Treasures of Heaven at the Cleveland Museum of Art: A magical mystery tour of shared tradition

The Crippled and Sick Cured at the Tomb of Saint Nicholas, 

1425. Gentile da Fabriano. Image courtesy of the Board 

of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

I majored in Anthropology in college mainly because I was inspired by the swashbuckling adventures of Hollywood archaeologists like Indiana Jones, who circled the globe in search of powerful treasures to add his museum's collection. I double-majored in Medieval and Renaissance Studies because I was inexorably drawn to the beauty and strangeness of the art and architecture of those ages. What I did not know when I began studying archaeology was that most of it is about moving dirt from one place to another in an effort to gain insight into cultures that have long since passed from our collective memory, and it rarely involves treasure. Likewise, when I entered my medieval art history studies I did not yet understand that for a largely illiterate population living in a dark and painful world, art was more than mere decoration, it was a pictured pathway to the divine.

This weekend The Cleveland Museum of Art opens Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics, and Devotion in Medieval Europe. This new exhibition gives us a precious glimpse of a culture we have left behind, and a sense of the mystery that was once at the center of a powerful Christian faith. Treasures of Heaven features dazzling gold, silver, and jewel-encrusted objects from some of the finest museum collections in the United States and Europe, supplemented by impressive marble altarpieces, and delicate parchment manuscripts depicting the lives of the saints. Still, there is something dark hiding beneath the shiny surface.

The richly toned galleries, flow from one room to the next through graceful arches, and interpretive texts appear on gothic crest-like panels crowned with delicate rosettes. These were lovely touches, but they are not what moved me. What was it then? What made me stop and contemplate the fate of those pilgrims who traveled on foot hundreds of miles, or even farther, to behold these precious objects? It was the bones.

Reliquary with Tooth of Saint John the Baptist, 

1375-1400; 900s-1000s.  Photograph by Robert 

Hashimoto. Reproduction, courtesy of The Art 

Institute of Chicago.

Throughout these serene and sterile museum spaces were beautiful vessels discretely containing, or audaciously framing the grisly remains of human beings. You may argue that these relics were (are?) not the remains of just anyone, but those of venerated saints. Still it is not saintliness, but basic human curiosity that drives the visitor to get a closer look at the pieces of dead people in the room. The same desire compelling rubber-neckers to slow down and ogle an accident on the other side of the highway, finds me staring quizzically at an ancient tooth encased in rock crystal, my mind racing with child-like questions.

How could someone wrench that tooth from a dearly departed saint's mouth? Is it really from John the Baptist, or just some poor bell-ringer who slipped on the belfry stairs? How big was the "True Cross" if bits and pieces of it were sprinkled throughout Europe in countless reliquaries and amulets? So many silent questions voiced by my inner child. One nagging thought escaped in an uncontrollable shudder while viewing an assemblage of silk-wrapped relics. How terrible must life have been in this pre-scientific age for people to go to such great, gory lengths to capture and touch the divine?

Panel-Shaped Reliquary of the 

True Cross, 

1214. 

The Cleveland 

Museum of Art.

The Anthropologist in me felt something else as I toured the galleries today, something our increasingly xenophobic world could use a little more of, a sense of universality, of oneness. It was in the golden faces of saints, masks of the dead, which in many ways parallel artifacts from the great Mesoamerican civilizations. It resonated in the perpetuation of sacred remains for healing and protection. The richly illuminated texts preserving histories of the faithful shared traits with Mayan codices, Egyptian papyri, Islamic, Hebrew, and Hindu manuscripts. I remember my schoolgirl revulsion upon learning that many prehistoric people buried their dead ancestors beneath the floors of their homes, keeping them close for protection. Other cultures carried the dead around in bundles, or marched their remains out for feasts and festivals. Out of context these practices seemed ghoulish and bizarre. In Treasures of Heaven we see the roots of our modern culture laid plain as gloriously and wondrously, if not uniquely, bizarre.

Often in our modern culture, pundits attempt to reduce complex issues to 15-second sound bites. Things are parsed out for us as black or white, left or right, ours or theirs, one or the other. In this exhibit art history has its rebuttal. We are like them, and they are us. These medieval traditions and treasures demonstrate our forbears' belief in the mysteries of faith and their pursuit of magical solutions to physical problems and daily strife.

Reliquary Head of Saint Eustace, c. 1210.

