Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland to open permanent home after 44 years on the move

Published: Sunday, October 07, 2012, 6:00 AM     Updated: Friday, October 12, 2012, 5:52 PM

By Steven Litt, The Plain Dealer
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Enlarge Gus Chan, The Plain Dealer Despite the new Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland’s monumental shape, which resembles a pyramid from some angles, architect Farshid Moussavi said she was not interested in designing the building to resemble a static, unchanging monument. Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland: A shining new gemgallery (16 photos)

MOCA opens this weekend David Norr, chief curator at MOCA, Cleveland’s Museum of Contemporary Art, talks about MOCA’s new home at the corner of Euclid and Mayfield in uptown Cleveland. Grand opening parties are this weekend and the museum is free to the public on Monday, October 8. Watch video

You might call it the tale of the wandering museum. Or, with apologies to John Milton, “Paradise Regained.”

The Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, which opened in a tiny storefront on Euclid Avenue in University Circle 44 years ago and then left in search of more space, has finally come back to its roots.

From 1 to 6 p.m. Monday, MOCA Cleveland will open to the general public its spectacular new building on the prow of the triangular intersection of Euclid Avenue and Mayfield Road. (Admission is free, but timed tickets are recommended. Regular hours begin Wednesday.)

The $27.2 million, 34,000-square-foot structure is a seductively mysterious four-story gemstone sheathed in reflective panels of black stainless steel. It was designed by architect Farshid Moussavi of London, a native of Iran and an up-and-coming international star. The building is both her first museum and her first assignment in the United States.

Those factors will make the MOCA building news for art- and architecture-loving media outlets from around the world. More to the point for Cleveland, the new MOCA symbolizes the view that investing in the arts is critical for a city on the mend after decades of struggling with population loss and poverty.

“I think it’s the new Cleveland,” said Stewart Kohl, a MOCA board member and co-chair of the museum’s capital campaign.”MOCA will be a kind of draw that we really haven’t had.”

Of course, the museum’s voyage can’t compare to that of Odysseus finding his way home after fighting the Trojan War, or Moses leading his people to the Promised Land, but it does have certain qualities of an epic myth.

It’s the story of an institution that has gone from infancy to maturity, and from the fringe to the center, without ever losing its edge.

It was in 1968 that Marjorie Talalay and Nina Castelli Sundell, two visionary arts advocates, launched the small, for-profit New Gallery in a former dry-cleaning storefront at 11301 Euclid Ave.

Take a virtual tour of the new MOCA Cleveland museum.

Since then, the institution has had three directors,three namesand four rented homes across the city. It evolved from a for-profit gallery to a nonprofit, noncollecting museum. It’s one of many institutions like it around the world that exhibit new art while avoiding the heavy cost of building and maintaining a permanent collection.

Its wanderings took it from the Euclid Avenue storefront to a former frat house on nearby Bellflower Road and then, starting in 1987, the Galleria mall downtown. For the past 22 years, it occupied a spacious second-floor loft in the old Cleveland Play House complex at 8501 Carnegie Ave.

Over the years, it hosted some of the most outrageous, comprehensive, inspiring, shocking and all-around entertaining art exhibitions in the history of Cleveland.

Whatever its name at any particular point, the institution has been the place where many Clevelanders first encountered Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Christo, Jasper Johns and Frank Gehry.

It’s where Yoko Ono displayed smashed teacups and asked viewers to glue the pieces together, where performance artist Janine Antoni lowered herself naked into a bathtub filled with lard to make a statement about obsession with body fat, and where Red Grooms encapsulated the entire city in a raucous installation he created on-site in a four-day burst of creativity.

During many years in which the far wealthier Cleveland Museum of Art treated contemporary art with disdain, MOCA was the one place in town that reliably erased the cultural time lag between the avant-garde and the heartland.

“It was amazing to me how often I’d walk into any museum around the world and see something I’d seen in Cleveland a year or two before,” said longtime supporter Becky Dunn.

The opening of the museum’s new home marks the end of one journey and the beginning of another, as MOCA becomes one of the most visible cultural institutions in the city.

Its building is the centerpiece of Uptown, an eight-acre, $150-million-plus campus-edge development next to Case Western Reserve University that includes apartments, shops, restaurants, a bookstore, a supermarket and the expanding Cleveland Institute of Art.

