COLUMBUS, OH.- The Columbus Museum of Art announced the reopening of the Pizzuti Collection of CMA in the city’s Short North district. The Pizzuti Collection of CMA was temporarily shuttered by the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020. It reopened to the public on Saturday, Aug. 28 with new operating hours of 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Friday through Sunday.
The reopening features two new exhibitions, along with the installation of a favorite work from the CMA Collection, Nocturne Navigator by Alison Saar. On the third floor, the Museum features Bruce Robinson: Flutterby, a solo presentation of painting and sculpture by the long-standing Columbus-based artist and educator. The exhibition presents a range of the artist’s shaped plywood paintings and assemblages that address movement and the body, drawing especially on African American history, accomplishments, and experience.
The main level of the Pizzuti Collection of CMA features a solo exhibition by multidisciplinary artist Nina Katchadourian. An immersive and deeply personal work about resourcefulness, hope and creative capacity under duress, Katchadourian’s To Feel Something That Was Not of Our World is fitting as the museum and the world emerge from crisis. In June 1972, the Robertson family was cast adrift in a lifeboat and dinghy when a pod of orcas sank the schooner Lucette on which they lived. Their remarkable tale of survival was first recounted in Dougal Robertson’s bestselling “Survive the Savage Sea” (1973), a book that has fascinated the artist since childhood. For this project – which was developed during the pandemic – Katchadourian interviewed the family’s oldest son, Douglas Robertson, over a period of 38 days that corresponded with the timeline of their harrowing ordeal.
Featuring Katchadourian’s life-size paper models of an orca, as well as every animal the Robertsons caught and ate, To Feel Something That Was Not of Our World invites viewers into a personal-museological exhibition of videos, sculptures, photographs, drawings, text message exchanges and excerpts from the nearly 50 hours of audio recordings. The galleries, painted deep blue, become a vessel for the story of the shipwreck and the intimate conversation between Robertson and Katchadourian. At a moment when so many have endured loss, isolation and uncertainty, To Feel Something That Was Not of Our World is an inspiring story of connection, creativity and endurance.
Katchadourian's work is in public and private collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Blanton Museum of Art, Morgan Library, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Margulies Collection, and Saatchi Gallery. She has won grants and awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation, the Tiffany Foundation, the American-Scandinavian Foundation, Grönkvistska Foundation, and the Nancy Graves Foundation. Her repertoire of work includes video, performance, sound, sculpture, photography and public projects. Katchadourian lives and works in Brooklyn and Berlin, and she is a Clinical Full Professor on the faculty of NYU Gallatin. She is represented by Catharine Clark Gallery and Pace Gallery.