© The Trustees of the British Museum

A banner adjacent to the entry of the last gallery presents a grayed image of a once bright illumination, toned-down from its full vibrancy it suggests the mystery is fading. The reliquaries and bones of the saints are followed in the final gallery by Martin Luther's sermons declaring the heretical theater of the veneration of these relics. As the Age of Enlightenment approached, the provenance and religious role of relics was questioned by reformers like Luther and Erasmus, asking the same skeptical questions I did in the previous galleries.

Here we encounter the essence and realities of faith. Even in this age of cutting-edge science, diseases like cancer, Alzheimer's, and others cause persistent pain, suffering, and loss. The reality of our own mortality forces rational minds to confront the desire for a magical talisman that can drive the demons away and make it all better. People today look for healing in the hands of envangelical ministers and buy snake oil from late-night infomercials. We are skeptical, but we keep the faith, just in case. In Treasures of Heaven we come face to face with ourselves and discover we are not so different from the pilgrims, or the pagans.

An esteemed exhibit designer once told me that authenticity is in the eye of the beholder, going on to suggest that visitors do not care if an object is real, as long as it is cool. The impressive exhibition Treasures of Heaven at the Cleveland Museum of Art flies in the face of this logic. For centuries people have journeyed great distances to see these objects, and I think in this case they are worth the trip.

The Cleveland Museum of Art has chosen a new director

Click on the link below to read the article by The Plain Dealer's art critic, Steven Litt, detailing the Museum's choice to lead their institution through the completion of their ongoing expansion and renovation in 2013, and towards its centennial celebration in 2016.

David Franklin of the National Gallery of Canada named director of the Cleveland Museum of Art

Published: Thursday, August 26, 2010, 10:00 PM     Updated: Thursday, August 26, 2010, 10:11 PM

Steven Litt, The Plain Dealer

University Circle videos promote impact and richness of institutions and life in the Circle

A few months ago a colleague from the Cleveland Museum of Natural History asked my family to participate in a promotional video series University Circle Incorporated was producing for its website. Here is the resulting short video, featuring our visit to the museum and highlighting many of the reasons we choose to spend part of our life here in Cleveland "in the Circle."

The other videos in the series showcase the excellent healthcare, housing, and educational opportunities offered within University Circle.

Build your own custom video playlist at embedr.com

Cleveland Museum of Art Solstice Party promises a night of great art and music

In celebration of the long-anticipated reopening of the ancient Near Eastern, Egyptian, African, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and some of the medieval art galleries this Saturday night, the Cleveland Museum of Art will be hosting a global music feast, featuring artists from Burkina Faso, Benin, Syria, and New York City. Beginning at 5:30 "Eventide" ticket holders can sample hors d'oeuvres from some of the best restaurants in town, cozy up to open bars, and rub elbows with the curators in the museum's galleries. "Twilight" guests may arrive at 7:30, as the music really gets going, and "Solstice" revelers are welcome any time after 10:00PM. Ticket prices range from $175 ($120 for museum members) for Eventide admission, down to just $15 for Solstice tickets, provided you purchase them in advance. All tickets are good until closing time at 2:00AM.

Last year, as the Museum hailed the grand opening of the renovated and expanded East Wing, over 4,000 Solstice guests crowded the galleries and lined up outside waiting to get in to what turned out to be the party of the year. From the looks of this year's line-up, Solstice 2010 promises to be another incredible fete. With the reopening of the ancient, medieval, and African galleries Saturday night, the Museum will increase the quantity of art on exhibit by 60%. Don't miss your chance to be one of the first in Cleveland to glimpse the likes of Apollo Sauroktonos, and catch some hot musical artists from around the globe. Visit the Museum's fresh new website at www.clevelandart.org to purchase tickets and find a detailed schedule of the Solstice festivities. I'll see you there Saturday night!

Neanderthals, Reliquaries, and Schreckengost, oh my! Or, how everything old is new again

It is a MuseoBlogger "throwback Thursday," as I find myself haunted by three former passions in the cultural news of yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

Yesterday, I learned that the Cleveland Museum of Art launched a brand new website, and as I delighted in the new personalization potential of the site, I quickly found a link to the "new perspectives" videos. My favorite features the Museum's Curator of Medieval Art, Stephen Fliegel, interpreting a 12th-century reliquary shaped like a human arm. This ghost of pursuits-long-past was a fantastic discovery, bringing back memories of afternoons spent in the dark of an art history classroom, striving towards my undergraduate degree in Medieval and Renaissance Studies. It also conjured up images of the incredible medieval art collection housed at CMA, but closed to the public for many years now as part of their colossal renovation and expansion campaign. Fortunately for all of us cooky medievalists, the reinstalled gallery will open June 26th, and the arm reliquary will be just one of the many fascinating objects featured there. Check out the Museum's innovative new website and the arm reliquary using the link below.

