‘Infinity Mirrors’ opens as Cleveland becomes art hub
The wildly CLEVELAND — popular Yayoi Kusama “Infinity Mirrors” exhibition has tested all four museums it has visited so far on a twoyear, six-city tour.
The Cleveland Museum of Art, where the highly anticipated show that began Sunday, will be no different.
In addition to viewing more or less conventional sculptures, paintings and drawings, visitors queue up for quick dips inside Kusama’s mirror rooms, which offer endless reflections of colored lights and polka-dotted phalluses, balloons and pumpkins.
Visitors get 30 seconds a pop in each room — an interval determined by the host museum and the artist’s studio as a way to maximize the number of people who can see the show, without creating an experience that’s so brief as to be pointless.
Most visitors take time to grab a selfie or two before peering momentarily into reflections that approximate what it must be like to stand in the middle of the Milky Way, or the opening credits of a “Star Wars” film.
Then there’s a polite knock on the door and an attendant says it’s time for the next group of three or four people to have a chance.
Pulsing people with timed ticket entries through the exhibition in a controlled manner means organizing the exhibition layout like a security line at an airport, or queuing space at an amusement park.
It also requires a lot of manpower.
“In an installation like this, it takes 30 people to run it,” said Jeffrey Strean, the museum’s director of architecture and design.
“It’s like Cedar Point, where you have people lowering the bar on the ride before you go through it,” he said. “We have people manning each one of these (six) rooms to make sure they’re in and out in 30 seconds.”
How to get tickets
The Kusama show runs through Sept. 30.
General admission tickets ($30 for adults, $15 for children 6-17), will be on sale through the run of the show, but only online or over the phone. Go to clevelandart. org/Kusama or call 216-4217350. The Cleveland Museum of Art is in University Circle, 11150 East Blvd., Cleveland.
The museum doesn’t want visitors camping out every day to get same-day tickets, as they have at other venues.
The museum has sold more than 50,000 tickets so far, but it expects total attendance will be over 100,000 for the show, so plenty remain.
Sales of remaining tickets will be held every Monday at 9 a.m., starting July 16.
On July 16 only, the museum will sell tickets for all remaining weeks of the show, the museum announced Thursday.
On every other Monday after July 16, tickets will only be sold for the following Tuesday through Sunday.
With Front, Cleveland becomes contemporary art hub
The Kusama run at the museum coincides with the Front International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, the biggest regional exhibition on new art in the history of Northeast Ohio.
Front, opening July 14 through Sept. 30, will be on view at 18 museums and institutions in Cleveland, Akron and Oberlin, plus outdoor spaces. It includes work by 116 artists from around the world.
The Cleveland Museum of Art is devoting three of its major temporary exhibition galleries and other spaces to Front artists.
The overlapping shows mark the first time in the museum’s recent history — and perhaps its entire 102 years — that nearly all of its temporary exhibition galleries have been devoted to contemporary art.