Once a dead zone, Uptown lies at the heart of one of the hottest centers of economic growth in Ohio, anchored by venerable institutions including the Cleveland Orchestra, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Cleveland Clinic and University Hospitals.

In this heady mix, MOCA will have ready access to the large and steady audience of university students that it has always coveted, plus visitors who flock to other nearby museums.

A very sweet aspect of MOCA’s triumphant return to University Circle is that the once-skeptical Cleveland Museum of Art has done a complete about-face on contemporary art, at least in part in response to relentless pressure from the upstart institution it once ignored.

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.

A gallery is born

For Roger Salomon, a key early player in the MOCA saga, the rise of Uptown and the museum’s return to University Circle have taken too long.

“I see it as 30 years of frustrated hopes,” said the retired professor of English at CWRU and honorary member of the MOCA board. But he admits the story has turned out pretty well.

“It makes me feel marvelous,” he said.

Salomon has reason to feel good, because he is widely credited for having arranged the first encounter between Talalay and Sundell, which set MOCA in motion.

Talalay and Sundell came to Cleveland in the late 1960s when their husbands’ careers brought them to the area. Talalay’s husband, Anselm, was a brilliant Russian-born scientist and inventor. He came to Cleveland from New Haven, Conn., to become a vice president of research and development at the B.F. Goodrich Co. Industrial Products Division in Akron.

Nina’s husband, Michael Sundell, came from New York to teach Victorian literature at CWRU.

Salomon, who knew both the Sundells and the Talalays, thought it was natural that Marjorie, who had already run a small gallery in New Haven, might want to start one in Cleveland with Nina.

A key factor was Nina Sundell’s extraordinary family connection to the art world through her father, Leo Castelli, the most important New York art dealer of the day, and his ex-wife, the also highly influential art dealer Ileana Sonnabend.

Talalay, a glamorous, well-dressed woman known for her sharp wit and salty tongue, had already done business with Castelli through her previous gallery in New Haven. Yet Sundell said in a 2008 telephone interview that she and Talalay at first “regarded each other with profound suspicion.” They apparently got over it quickly and exploited their access to a unique supply of cutting-edge art.

The cultural climate they confronted in 1968 was chilly. The Cleveland Museum of Art had been holding its annual May Show of regional artists since 1919, but it paid little attention to contemporary art from outside the Western Reserve.

Art dealer Howard Wise had tried to establish a contemporary gallery in University Circle, but he gave up and moved to New York.

Contemporary-print dealer Art Feldman gathered patronsincluding Peter B. Lewis, then president and chief executive officer of Progressive Corp., the fast-growing auto-insurance company in Mayfield. But Feldman sold his stock privately, without holding exhibitions.

Oberlin College art historyprofessor Ellen Johnson built a powerful collection of contemporary work at the Allen Memorial Art Museum, but Cleveland remained fundamentally insular.

Devoted supporters
but few buyers

The New Gallery shocked Clevelanders with Warhol prints of Chairman Mao, props from performances by Rauschenberg and a now-famous stunt in which Christo wrapped the storefront itself and helped launch a career that later included wrapping the Reichstag building in Berlin.

Talalay and Sundell found few buyers at first.

“Even though they had really good stuff — very good stuff — they couldn’t get anybody to buy it in Cleveland,” said Cleveland native Agnes Gund, who went on to become a nationally respected arts advocate and president of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Yet the New Gallery gathered a coterie of devoted supporters that included Gund and the late Jeannette Dempsey, a sister of Philip Johnson, the famous Cleveland-born architect.

“When Nina and Marjorie came to town, we heard about the Castelli connection and we were very interested, and it became a big part of our lives,” said Hope Hungerford, a current MOCA honorary board member, who was then married to lawyer Andrew Dempsey, Jeannette’s son.

Sundell left the gallery and Cleveland in 1973 when she and her husband moved back East. In 2008, she said that her Cleveland years were “more fun than anything else I’ve ever done in my professional life, and as much fun as the best things I’ve ever done in my private life.”

After her departure, the New Gallery eventually morphed under Talalay’s leadership into the nonprofit Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art.

