The Cleveland Museum of Art commissions new site-specific work by Teresita Fernández

CLEVELAND, OH.- The Cleveland Museum of Art announced today the acquisition of Soil Horizon(Cleveland), a site-specific commissioned work by acclaimed artist Teresita Fernández, whose work is characterized by an expansive rethinking of what constitutes landscape. Comprising two large-scale glazed ceramic wall murals, the work will be installed in the Jane and Jon Outcalt Family Concourse, connecting the museum’s Horace Kelley Art Foundation North Lobby with the Ames Family Atrium, beginning in February 2027.

The commission completes the transformation of the CMA’s Horace Kelley Art Foundation North Lobby and adjoining spaces, undertaken in 2024 to enhance the visitor experience while respecting the distinctive architecture of Marcel Breuer. The concourse was envisioned as a space where a new work of art would welcome visitors, provide a memorable artistic experience, and help transition them from the everyday world into the encyclopedic collections of the museum’s galleries. In its place at the CMA’s entrance, Soil Horizon(Cleveland) will be the first artwork that visitors encounter.

“Soil Horizon(Cleveland) reflects Teresita Fernández’s remarkable ability to respond to site, place, and architecture through her artwork,” said Nadiah Rivera Fellah, the CMA curator of contemporary art. “The work’s imagery is inspired by landscapes and vistas native to Ohio, and by the museum’s collection, while its luminous, ethereal quality offers a compelling counterpoint to the weight and heaviness of Breuer’s architecture.”

Soil Horizon(Cleveland) consists of thousands of tiny square ceramic tesserae that glimmer and transform as visitors move through the two floor-to-ceiling panels. The work’s title refers to a geological term describing the horizontal layers that make up the earth, from bedrock to the topmost layer of soil. As Fernández states: “Each layer, or ‘horizon,’ has its own characteristics and like a portrait of a place, demarcates the chronology of the land it constitutes while metaphorically suggesting what is buried, what is in transition, and what is yet to emerge.”

Fernández has spent over three decades unraveling the intimacies between matter, human beings, and locations. Through monumental public art, site-specific sculptural installations, film, and works on paper that are materially and historically driven, Fernández’s work questions and expands conventional notions of site and landscape.

Teresita Fernández’s work is characterized by an expansive rethinking of what constitutes landscape: from the subterranean to the cosmic, from national borders to the more exclusive psychic landscapes we carry within. Her luminous, sculptural works poetically challenge ideas about land and landscape by amplifying the powerful, emotional connection in how we imagine place, and by extension, one another. Fernández exposes the complex narratives that stem from distorted, colonial histories, elaborating on these themes in subtle ways that insist on intertwining beauty, the socio-political, the intimate, and the immense. Imagining the landscape with reciprocal sentience, Fernández has said, “you look at the landscape, but the landscape also looks back at you.”

Fernández is a 2005 MacArthur Foundation Fellow and the recipient of numerous awards, including a Creative Capital Award; Guggenheim Fellowship; the Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award; an American Academy of Rome Fellowship (AFAAR); and a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist’s Grant in Visual Arts, among others. Her works have been exhibited and collected both nationally and internationally including: the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA); Whitney Museum of American Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Menil Collection; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Pérez Art Museum Miami; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Spain; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; SITE Santa Fe; the Smithsonian American Art Museum; MASS MoCA; and Castello di Rivoli, Italy, among others. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.