Unearthing: Searching Through Strata

May 24, 2025 - March 1, 2026

Opening May 24, 2025, the Springfield Museum of Art presents Unearthing: Searching through Strata, a survey of work by artist Anita Cooke. This exhibition traces a 20-year creative journey beginning when Hurricane Katrina buried her clay studio in the Louisiana mud.

Before the storm, Cooke was a ceramic sculptor and functional potter. In the wreckage of Katrina, she unearthed her Aunt Genie’s 1950s Singer Featherweight sewing machine. This discovery sparked a profound shift in her artistic medium and method. Using the sewing machine, Cooke began stitching together intricate textile constructions, embedded with evidence of her time and labor.

Cooke is a process artist. Her primary goal is in the making, and the effort of her work is visible. She paints canvases, tears them apart, pins, organizes, gathers, layers, stitches, and compresses. Cooke’s complex work evokes loss and finding, chaos and order, and searching for meaning in what remains.

Anita Cooke is a visual artist living and making work in New Orleans. Formerly from Springfield, Ohio, Cooke took her first pottery class at the Springfield Art Center (now the Springfield Museum of Art) while in high school. Cooke continued in ceramics, earning a BFA in Ceramics from Kent State University. She received an MFA in Ceramics and Sculpture from Newcomb College at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana.

The Ohio Watercolor Society | North Gallery

Opening September 20, 2025

The 79th Juried Members’ Exhibition | McGregor Gallery

Opening August 16, 2025

Click for call for entries information 

Aminah Robinson:  Journeys Home, A Visual Memoir

February 1, 2025-July 13, 2025

Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson (1940–2015) was an exceptionally prolific artist who used traditional and unconventional, non-traditional materials to create a staggering body of work. Her drawings, paintings, sculptures, and mixed media textiles chronicle her family’s African ancestry, her travels worldwide, and her witness to African American life.

The MacArthur Award recipient was also a researcher, historian, poet, author, illustrator, composer, and teacher who used her vast talents to draw harmony into a discordant world. When Robinson passed away, she entrusted her art, writing, personal belongings, and home studio to the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio, her hometown museum.

Aminah Robinson: Journeys Home, a Visual Memoir brings together some of the artist’s most profound works and words, produced over seven decades from 1948 to 2012. Drawing upon Robinson’s historical research, folklore, and personal narrative, the exhibition presents a visual memoir of the artist’s life and a compelling tableau of the African American experience.

Can’t Hold Me Down

November 8, 2024 - April 30, 2025

About the Project

In Can’t Hold Me Down, Springfield photographer Ty Fischer partners with 17 students from Cliff Park High School to bring forth stories of personal challenge and resilience through dynamic layered portraits and story. Each student reflected on their educational journey, sharing experiences of struggle and strength.

Listening to each student’s story as he photographed them, Fischer let each student’s words guide his creative
approach in making their portrait. The resulting prismatic lenticular portraits combine three different images: a black-and-white portrait, a collage of each student’s most
impactful words, and an AI-generated image embodying the student’s positive emotions about their individual path of growth and perseverance.

About the Collaborators

High School Student Collaborators include Alyssa Allen, Lisa Baum, Peyton Berner, Walter Bostic, Anahstaciya Brown, Kamren DeArmond, Bradon Ervin, Jae’lyn Ervin, Kaylese Evans, Mireya Hammett, Samiya Hammond, Peter Hill, Montye Joyce, Ka’Miyah Robinson, Taylor Smith, Tre Walker, and Madison Wells.

Ty Fischer is a photographer and Springfield native. As an artist, Fischer is interested in exploring community narratives through his “Your Story” participatory storytelling and photography projects. Through this work, Fischer hopes that his portraits encourage conversation, connection, and the possibility of viewing others through their own lens.

Cliff Park High School is a unique learning environment serving students, ages 15-21, who have experienced significant life challenges necessitating a different approach to overcome each student’s obstacles to reaching graduation. Cliff Park offers flexible learning hours, accommodation around work schedules, hands-on technical and career training, and dedicated and specialized teachers. Each student can learn at their own pace, earning credits towards graduation as quickly as they can or as slowly as needed.

The Places We Return To…

September 28, 2024 - May 11, 2025

Eric Barth | Rod Bouc | Elsie Sanchez

In The Places We Return To, three Columbus-based painters explore evocative personal landscapes that reside deeply within. Colored by nostalgia, melancholy, and longing for something perhaps just out of reach, each artist wrestles with the complexity and intimacy of memory.