Talalay’s shows drew the wary attention of the formidable Sherman Lee, director of the Cleveland Museum of Art. He stalked out of the gallery in a silent huff after a visit to the frat house on Bellflower Road to see paintings by Julian Schnabel and a sound installation by Brian Eno.

“He came in, looked around and left very quickly,” said philanthropist Toby Lewis, who then manned the front desk as Talalay’s director of sales. “He was always rather intimidating. Nobody knew whether to go up and say, ‘Hello, Dr. Lee,’ or stay away.”

By snubbing Lewis, Lee ignored someone who soon became a respected arts impresario in her own right — and a generous donor to artistic causes.

After a couple of years working under Talalay, Lewis was invited by her ex-husband, Peter Lewis, to become the curator of the new art collection at Progressive Corp. Under Toby Lewis’ leadership over the following decades, Progressive amassed one of the leading corporate art collections in the country — one that focused entirely on contemporary art.

Toby Lewis has since become a major supporter of MOCA and of its new building. She donated $1 million to CWRU to surround the museum with a new plaza, which the university has named for her.

As for Peter Lewis, MOCA’s impact has had global implications. It was at a reception at the institution in the mid-1980s that Lewis met and befriended architect Frank Gehry.

That encounter led to Gehry’s unrealized plans for a lakefront skyscraper headquarters for Progressive next to Cleveland’s City Hall, along with unrealized and widely publicized plans for a vast house for Lewis in Lyndhurst.

Aspects of the Lewis house live on in Gehry’s concept for the 1997Guggenheim Museum branch in Bilbao, Spain, which touched off a global boom in cultural buildings designed by star architects.

Frustrated by failing twice to bring anything to fruition with Gehry in Cleveland, Lewis came back in the late ’90s with a $37 million gift to CWRU, which bankrolled half of the Gehry-designed building for the Weatherhead School of Management on Bellflower Road.

German artist Katharina Grosse talks about her four story high painting Artist Katharina Grosse of Berlin, Germany, talks about the creation of her four-story painting on the walls of MOCA’s newly completed uptown home at Mayfield and Euclid. The painting will always be a part of the building, because it will eventually be painted over. It can be seen from outside MOCA at night. Watch video

Collaboration is a family affair

Throughout the ’80s and early ’90s, Talalay ran the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art in collaboration with her husband, Anselm, in a hands-on manner that blurred work and home.Board meetings were held around the Talalays’ dining-room table in the modern-style interior of their house on Ludlow Road in Cleveland, just south of Shaker Square. After long days at B.F. Goodrich, Anselm Talalay painted gallery walls, took publicity photos or pasted up catalog pages.

“They didn’t put artists up in hotels,” remembers Kathryn Talalay, one of their three daughters, who was then visiting between semesters in college. “I would come home and expect to go to my bedroom, and my mother would say, ‘I’m terribly sorry, but an artist is in your bedroom.’ “

Lauren Talalay, Kathryn’s twin sister, remembers coming home from college to find the freezer full of fish that were to serve as props in a performance by a visiting artist.

The children never minded. They viewed their parents’ project as a duet that lay at the heart of their romance.

The center had a chance in the late’80sto createa permanent home when Peter Galvin, a real estate executive and a MOCA board member, arranged to buy a site from CWRU on the northeast corner of Ford Drive and Bellflower Road. The center then commissioned Cleveland architect Don Hisaka to design a 12,000-square-foot building, for which it started raising money.

Enlarge Special to The Plain Dealer Marjorie Talalay and Nina Castelli Sundell inspect Andy Warhol prints in an undated photo from the early years of their New Gallery in Cleveland. (MOCA Cleveland) MOCA Cleveland: The historygallery (6 photos)

But when Agnar Pytte became president of CWRU in 1987, he nixed the deal and bought back the land, which eventually became home to the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences.

A struggleto pull in visitors

The contemporary-art center pivoted and quickly leased space in the Galleria downtown from 1987 to 1990, while maintaining its presence in the house on Bellflower Road. In 1990, with the help of then-board President William Ginn, the center moved a third time, into the second floor of the former Sears store at the Cleveland Play House complex.