Arm Reliquary of the Apostles

In today's news I read about the mapping of the DNA sequence of Homo neanderthalensis, a truly ground-breaking discovery that will certainly shed new light on our human origins. Tomorrow's issue of the journal Science will outline the scientific research involved in mapping the Neanderthal genome and describe the subsequent finding that non-African human populations today share between 1% and 4% of their genes with our cave-dwelling cousins. Yet another blast from my academic past.

Besides medieval art history, the other half of my undergraduate degree was in Anthropology, and I loved it enough to pursue a masters degree in the subject. During the 1990s when I was in school there was ongoing debate in the field between anthropologists who held that modern humans swept out of Africa in a giant migration and wiped out neanderthal populations, and those who believed the two human subspecies met, feuded, interbred, and eventually absorbed the archaic humans into the modern human fold.

Milford Wolpoff, my paleoanthropology professor at the University of Michigan was a great proponent of the second view and argued at length that modern humans were descended, at least in part, from Neanderthals. About 10 years ago, with the general acceptance of mitochondrial DNA analysis, it seemed that everyone had dismissed his argument and moved on. Well, vindication has finally come! For those of us who have ever met Dr. Wolpoff, or my father for that matter, we all knew there just had to be some neanderthal DNA in there somewhere.

Tomorrow at The Bonfoey Gallery in downtown Cleveland my back-to-the-future news week wraps up with the opening of From Jazz to Design- the Art of Viktor Schreckengost a retrospective exhibition of Cleveland's own visionary renaissance man and recipient of the prestigious National Medal of Arts.

In the spring of 2006, as Director of Exhibits at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, I participated in the nationwide, 100 day-long exhibition celebrating Viktor Schreckengost's centennial birthday by mounting a small animal-themed exhibit of his work. Since his passing in January 2008, I now only occasionally come across Viktor Schreckengost's work around town, but tomorrow at 5:00PM, The Bonfoey Gallery will debut a collection of works representing all facets of his genius, including a few pieces never before exhibited. From Jazz to Design will be on exhibit through June 5, 2010.

I look forward to posting some follow-up photos from the Schreckengost opening next week and a review of the new medieval gallery at the Cleveland Museum of Art when it opens later this summer. In the meantime, I am heading out for dinner in my pink Izod polo shirt and my khaki pedal-pushers (no kidding) and relishing the fact that everything old seems to be new again.

Cleveland Museum of Art stands together with the city, hangs Cavs banners on front of building

First the Super Bowl bet between the New Orleans and Indianapolis museums of art, and now this. These top shelf art museums better be careful or they are going to throw off their stuffed-shirt reputations entirely... And wouldn't that be a shame?

Click on the image to see the full size photo on Twitpic.com

"Jackie Curtis and Rita Red" painting by Alice Neel coming back to CMA

Steven Litt of the Plain Dealer has the complete story of how the Cleveland Museum of Art made sure this contemporary classic would find a permanent home in their museum.

Cleveland Museum of Art wins auction for Alice Neel painting

By, Steven Litt, The Plain Dealer

November 12, 2009, 7:00AM

Image: Plain Dealer

CMA Chalk Festival photos

Indeed it was a beautiful day on Sunday and the weather was perfect for the Chalk Festival. Unfortunately, I could not get my mobile blog posting software to upload the photos from my phone live that afternoon, but here they are.

20th Annual Chalk Festival this weekend at the Cleveland Museum of Art

I just checked the local 5-day forecast and am delighted to report that our resident meteorologists are predicting a beautiful weekend here in Cleveland. This is particularly great news since the Cleveland Museum of Art will be hosting its 20th Annual Chalk Festival on Saturday and Sunday, and I am heading down to the Circle with my family for all of the fun.

The Museum's chalk festival draws on a centuries-old European tradition first practiced outside of Cathedrals in Italy, where poor beggars would decorate the sidewalks with chalk and charcoal drawings of famous paintings. This weekend, you are invited to come down to the Museum and try your hand at reproducing the Old Masters, or to produce your own original masterpiece. Sidewalk squares are $8, or $16, depending on the size and come with all of the chalk needed to begin your piece de resistance.

