Two new larger-than-life figures invite visitors to pause as they walk through the atrium of the Cleveland Museum of Art.
“I think the role of art in humanity is to give us back that patience to perceive the world around us,” said Rose B. Simpson, who created the sculptures for the museum at her studio in Santa Clara Pueblo, an indigenous community in northern New Mexico.
Two years ago, Simpson visited Cleveland for the first time and was struck by the museum's spacious, light-filled atrium where her sculptures now stand.
“It represents to me this crazy manifestation of our dreams,” she said. “Someone one time decided to close in the space with this massive glass ceiling … This is incredible, and this is monumental. But it's also a blip in the story of time.”
Simpson illustrates the “story of time” through the two, 25-foot-tall figures — titled “Strata.” They rest atop a metal platform etched with “a mystical creature that wraps itself around in bone form” enclosing large stones at the base.
“It's the raw material of the past,” she said. “But it's still there, right? It's what's holding it all up.”
Along the platforms holding the figures, visitors can run their fingers over what she called “seismic braille” and feel the welds she made.
“We are always influenced by the movement of the Earth,” she said.
The bodies of the figures reflect the colorful layers of the Earth. At the bust is where “humanity begins,” Simpson said.
“We are witnessing, we are hearing, we are smelling, we are being in this space,” she said. “We exist between the dream world and the spiritual place.”
The rain clouds at the top of the figures signify how the cycle repeats.
Commissioned for Cleveland
“Strata” will reside in the atrium of the museum through April 2025. Simpson was commissioned to create for the space after some of her small-scale sculptures were exhibited in the contemporary exhibit “Picturing Motherhood Now” in 2021.
“We were blown away, because we could just tell the craftsmanship that she used to create these handmade sculptures. You can see her fingerprints in the clay. You can see that she's thought through every aspect of it,” said Nadiah Rivera Fellah, curator of contemporary art, about the initial works the museum displayed.
Simpson’s new large-scale works were logistically challenging. They weigh more than 2,000 pounds and rest above art stored below the atrium. The installation in Cleveland was the first time all of the pieces were stacked upon one another.
“They stand so monumentally, and there's almost an effortless quality to them being here, even though it was quite a great deal of labor and effort on the artist’s part,” Rivera Fellah said. “They sort of seem like they were just beamed down from somewhere.”
Sculpture has been in Simpson’s family for generations. A current exhibit of her work in West Palm Beach, Florida, includes pieces by her mother, Roxanne Swentzell, as well as her grandmother and great-grandmother. Simpson also has large-scale sculptures on view in two public parks in New York City.
After the installation of “Strata” in Cleveland, Simpson said she was trying to stay in “suspended disbelief.”
“When I sit in my silence, it'll speak to me more,” she said. “I hope it does that for other people, too.”