Despite a renovation designed by Philip Johnson that linked the Play House to the art center with a long corridor from one lobby to the other, the two institutions rarely collaborated and never created a cultural center of gravity in Midtown. The Play House sold its complex to the Cleveland Clinic in 2009 and moved downtown to the Allen Theatre complex in PlayhouseSquare in 2011.

Throughout the ’90s, the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art struggled as a virtual stand-alone destination. Attendance drifted as low as 11,000 during the final years of Marjorie Talalay’s tenure, which ended with her retirement in 1993. Anselm Talalay died in Cleveland in 1994 at age 82, and Marjorie died in New York in 2008, at age 87.

Gary Sangster, an art historian from Australia, succeeded Talalay for two years before the center’s board decided the relationship wasn’t working. Sangster went on to become director of the Contemporary in Baltimore, a nonprofit producer and presenter of contemporary art.

Realization of a dream

Arriving in 1996 as director after having led the Aldrich Museum in Ridgefield, Conn., Jill Snyder stabilized the center, renamed it Museum of Contemporary ArtCleveland and charted the path back to University Circle — while presiding over excellent exhibitions and programs that gradually pushed attendance up to 20,000 a year.

Highlights included a major show on Israeli photography, a retrospective on the German-born American sculptor Ursula von Rydingsvard and an installation in which Russian emigre artist Ilya Kabakov created a vast retrospective exhibition for a fictional 20th-century Russian artist named Charles Rosenthal and his supposed disciple, an equally fictional Ilya Kabakov.

By moving to University Circle, MOCA expects that it will more than triple its attendance to 65,000 and play a far more important role in the cultural life of Cleveland. To kick off its new home, MOCA Chief Curator David Norr has organized an exhibition of works by 16 artists from five countries, underscoring the museum’s international aspirations.

For Snyder, the opening on Monday is the realization of a hard-won dream after fighting to raise more than $30 million so far through two recessions and struggling to align Moussavi’s glittering ideas with MOCA’s financial means.

“It was hard,” she said. “It was hard because we had a noble and audacious vision — and one that many people felt we couldn’t achieve.”

Yet MOCA is now back in University Circle. If you stand in front of the museum at the corner of Euclid and Mayfield, you can look diagonally west across the intersection and see the spot on the far side of the Commodore Place apartment building where the long-demolished storefront once stood.

It’s only a couple of hundred yards away, but it took 44 years to cover the distance. Now that MOCA has made the trip, it no longer needs to wander.

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Next Monday, the Cleveland’s Museum of Contemporary Art will officially move into its new $27.3 million home on Euclid Avenue. Designed by Iranian-born and London-based architect Farshid Moussavi, the sophisticated, gem-shaped museum reminds visitors that Cleveland can still build the kinds of flashy cultural toys associated with bigger, wealthier cities.

MOCA Cleveland may make the loudest design statement, but it’s far from the only symbol of bold, 21st century urbanism in the University Circle neighborhood.

The neighborhood has seen a diverse set of investments, including high density residential projects, new medical facilities and academic buildings, even multiple public transit initiatives. University Circle now stands out as a diverse hub of activity in a city clamoring for such things.

From left to right: Uptown Development, Case Western’s Gehry-designed business school, the recently opened Siedman Cancer Center. Photos by Mark Byrnes

Anchored by a stop along the RTA’s HealthLine, a bus rapid transit route that connects East Cleveland to downtown, the Uptown Development Project is a new mixed-use development with apartments and retail. Most importantly, the development gives the former food desert a full-scale supermarket. Constantino’s Market opened earlier this year on the ground floor of Uptown Development, thanks in part to a “Healthy Food Financing” grant from the Department of Health and Human Services.

Blessed by a significant cluster of university, medical, cultural, and transit facilities, it is in a fortunate position to generate private sector development (the neighborhood has grown to support around 3 million visitors, 50,000 jobs and 10,000 residents) that many surrounding communities still cannot since losing their industrial base in the last century.

From left to right: An artfully designed parking garage at the new Siedman Cancer Center, a Case Western dorm, Euclid Tavern. Photos by Mark Byrnes

In fact, it’s understood by most locals that once you’ve reached the railroad underpass and the “Gas USA” station just before E 123rd, you’ve gone too far for your own good. When I visited earlier this year, my friend, a University Circle resident, insisted we turn around once we reached the underpass. On the walk back, he regaled me with a series of crime stories passed around among his Case Western peers.

