Canton Museum of Art will observe President’s Day with free gallery admission and art activities. CMA will be open from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. on Monday, February 19, 2018 with soap carving and other art activities for all ages.

Exhibitions on view during President’s Day include:

Elijah Pierce: An American Journey
An American Journey explores the work of self-taught, American folk artists of the 20th century, Elijah Pierce (1892 - 1984). Pierce was a prolific African American wood carver known for his brightly painted sculptural panels illustrating biblical stories, moral lessons, historical events, and images from popular culture - a landscape of wood-carved art that is unlike any in America. This exhibit focuses on 40 major works. Featured in the exhibit is Pierce's most ambitious carving, "Book of Wood" (1932), consisting of seven panels with 33 scenes illustrating the years Christ lived on the earth, as well as works depicting segregation, the Vietnam War, Watergate, and Civil Rights, among others.

African American Masterpieces: Permanent Collection Highlights
African American art is a comprehensive term describing the visual arts of the American black community. In the past, African American art was expressed through basket weaving, small drums, quilting, pottery, painting, and woodcarving. After the Civil War, African American works were slowly accepted in American culture - however, their art was better received in Europe than in America. Today, most major cities have developed museums devoted to African American artists. Important collections of African American art are becoming more prevalent, and this exhibition celebrates the works from the Canton Museum of Art's permanent collection. In conjunction with the woodcarvings of Elijah Pierce, this exhibition showcases paintings and ceramics created between 1945 and 2010.

Engraved Fields: Jack McWhorter
Jack McWhorter refers to his most recent set of paintings collectively as 'engraved fields.' The reference is an apt one in the sense that his paintings are fields of a kind, articulated with a painterly calligraphy describing poetic marks. Looking at his paintings is to encounter places where the mysterious, the metaphorical, and the mundane come together for the viewer through expressive brush strokes. On one level, his paintings function as models of connectivity, arrivals, or snapshots of structures and relationships in flux, carrying the evidence of paths that led to their destination. Working up his paintings, they build into overall structures with inseparable components. Jack conjoins various series of procedures to develop visual relationships, including space/scale, and figure/ground.

Fire and Water: Ceramics and Watercolors
Do Fire and Water mix? They do at the Canton Museum of Art. An art museum is much more than a building. It isn't built simply with bricks, mortar, and concrete. It is built with a love of art, a commitment from a community, and the hope that the works of art inside can inspire future generations. Through the Canton Museum of Art's focus on American watercolors and ceramics, CMA has selected a unique identity among museums in Northeast Ohio. Building a strong, vital collection is central to living up to our commitment to the community, and building a lasting legacy for the future. And so, through the fires that built our ceramics, and the water that mixed with color on a palette, we build our collection, and we share these amazing artists and works to inspire visitors, both in the galleries and online.