Some homecomings deserve a museum. The Columbus Museum of Art presents Clare Rojas: Returning, the first major hometown exhibition of Columbus-born artist Clare Rojas — on view September 18, 2026, through February 7, 2027.
The exhibition brings together more than 70 works made over the past fifteen years, spanning painting, sculpture, works on paper, and performance. It is a sweeping look at an artist who has continually expanded the boundaries of narrative abstraction and feminist image-making — and who, after years in Northern California, has come home to Ohio.
An artist of departures and returns
Born and raised in Columbus, Rojas built a cross-disciplinary practice bridging abstraction, folk imagery, feminism, ecology, spirituality, music, and storytelling. Returning treats homecoming as both a geographic event and a metaphor: cycles of memory, selfhood, and renewal run through the show, which is organized thematically rather than chronologically.
Visitors move through recurring motifs — birds, moons, suns, tides, flowers, and landscapes — that reflect the inner states of both maker and viewer. Rojas draws a visual line between the flat horizon of the Ohio heartland and the low coastal horizon of her former California home; migratory birds, symbols of departure and return, appear again and again. As a songwriter and musician, she also brings a lyrical sense of storytelling to the galleries.
Plan your visit
- What: Clare Rojas: Returning
- When: September 18, 2026 – February 7, 2027
- Where: Columbus Museum of Art, 480 East Broad Street, Columbus
- Curator: Anna Katherine Brodbeck, Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs
See columbusmuseum.org for hours and tickets. And note this: the museum offers free admission for visitors 25 and under — a perfect excuse to bring the next generation of Columbus art lovers.
Photo: Indrian at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (Columbus Museum of Art).
