the sculptures, layers of rocks fill the base, and metal armature acts as the structural support. However, the exterior consists of steel, pumice, concrete, bronze, and clay. As her primary medium, clay is both a material and a vessel for Simpson’s creative expression.