Don't want to get your hands dirty? That's fine, you can admire the chalk drawings created by renowned artists, groove to live music, and stroll the beautiful gardens around the Wade Lagoon all for free. That's right, there is no admission fee, and the weather looks sunny, so plan to come down and join the festivities. The event runs from 11:00 to 5:00 on Saturday the 12th, and from 12:00 to 5:00 on Sunday the 13th.

I am planning to be there with my husband and our two little girls on Sunday to color a square. We plan to create an original abstract work, incorporating the prominent toddler and preschool influences that affect our creative vision during this predominantly pink period we find ourselves in right now. But, knowing how things go with small fry, it may end up as one of those unfinished classics that the artists, once distracted, never return to finish. Photos to follow next week.

For more information on the music performances, the history of the Chalk Festival, or to reserve a sidewalk square, check out the Museum of Art's Newsroom blog, or visit the Museum's website.

Museums making progress for the sake of progress, at what cost?

An old building was torn down on Monday behind the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. It was a carriage house-- a relatively old, late Victorian building, designed and commissioned by the Museum's namesake, the significance of which had been widely debated. Suffice it to say, the Museum owned the building and wished to tear it down to clear the way for a new addition designed by renowned architect Renzo Piano.

An article in the Boston Globe gives the account of the eventual demolition and comments posted by readers allude to the disagreement over the Museum's decision to raze the old structure to begin anew.

Gardner Museum tears down carriage house at heart of dispute - The Boston Globe

Photo above: The carriage house demolished by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (David L. Ryan/ Globe Staff)

(Posted using ShareThis)

As I am unfamiliar with the specific motivating factors on both sides of the argument in this particular case, I'll set aside my own opinion on the demolition of the Gardner carriage house, but the incident does beg the question, when are we seeking progress for progress' sake alone? How do we effectively weigh the future cost of today's decision to sacrifice something old, to bring about something new? As museums, when are we truly improving our visitor experience, and when are we simply refreshing it? And, if all we need, or desire, is refreshment, do we really need to destroy what is old, or can we effectively repurpose it?

I am sure that in their due diligence process the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum wrestled with all of these questions and more, but how did they know when they had arrived at the right answer? In destroying an edifice conceived by their founder as part of her original museum vision, how did the Gardner Museum leadership balance their founding principles and core mission with their own vision for the museum in the 21st Century and beyond? We all hope that egos, deep pockets, and other traditional sources of power and influence will not weigh heavily upon our decision-making process, but living in the real world we have seen these forces at work in conference rooms, cocktail parties, and board meetings. Who you know and what you can bring in still makes a difference. Even when the strategic plan is specific, collaborative, and comprehensive there seems to always be enough room for individual interpretations and personal visions.

Working in the museum field for these last 13 years, I have been involved in strategic planning on staff at several institutions, and as a collaborator or facilitator at several more. In each process the details are different, but the aim is the same: let's define who we are, why we are relevant, and how we can do what we do better in the future. Along the way, some ideas are set aside as impractical, some goals are determined to be unattainable, and some buildings are marked for demolition. In my opinion, the process is most authentic and "refreshing" when there are no sacred cows, when everything is on the table and all ideas are considered and debated upon their own merits. I assume that this is what happened in Boston, and eventually the Museum decided that the carriage house needed to go to make room for a new space that will better serve their mission and long-term goals.

As guardians of the public trust, museums need to be very open with their staff internally and with their external constituents, sharing, explaining, substantiating, and even reconsidering the goals and initiatives that drive their biggest and most controversial decisions. Ultimately, the final plan and directives will, and should, still come from museum leadership, but I believe the most inclusive process would have the best end result.

The Cleveland Museum of Art exemplified this open approach in 2004-05 as they prepared to embark on their massive $300 million renovation. The Museum did an excellent job of including its members and other visitors in the planning phase, encouraging public input and gaining their trust. Some decisions were initially unpopular (like enclosing the courtyard and cutting down the towering old trees), but through open dialogue many Clevelanders were persuaded that the Museum had a clear, relevant, and important vision for itself, which the renovation design would effectively carry out.

It is a reality that in every business, even in nonprofits and museums seeking to serve the greater good, people in leadership positions must make tough calls and some people on the outside will be unhappy with those decisions. Certainly, there are angry and disappointed people in Boston this week, but could the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum have avoided the current PR quagmire with some open dialogue and public briefing sessions? Perhaps. We will never know for sure, but the rest of us can learn how not to knock down an old building from their experience. May our renovations be guided as much by reflection, as ambition, and let us all be as eager to build consensus as we are to build a new wing.