The CMA’s special exhibitions help engage the public and tell stories that the permanent collection galleries cannot do alone. Supporting these exhibitions helps to offer consistently rich experiences that unite, engage, and represent one of the most prominent ways to connect individuals and communities to the museum.

Often featuring works on loan from other institutions and private collections around the globe, along with scholarship from an international cadre of peers and in partnership with our own curatorial experts, the CMA’s carefully chosen special exhibitions bring the world to our museum. Diverse cultures and histories from all periods take shape through challenging, scholarly, relevant, and innovative exhibitions that play a crucial role in northeast Ohio’s cultural vitality and in making the CMA one of the top art museums in the world.

CMA exhibitions forge strong emotional and intellectual connections between art and ideas to illuminate, fascinate, and inspire visitors. To achieve this, the museum makes a significant investment each year in special exhibitions. They help us make meaning in our lives and find connections in even our most difficult times. Above all, they advance the museum’s abiding mission to “create transformative experiences through art, for the benefit of all the people forever.

The CMA’s celebrated tradition of educational innovation spans the institution’s entire history and is rooted in its founders’ firm conviction that the museum should play a central role in the city’s cultural life. Since the board’s inaugural secretary, Hermon A. Kelley, declared, “This institution shall be a live educational force in the community and not a mere cold storage warehouse for works of art,” the breadth and superb quality of the encyclopedic CMA collection continues to be matched by the museum’s active commitment to public engagement, scholarship, and lifelong learning through the arts. This commitment, articulated in the museum’s ambitious mission “to create transformative experiences through art, for the benefit of all the people forever,” is an acknowledgment of the arts’ unique capacity to engender growth and inspire change as well as an enduring call to action.

The education department at the CMA encourages visitors to practice mindfulness, fosters creativity, and inspires generations of lifelong learners and museum goers. This impactful fund supports broadening audiences, studio classes, lectures, continuing education, distance learning, the museum’s partnership with Case Western Reserve University, and so much more.

The CMA’s conservation department holds a worldwide leadership position in the preservation and treatment of a wide range of art. Working in an 18,000-square-foot suite of state-of-the-art laboratories, the conservation department operates in one of the finest spaces in the country for analysis, study, and conservation of museum collections.

Art meets science in the museum’s conservation labs. Using simple hand tools and microscopes, as well as high-tech tools such as X-radiography and infrared reflectography, our conservators work with patience and precision to examine artwork and perform conservation treatments. Walking through the conservation suite on any given day, you may find a conservator closely examining a unique 15th-century engraving; carefully mounting a 6th-century Egyptian Coptic textile for display; working on an impressionist’s masterpiece to bring it as close as possible to its original state and artist’s intent; or preparing a fragile porcelain vase to travel within the building or across the world without harm from movement or environmental changes.

The combined resources of the library and archives serve to assist museum staff in researching and planning exhibitions, programming, publications, and acquisitions. In addition to research and archival work, our library also houses rare books, book preservation, digitization, and open access initiatives. Ingalls Library and Archives serves the general academic communities, museum members, and the public in advancing art historical research of a scholarly or personal nature.

The Ingalls Library and Archives is an indispensable resource of the CMA and one of the museum’s top strategic priorities. This fund supports their critical work, including such important initiatives as: endowing several needed positions in the library; funding a strategic initiative to digitize, catalogue, and add historic photonegatives of objects in the museum collection, important documents, and papers of Cleveland’s artists; and prioritizing the acquisition of research materials on diverse artists.