Though different in style and approach, each of the artists’ works hint at a tension just beneath the surface, a dark side, an unshakable feeling. By applying heavy pigments and then scraping them off the surface— obscuring and revealing—each artist uses methods that recall the intangible qualities of place-based memories.

 

About the Artists

Eric Barth grew up near Lake Erie, in the suburbs of Cleveland, where his early involvement in the arts began in the underground music scene. He holds a BFA from The Ohio State University and founded The Barth Galleries in Columbus and Cleveland, Ohio.

Rod Bouc was raised on a farm in Nebraska. He earned a BFA from the University of Nebraska and an MFA from The Ohio State University. For over thirty years, he served as a registrar and as an administrator of the Columbus Museum of Art.

Elsie Sanchez was born in Havana, Cuba, and immigrated to the United States as a young child with her family. She earned her BFA and MFA from The Ohio State University. She received the Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Greater Columbus Arts Council Arts Partnership Award, and was selected to participate in the XIII Havana Biennial.

Line | Drawing Meaning from the Mark

July 20, 2024 - Ongoing

Curated from the museum’s permanent collection, this is the first of a new series of exhibitions exploring the big ideas of visual art.

Line is language. Line is expressive. It can whisper, shout, proclaim.
Line can be bold, certain, searching, delicate.
Line can be quick, clipped, staccato.
Line can be sinuous, curving, undulating.

Line can build stability through structure and scaffolding.
Line can convey movement and energy by changing direction.
Line can be an edge, a contour, a border.
Line can mark a boundary between what is and what isn’t.

Line can be an index of where the artist’s mind–or the artist–has traveled, a record of moving, searching, observing, measuring.
Line is a point traveling through space.
Line is a path.

ZZ (detail image), Jack Moulthrop, ceramic, 2009

Color Fields: Andrea Myers

Andrea Myers
August 10th-December 29, 2024

I take up space as a female artist, reclaiming ‘women’s work’

 while pushing the boundaries of painting. –Andrea Myers

In Color Fields, Andrea Myers uses discarded, donated, and domestic clothing in ways that both reference and resist the rigid notions of work traditionally assigned to women. She approaches textiles differently. She uses the visual language of Color Field painting, including vibrantly saturated color over large swaths of a surface. She combines this with a gestural—and a bit rebellious—approach to quilt making to create large-scale panoramas, organic formations, and shifting shapes.

For the artist, colorful fabric functions like tubes of paint. Her sewing machine’s stitches are her drawings—dense, wild, and frenetic with energy and movement. Her color palette is not quiet; but instead, riotous neons and technicolor. Simple shapes suggest landscapes, sun, moon, mountains, rivers, erosions, contours, and topographies. These soft geometries push against the boundaries of the rectangular frame, spilling onto the walls and floors and over obstacles in her path.

Andrea Myers is an interdisciplinary artist who creates work at the intersection of contemporary color field painting, sculpture, and fiber arts. Having grown up in the flat farmlands of the Midwest, Myers’ artwork represents a joyous rebellion against the tight tedium of cross-stitches and the precision of traditional quilt making. Instead, hers is one of clashing colors, scribbling stitches, and joyously coloring way outside the lines.

Myers earned her BFA in Printmedia (2002) and her MFA in Fiber and Material Studies (2006) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Myers’ work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. She lives and makes art in Columbus, Ohio.

Playground: Constructing My Identity

Ju Yun
March 9th-September 8, 2024

Ju Yun playfully explores her hybrid Korean-American identity in the studio–her creative playground. In this space, anything goes, as she uses tinsel, pom-poms, hair extensions and her sense of humor to construct fantastical new identities.

Born and raised in South Korea, Ju Yun immigrated to the United States and earned her BFA in painting from the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington D.C. Her work has been shown in the US and abroad, including recent solo exhibitions—Evolution of Identity and Hybrid Identity–at the Susquehanna Art Museum in Pennsylvania, the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington in Virginia, and CICA Museum in South Korea. She lives and teaches studio art to children in Chantilly, Virginia.

Chronicles: The Great Depression and the Pandemic

Nov 4, 2023-Mar 30, 2024

Featuring two series of photographs taken a century apart, this exhibition explores how resilience can be born out of times of national tragedy and how documentary photographers are a valuable part of capturing the past and present. Chronicles originated at the Decorative Arts Center of Ohio and was co-curated by Dr. Christine Fowler Shearer and Arnold Tunstall.

Opening reception: Saturday, Nov 4, 6-7:30pm