June 12, 2015 — September 5, 2015
Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland








June 12, 2015 — September 5, 2015
Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland
Mary Ann Aitken, Derf Backderf, Cara Benedetto, Christi Birchfield, dadpranks, Kevin Jerome Everson, Ben Hall, Jae Jarrell , Harris Johnson, Jimmy Kuehnle, d.a. levy, Michelangelo Lovelace Sr., Dylan Spaysky, and Carmen Winant.
How to Remain Human continues MOCA Cleveland’s focused engagement with artists connected to Cleveland and the surrounding region, including neighboring cities in Pennsylvania and Michigan. It features emerging, mid-career, and established artists, working across a wide variety of media, who question and affirm humanness.
The exhibition’s title is a line from the late Ohio writer d.a. levy’s “Suburban Monastery Death Poem” (1968). Ardent, aching, and raw, levy’s poetry captured the struggle for freedom and expression during a tumultuous time in Cleveland’s history. Among the artists in How to Remain Human, there is a shared sense of the need to make, in order to interrogate life and claim space. They explore various ways of acting in and experiencing the world, questioning how we can go on, relate, and be.
Language and narratives are found in many of the works, presenting chronicles of the everyday and the urgent need to communicate. Thick paint, familiar objects, and engagements with the body give the exhibition a heightened sense of touch and physicality. Humor and nonsense become tools to playfully puncture life’s routines, habits, and trials. Together, the works tackle the complexity and intensity of being human: conflict, power, pleasure, folly, doubt, loss, skin, sex, home, money, hair, rage, romance, confusion, darkness, lightness, reaching, pushing, here, now, never, again, more, always.
with Rose Bouthillier, Associate Curator, and Megan Lykins Reich, Deputy Director