“A rose is a rose is a rose” is Gertrude Stein’s famous sentence that has always struck me as being both ridiculous and profound. If one repeats a word enough times it begins to lose its meaning, and adversely, repeated enough times, it forces one to look harder at what the word actually means.
A show is a show is a show. Except when it isn’t.
There are museum exhibitions, juried exhibitions, open calls, artist-run exhibitions, commercial gallery exhibitions, community exhibitions and student exhibitions. There are the shows that artists spend months applying for and the shows that seem to arrive with the institutional authority already attached.
And then there are the shows that tell us something about who has been given the power to define what matters.
I have been thinking about this while teaching a Studio Capstone course at Cleveland State University to students who are about to graduate and enter the dizzying wilderness of the art world. My role is to guide students through the professional practice needs that support their creative work.
We talk about artist statements. Presenting their work. Resumes. Documentation. Websites. Applications. Grants. Residencies. Portfolios. How to photograph their work. How to write an email inquiry and cover letter. How to introduce themselves to curators and explain their work succinctly. Our class discussions are about strategies to make their work visible and navigate ways for their work to get attention.
I find myself asking: Who gets to decide when an artist is worthy of attention?
For these soon-to-be graduates, the contemporary art world feels like a maze. Students have spent three years, post pandemic, learning how to make things and navigate the making and ideation processes within this sideways, AI-rattled world as they look into their uncertain futures and try to figure stuff out.
Many folks in my class are first generation students in their family to enter higher-ed. They need to become their own funders, entrepreneurs, archivists, photographers, writers, marketers, grant writers, publicists, web designers, administrators and advocates. They need to understand the language of the field and know where the doors are. New visual arts creatives traversing this new frontier also need to know which doors are actually open and who has the analog keys, swipe cards and the new-fangled face recognition access.
I have been working 40 years in the visual arts in Northeast Ohio as an artist, curator, teacher, arts activist, collector and co-founder of an artist-run organization. I’ve watched artists build institutions when institutions didn’t exist. I have watched Cleveland artists create their own opportunities, their own spaces, their own archives, and their own audiences.
Cleveland has always had an extraordinary abundance of artists. What we have not always had is an equal abundance of recognition, resources and institutional power and moments that VALUE artists.
This is where I find myself thinking about the Lake Effect exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Transformer Station and the conversations and social media threads that surrounded the exhibition.
A few core questions people seem to be asking include: What happens when an institution has the power to gather artists, place them within a particular context, and attach its authority to their work? What happens to the artists who remain outside that frame?
This isn’t an argument against museums. Museums preserve history, create context, introduce artists to new audiences, and tell us what a community believes is worth remembering. But precisely because museums have that power, the choices they make matter. When an institution presents artists, it doesn’t simply put artwork on walls. It says LOOK, be attentive to this work because it matters.
This is the part I keep looping back to with my students because I tell them that their job is to illuminate their own work.
But institutions also have the ability (and resources) to illuminate and invest with a much bigger, bad ass flashlight. Museums can give artists visibility that an Instagram account cannot. It can go all-in and give context that an open studio cannot. Museums can put an artist into a historical conversation. CMA has purchased work for their permanent collection directly from previous shows including art by Christi Birchfield, Dexter Davis, Michaelangelo Lovelace and Paul Tikkanen (just to name a few). All these artists were in different stages of their careers, and the museum purchases were a big reason for pivotal, game-changing moments.
CMA’s May Show ran for 75 years and was the longest-running model of regional recognition. It wrapped in 1996. A show I loved that partnered with CMA, moCa and SPACES was 1996’s Urban Evidence. It brought together regional, national and internationally recognized artists, spotlighting this region very literally, geographically moving people around the city. The last was Karamu Artists Inc.: Printmaking, Race, and Community, exhibited at the main museum in 2025. Major purchase prizes and acquisitions were made from these exhibitions, demonstrating tangible value to the artists included in them.
From these examples, an artist’s work can find its way into other collections. These opportunities introduce artists to new curators, collectors and writers, and grooms a cultural legitimacy by the institutional recognition that does not remain just a neutral gesture. The artists in Lake Effect felt proud and excited to be included. They should; they deserve those accolades.
As far as the museum goes, it seemed to present from the onset a confusing paradox of decisions, from its thematic focus of the naming of exhibition, opting out of a bold public opening, and withholding who juried the show (six unnamed CMA staffers). The show was marked by hesitation unrelated to the art on display. This created an underwhelming roll-out that withheld the much-deserved fanfare and celebration that the artists truly deserved.
CMA’s Transformer Station has an opportunity here to further investigate and experiment with the region—exploring how recognition, investment and context can make the exhibitions more meaningful and purposeful that value both the artist and the institution.
Many fantastic shows have occurred these past two years at the Transformer Station, all mined from the celebration of regional art and activity. Those shows have also been undersupported and underpromoted to the public. This leads me to wonder, what is in store for CMA’s Transformer Station space?
This show was not just a show. Maybe this is where Stein’s rose comes back. This show could have been a sparkling, game-changing moment that these talented artists should have received. For my students, it is what can be aspirational as a credential or a career-changing moment. It is a line on a resume that suddenly makes the next curator take notice. For an emergent artist figuring out how to traverse their futures with possibility (particularly in their hometown), the difference is between being seen and being recognized. That is the institutional privilege we should be willing to talk about—not as an accusation, but as a condition.
This is what has made teaching this Capstone class unexpectedly humbling for me. I came into the semester thinking I was going to teach professional practice as I learned it. Instead, my students have made me think more deeply about the profession itself. What is your value? What is your contribution? How has it changed? What makes your work important? How will you communicate it? How will you get it into the world?
Do institutions need to ask a few questions of their own? For sure! How are they communicating their value? Whose work are they making visible? Who are they inviting into the conversation? Who is missing? Who gets to define what Cleveland’s contemporary art history will be?
One thing I do know is that Cleveland artists are remarkably resourceful. They make spaces, form collectives, organize exhibitions, publish, teach one another, share equipment, start nonprofits, build archives and, most importantly, create communities. Lake Effect, and other shows like it, could do this too. But it can’t be airtight and needs discussion. If Lake Effect was intended to take the temperature of Cleveland’s art community, perhaps this would be a good time to sit down with the community and take their temperature, bringing in yet another wave of visibility and dialogue to the show.
Artist don’t wait for permission—they just do it. Permissions, however, still seriously matter when it comes to the institutions that have the resources and authority to provide them.
Not all artists deserve a museum exhibition, but these artists did—and it should have been celebrated like any other exhibition presented at what is regarded as one of the best museums in the world. The question is whether the ecosystem surrounding our artists creates enough pathways for discovery, experimentation, risk, dialogue and recognition.
Because if the only pathway to significance is institutional validation, we have built a very narrow road.
I keep returning to Stein. A rose is a rose is a rose. An artist is an artist is an artist. The art comes before the resume, the fellowship, the museum collection, the gallery representation, the residency. There is an artist making something at the beginning, middle and late stages of their careers because they have something they need to investigate, understand, question and share.
Our job—as art exhibit visitors, art lovers, teachers, curators, collectors, museums, galleries, critics, arts organizations and fellow artists—is not simply to determine who has already arrived. It is to pay attention to who is arriving because Cleveland’s next generation of artists are already here.
They are making the work, building the websites, writing the artist statements, applying for the grants, scratching their heads in their studios wondering if anyone is listening. And they are watching—that a show is not just a show. They want to know who gets the show? Who gets seen? Who gets remembered and who gets to become part of the story?