Image: Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland
Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland will open ‘Jody Pinto: Body/Land’ on Aug. 28, presenting the first retrospective devoted to the artist’s five-decade practice. The exhibition will run through March 7, 2027, at the museum’s Cleveland venue and surveys work that spans sculpture, drawing, ephemeral outdoor installations, landscape interventions, and public art.
According to the museum’s exhibition text, Pinto emerged in the 1970s Land art movement and developed what she described as “living structures,” site-responsive works shaped by weather, visitors, and found materials. The retrospective traces her career from rape crisis activism and early excavations to later landscape and urban design projects, and it connects those strands through Pinto’s concept of “body/land,” which links bodily and environmental forms and systems such as veins and irrigation, hair and plant growth, and cycles of injury and healing.
The exhibition also foregrounds Pinto’s relationship to public space. The museum notes that, since the 1990s, she has completed more than fifty international public commissions and has explored municipal space as a form of public theater. That work includes bridges, gardens, parks, and transit systems, placing the retrospective at the intersection of sculpture, civic design, and site-specific practice.
‘Body/Land’ will restage several major installations and include Pinto’s experiments in drawing, plans for realized and unrealized works, and a new outdoor sculpture presented in partnership with Art Lot in Brooklyn, New York. The exhibition will also be accompanied by the publication of Pinto’s first monograph. moCa says the project is presented through Toby’s Prize, a special commission award made possible by Toby Devan Lewis.
The show is curated by DJ Hellerman, deputy director and senior curator, and Marie Catalano, independent curator. The museum’s newsletter described the exhibition as the first retrospective devoted to Pinto’s “groundbreaking five-decade practice,” and the website notes support from Margaret Cohen and Kevin Rahilly, along with the John P. Murphy Foundation.
Born in 1942 in New York, Pinto lives and works in New York. moCa’s artist biography says her work was featured in ‘Groundswell: Women of Land Art’ at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas in 2023 and in ‘Underground’ at MoMA in 2022–23. It also notes that her work has appeared in the Whitney Biennial and the Venice Biennale, and in exhibitions at Artpark, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Fabric Workshop and Museum, the New Museum, and the Queens Museum.
The museum’s exhibition page lists several public works by Pinto, including ‘Fingerspan Bridge’ (1987) in Fairmount Park, Philadelphia; ‘Tree of Life/ City Boundary’ (1992) at Papago Park in Phoenix; the redesign of Santa Monica State Beach and Palisade Park in Los Angeles (2001); Fort Lauderdale International Airport (2002); and ‘Land Buoy’ (2014) in Philadelphia. ‘Jody Pinto: Body/Land’ is scheduled for Aug. 28, 2026-Mar. 7, 2027.
