One Fine Show: “Ann Hamilton, still and moving • the tactile image” at the Cleveland Museum of Art

It’s impossible to know what’s being taught in American high schools these days, but I hope they’re still teaching photography classes with darkrooms, and that under those red lights students make pinhole cameras. Phone cameras and Instagram have made photography the dominant medium of the age, but capturing an image with one’s bare hands can change how you see everything. The first photo I took this way was an up-close imprint of the brick wall near the smoking area for goth students. I didn’t smoke then and wasn’t sure it would work. The result looked like the surface of another planet. It was blurry and chunked in ways that were unexpected but appealing.

The art of Ann Hamilton (b. 1956) often concerns itself with similar games of light and texture, and her new show at the Cleveland Museum of Art, “still and moving • the tactile image,” deploys her practice in a way that will appeal to anyone who has ever wondered about the off-limits sections of an institution. For this exhibition, Hamilton has used a handheld scanner to offer a fresh perspective on a group of objects in the Cleveland Museum’s collection that are rarely on display: small-scale figurative ceramics and crèche figures from the 1300s-1800s.

The resulting installation blows these objects up into wall-sized pigment prints. Being a New Yorker, I want to say that they remind me of the wheatpasted fashion advertisements you see in certain neighborhoods with these dolls trying a little too hard to look very cool. What’s true for anyone is that they have strange outfits and the downtown model’s contradictory combination of aloof intimacy. We’ve never seen these objects before and will never see them this way again, but the proportions and surfaces are so strange that we’re also never quite sure what we’re looking at or how the image was even created. These are old works that feel older thanks to the wrinkles on the paper, but the method of capture feels new. These hanging works are like strange tapestries from an alien culture.

The show’s catalogue reminds us that though Hamilton made these with a scanner, the term “photography” is derived from a Greek term that translates to drawing with light, and the book quotes an email from when she’s working on the project that certainly sounds like photographing a subject with sentience: “the process of making is one of circling/ setting out—turning—turning again/starting out again/and this project like others turns around and toward/as it finds its form/again and again.” The catalogue also features small photographs of the objects she chose, which hail from China, France, Germany and Italy. I appreciate the degree to which not much is said about these original objects, though they are fascinating and beautiful enough for their own catalogue. Instead, they are given over to Hamilton’s vision, which allows them to speak for themselves and for us to ponder the other wonders that might be hidden in the walls of the Cleveland Museum.

“Ann Hamilton: still and moving • the tactile image” is on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art through April 19, 2026.

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