It’s a jarring realization, particularly when you pass the colorful collection of new luxury town homes near the ominous “border” called Circle 118. They are separated by only a light rail station from 27 Coltman, a similar new housing complex. Past the Gas USA however, a cemetery, empty lots, and deteriorating homes begin to tell the more familiar story of urban life in Cleveland.

Circle 118, a recent luxury housing development in University Circle. Photo by Mark Byrnes.

Besides downtown’s recently reported housing shortage, University Circle’s success feels more of an anomaly than a sign of things to come. Population loss is the norm to the immediate north, east, and west of University Circle. Few cities in America have lost more people since the 1960s than Cleveland, with an overall drop of 17 percent in the last ten years.

But that is not to say that University Circle’s evolution is in vain. In many ways it’s a Rust Belt planner’s dream of a modern-day economic hub centered around eds, meds, and an exhaustive collection of cultural facilities. Some examples:

• Case Western maintains its high-ranking reputation around the country, emphasized a decade ago with the opening of a new business school designed by Frank Gehry. It has has also experienced one of the largest growths in endowment (393 percent) of any university in the last 20 years.
• Medical-related businesses continue to see growth with the nearby Seidman Cancer Center as part of University Hospitals. Tech incubators like BioEnterprise, launched as a collaboration between the Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals Health System, Case Western, and the Summa Health System, help generate economies of scale around its major employers.
• Some of the city’s best public transit connections can be found in the immediate area. The HealthLine, hosting multiple stops in the neighborhood, serves as a model for cash-strapped cities looking for better public transit along its major corridors. Last month, reconstruction began at Cedar – University station and plans are in place for a new station at Mayfield and E 119th. It will replace the current station on Euclid and E 120th, bringing riders closer to places like MOCA and Little Italy and further from Gas USA.

A promotional video for MOCA’s now sold-out opening night ceremonies this weekend.

Before next Monday’s official opening, MOCA Cleveland patrons will celebrate inside the new museum Saturday night, acknowledging the new era that the museum and its eye-catching home are about to embark on. For University Circle, it’s merely one piece of a neighborhood that keeps impressing in a city that, for the most part, still struggles to fight off its decline.

Top image: A rendering of the new MOCA Cleveland building, courtesy the museum.

first image
‘MOCA cleveland’ by farshid moussavi architecture, cleveland, ohio, USA
image © dean kaufman
all images courtesy of farshid moussavi architecture

designed by london-based farshid moussavi architecture, the ‘MOCA cleveland‘ has just opened in a neighborhood of cleveland, ohio.
one of the few in the country, the non-collecting art museum intends to become a catalyst for creativity and growth with changing
exhibitions and displays throughout the 34,000 square foot building. eliminating the need for permanent galleries, the main priority
of the design was flexibility to accommodate a great variety of media and genres within the four storeys. resting on a triangular site,
the geometric form begins with a hexagonal footprint and rises 60 feet to the square facet for the roof. entrances at all sides of the perimeter
allows the interior to be used in many ways. upon entering, visitors are confronted with a full-building height atrium, revealing the
angled exterior walls as it spans to the ceiling. guiding towards the lobby, cafe and shop with double-storey multi-purpose room for public events.

a grand focal staircase takes visitors to the upper levels, experiencing the structural system of the building and culminating with
a 6,000 square foot gallery at the top floor. without fixed partition walls, the space may be configured as needed with views towards
the plaza below.

exterior
image © dean kaufman

mirror-finish black stainless steel reflects the sky
image © dan michaels

doorway within reflective facade
image © dean kaufman

ground floor
image © dean kaufman

grand stair
image © dean kaufman

gallery
image © dean kaufman

gallery
image © dean kaufman

ground floor commons
image © dean kaufman

interior office
image © dean kaufman

exterior facing euclid avenue
image © dean kaufman

image © duane prokop / getty images

project info:

construction budget: $18.7 million
area: 34,000 ft2
project team:
design architect: farshid moussavi architecture (until june 2011 FOA)
executive architect: westlake reed leskosky
engineering services: westlake reed leskosky
facade engineering: arup facades

A Bold New Home for the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland