Three New Sculpture Exhibitions Explore Memory, Place and Living Systems

Three experiential exhibitions opening June 20 feature new and site-responsive work by Noelle Choy, Jacklyn Brickman, and Malena Grigoli. The new exhibits span sculpture, installation, video, and living material to investigate memory, place, and the invisible forces embedded in everyday life. On view through August 22, the exhibitions reflect The Sculpture Center's ongoing commitment to supporting artists at pivotal moments in their careers while encouraging experimentation in the field of contemporary sculpture.

“Choy, Brickman, and Grigoli each bring a deeply felt attention to threshold spaces; between memory and presence, the cultivated and the wild, the past and what lingers in the built environment. Together they offer three distinct yet profound approaches to what sculpture can hold and ask of us,” said Grace Chin, Executive Director.

Noelle Choy: Adventurers

In Adventurers, Noelle Choy presents new and ongoing works that explore biographical fiction through precarious materials and their ability to hold fragmented memories within physical space. The exhibition traces how people, conversations, and everyday objects leave emotional residue, shaping both personal and collective acts of remembrance. By reexamining the preciousness of objecthood, the works retain the language of sculptural models, where ideas remain in motion and memories take material form.

An accompanying film, Wonders of the World, follows Choy, her brother, and her aunt as they retrace her mother's immigration from Taiwan to the United States. Moving through ordinary places—a bus stop, a restaurant, familiar streets—the film unfolds through a rhythmically candid and haunting narrative that becomes as much about her aunt, her mother, and their shared history.

Jacklyn Brickman: ARRIS | a vestige

ARRIS | a vestige explores care, memory, and the relationship between humans, plants, and place. Inspired by the interstitial corridor between The Sculpture Center and Lake View Cemetery, the project brings weeds gathered from East 123rd Street into a constructed environment where sculpture, sound, and projected video respond to visitors’ touch in real time through a collaborative biofeedback system.

Referencing the architectural term “arris”—the edge where two surfaces meet—and “vestige,” a trace of what once remained, the installation centers plants often dismissed or removed, questioning how ideas of value, belonging, and care are shaped. The work invites visitors into a contemplative, sensory environment that reflects on coexistence and the layered histories embedded within the landscape.

At the opening reception on June 20 at 6:45 PM, Brickman will lead a participatory sensory engagement in which visitors are invited to touch plants relocated from East 123rd Street and experience real-time biofeedback soundscapes and video projections generated by their contact.

Malena Grigoli: Genesis 1:29

In Genesis 1:29, Malena Grigoli animates material from the history of 12210 Euclid Ave—home of The Sculpture Center—specifically its 1970s occupant: a vegetarian restaurant that bore the exhibition’s titular name. Inspired by the restaurant’s signature freshly baked bread, Grigoli cultivated yeast in the gallery, summoning the invisible ecology of ambient yeast that accumulates in any space devoted to the practice of fermentation.

Using a long-ago-salvaged door from the building’s basement as both a cast for the cultivated yeast and a portal into the past, the work brings together fragments from the building’s history to explore the labor of inhabiting a space—an intangible yet enduring presence within its walls. The embodied energy of a structure, Grigoli suggests, holds space open long after its original use has ended.

Taken together, the exhibitions present three distinct but deeply resonant investigations into memory, place, and the invisible histories embedded in everyday life. Choy works through biography and material fragility to give form to fractured personal memory, Brickman engages living systems and sensory experience to question how care and belonging are assigned within a landscape, and Grigoli excavates the layered past of a single building to ask how the labor of inhabitation outlasts the people who performed it. Across practices and media, all three artists share a commitment to making visible what is too often passed over; the remnants that quietly shape the world around us.

About the Artists

Noelle Choy

Noelle Choy creates performative sculpture, objects, and video that seek counter-narratives in cultural mythmaking. She received a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at Socrates Sculpture Park, The Momentary, and Snug Harbor Cultural Center. Choy has received residencies from Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and fellowships from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, The Color Network, and Anderson Ranch Arts Center, among others. She is the recipient of the Seebacher Prize for Fine Arts and the Charlotte Street Foundation Visual Artist Award and Byron Cohen Award. She is currently Assistant Professor at Kansas City Art Institute.

Jacklyn Brickman

Jacklyn Brickman is an interdisciplinary artist and educator whose work entangles science fact with fiction to address social and environmental concerns through natural entities, processes, and technology. Her practice spans installation, video, and performance, with a focus on cross-disciplinary collaboration. Fellowships include the National Academy of Sciences, Chaire arts et sciences, the Folger Shakespeare Library, National Endowment for the Arts, and Erb Family Foundation. Brickman is Assistant Professor of Kinetic Imaging at Western Michigan University and resides in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Malena Grigoli

Malena Grigoli is a Cleveland-based artist working across writing, choreography, and image-making to articulate lived time, life cycles, interpersonal negotiations, and maintenance. Beginning in 2024, she directed the year-long project 9413 Sophia Ave, a choreographed deconstruction and performed maintenance of the built environment supported by the City of Cleveland’s Transformative Arts Fund. Grigoli currently serves on the board of SHED Projects in Cleveland, Ohio.

Exhibition Details

Noelle Choy: Adventurers

Jacklyn Brickman: ARRIS | a vestige

Malena Grigoli: Genesis 1:29

Dates: June 20 – August 22, 2026

Opening Reception: June 20, 2026, 5:30–8:00 PM

Participatory Sensory Engagement with Jacklyn Brickman: 6:45 PM

The Sculpture Center

12210 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, OH 44106

216-229-6527

sculpturecenter.org / @sculpturecenter

About The Sculpture Center

The Sculpture Center (TSC) in Cleveland, Ohio is one of the only cultural institutions in the United States dedicated solely to sculpture. Founded in 1989, TSC provides critical resources to sculptors along their journey through opportunities for creation, exhibition, mentoring, conversation and engagement. In the last five years, TSC has expanded the scale and scope of its programs and services, advancing a vision to become a regionally and nationally recognized cultural space for sculptors where creative ideas, experiences and community connect and flourish.

Recognizing that artists of all backgrounds are vital to envisioning a better world and contributing to the communities we want to live in, TSC supports Pre-Early Career, Early Career and Mid-Career artists through an expanded exhibition program. Since 1991, its keystone Revealed series has served as a catalytic platform for early-career sculptors, offering solo exhibition opportunities, honoraria, technical assistance and professional documentation at a critical inflection point in an artist’s career.

By prioritizing inquiry over market viability, TSC creates space for experimentation and risk-taking, enabling artists to test ambitious ideas that might otherwise be untenable. For more information, please visit sculpturecenter.org.