Columbus is welcoming one of its own home in the most colorful way possible. The Columbus Museum of Art presents Clare Rojas: Returning, the first exhibition of the Columbus-born artist in her hometown, on view in the Lower Level Walter Wing through February 7, 2027.
Born in 1976, Rojas built a celebrated career as a painter, sculptor and musician, spending much of it in the San Francisco Bay Area. Prompted by her recent move back to Ohio, Returning brings together more than 60 works of painting and sculpture in many scales, and takes the cyclical nature of life as its starting point — how we grow, care for one another and begin again.
Visitors will find Rojas returning again and again to beloved motifs: birds, moons, landscapes, flowers and figures drawn from folklore and the natural world. Inspired in part by ecofeminism, her work treats nature as a source of wisdom, and invites both quiet introspection and a warm spirit of community. It is personal and universal at once, and deeply rooted in the place where her imagination first took shape.
Curated by Katherine Brodbeck, Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs at CMA, the exhibition is included with general admission, and members receive free admission. Whether you are discovering Rojas for the first time or greeting a hometown artist at last, Returning is a joyful reason to spend an afternoon at the museum on East Broad Street.
Photo: Columbus Museum of Art — Clare Rojas, The Gossips (detail), 2025. Oil on linen. Museum Purchase, Derby Fund.
