Curator-Led Tour of Clare Rojas: Returning

Jess Xiao Long, curatorial associate at the Columbus Museum of Art, is leading a guided tour of Clare Rojas: Returning on Thursday, December 10, from 6 to 7 PM in the Lower Level Walter Wing. It's a good way to get a closer look at the show, which is the first major hometown exhibition for Rojas, a Columbus-born artist who spent much of her career in Northern California before moving back to Ohio.

Rojas works across a few different mediums—painting, sculpture, installation, and music—and her practice is rooted in her Peruvian heritage. She draws on abstraction, folk imagery, feminism, ecology, spirituality, and storytelling, and the exhibition brings together more than 70 works from the last fifteen years. The show is curated by Anna Katherine Brodbeck and is hung thematically rather than chronologically, so you'll see pieces from different periods side by side. Birds, moons, suns, tides, flowers, and landscapes recur throughout as symbols of memory, selfhood, and renewal.

The tour is free with registration. The exhibition itself runs from September 18, 2026, through February 7, 2027, so if you can't make the tour, you've still got plenty of time to see the work on your own. It's supported by the Charles Kleibacker Endowed Fund for Excellence, the Scantland Family, Girlfriend Fund, and Everything But The House.