Ed Bereal: More Magic 

September 2025-January 2026 | Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, Ohio

Curated by William Morrow, Independent Curator 

This exhibition aims to amplify the dynamism and breadth of Ed Bereal’s career as a draftsman, painter, sculptor, performative artist, archivist, and teacher, with particular focus on major works from the last 20 years. Active since the 1960s, Bereal’s large-scale assemblage sculptures, ongoing self-portrait series, and paintings continue to push the boundaries of medium and categorization. His perpetual cross-referencing of genres, politics, and representation in art IS (and always has been) an unapologetic commentary on the tensions, contemporary conflicts, and sociopolitical issues that do not fit squarely within the status quo. His aesthetic sensibilities are equally divergent in the range of influences from his childhood fascination with Norman Rockwell, the lyrical innovations of jazz legends like John Coltrane, the rawness of abstract expressionist painters, and his love for the historical portrait painter John Singer Sargent. The exhibition will also introduce to audiences archival footage of Bereal’s wildly innovative theater troupe and black radical collective that performed political satire in Los Angeles between 1969 and 1975. The exhibition will explore, for the first time, Bereal’s archival recordings and interviews with legendary artists and musicians in Los Angeles from the 1960s and 1970s. Bereal’s inclination to make work that stops you in your tracks and makes you question what you are seeing is at the heart of this exhibition and what makes Ed Bereal: More Magic profoundly urgent and necessary. In a recent interview, Bereal refers to his desire to break down barriers between folks with a difference of opinion and bridge the gap between artworld insiders and the everyday Joe as the “magic.” Bereal was a university teacher from the 1960s until his retirement in 2007. Still actively making work well into his 80s, Bereal continues to teach us how to see the world or to embrace what his teacher Robert Irwin referred to as the “illusionary space.”

More information at the CAC