MOCA Cleveland. Photo: Steven Litt, The Plain Dealer

CLEVELAND, Ohio – Contemporary art can be a tough sell in Northeast Ohio, especially when you charge admission to see it.

That’s one big reason why Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland is abolishing admission fees starting Saturday, March 16, when it opens a series of new exhibitions celebrating its 50th anniversary.

“Free admission was my dream,” Jill Snyder, MOCA’s director since 1996, said in an interview. “It lowers the barrier to participation, to entry, and is the right thing to do.”

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Snyder, head of Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, at the construction site of MOCA's new home Tuesday, November 1, 2011. Gus Chan, The Plain Dealer

By ditching admission, MOCA is joining the Cleveland Museum of Art, Spaces, the Transformer Station gallery and other local venues that have made Cleveland a free zone for art lovers. (The Cleveland Museum of Art charges admission for certain special exhibitions).

But Snyder and funders of the museum say free admission is just one part of a collection of 50th anniversary initiatives they’re calling “Open House.”

“Free admission is a passive action,” Snyder said. “It lowers a bar, but it doesn’t mean people feel they belong.”

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Nationally respected artist Hank Willis Thomas, co-founder of "For Freedoms," a series of artist-led town halls celebrating free speech, spoke during a For Freedoms event at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland in 2018. Photo: David Williams

The thrust of MOCA’s efforts is to keep it in the vanguard locally, nationally and internationally while increasing and diversifying an audience that has leveled at around 35,000 a year – short of where it would like to be. It believes Open House and other initiatives will boost attendance by 50 percent.

In all, the museum has raised $2.5 million to fund anniversary efforts that include Open House, rebranding its graphics, and a new annual global art prize named for donor Toby Devan Lewis that carries a $50,000 award.

Major anniversary gifts include $800,000 from Lewis for the prize, and a $500,000 grant from the Chicago-based Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation for an apprenticeship program for gallery attendants who will double as guards and educators.

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Museum of Contemporary Art building seen along Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, OH, Tuesday, October 10, 2017. (Marvin Fong / The Plain Dealer)

Other supporters include the Cleveland and Gund foundations. Free admission is supported by grants from the the Kelvin & Eleanor Smith Foundation, The Char and Chuck Fowler Family Foundation, and The Connor Foundation.

The changes at MOCA follow its relocation in 2012 to an architecturally dramatic new building in University Circle designed by Iranian-born London architect Farshid Moussavi.

Clad in shimmering reflective panels of black stainless steel, MOCA’s building occupies the point formed by the intersection of Euclid Avenue and Mayfield Road.

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Farshid Moussavi, architect of the brand new MOCA museum building, showing 3 different sides of the structure, on Sept. 16, 2012. Chuck Crow, The Plain Dealer

Despite initially positive reviews, market research by the museum shows that the building looks uninviting to some.

“Much as people find it striking and iconic, [the building] can feel formidable, a bit like a fortress because of its seamless skin,” Snyder said. “That together with the fact that contemporary art can be perceived as intimidating created some barriers to entry.”

Then too, MOCA is receiving less foot traffic than expected in the new Uptown District, a $150 million residential and retail redevelopment undertaken by University Circle, Case Western Reserve University and the private developer MRN Ltd.

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A 1978 poster from MOCA's 10th anniversary featured art by Roy Lichtenstein

MOCA previously provided free admission on the first Saturday every month and to visitors 18 and under.

Over the past year, it spent $200,000 to redesign its reception lobby to make it more welcoming.

It also plans to install a sign facing the Euclid-Mayfield intersection encouraging people to enter from that side. The main entrance, on the opposite side of the building, faces east toward CWRU’s Toby’s Plaza, named for Lewis.

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Megan Lykins Reich, deputy director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, spoke at a "For Freedoms" town hall at the museum in January. MOCA is launching a new 50th anniversary "Open House" initiative that includes free admission, additional public engagement and a specially funded program for young art educators. Photo: David Williams

In other moves, the museum is hiring LaTanya Autry, a curatorial fellow at the Yale University Art Gallery, as its first diversity fellow, whose mission will be to help the museum expand its audience.

MOCA will also offer more family-friendly programming and civic engagement activities.

The new Engagement Guide program funded by the Thoma foundation will involve 12 to 15 newly appointed apprentices who will work 20 hours a week at $12 an hour. They’ll replace work-study students who were paid less and worked fewer hours, and had fewer responsibilities.

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MOCA Cleveland director Jill Snyder, middle, chats with guests during the opening night party Saturday, October 6, 2012 in Cleveland. To her right (in pink) is the building's architect, Farshid Moussavi. (Joshua Gunter/ The Plain Dealer)

Snyder sees the new program as a way to provide security for exhibitions while removing economic and professional barriers for Clevelanders who aspire to careers in museums or cultural institutions.

Participants would be hired in proportions echoing the demographics of Cuyahoga County, which is 30 percent black.

They’ll receive training in visitor engagement, education and guarding art, and they’ll be connected with professional mentors among the museum’s board of trustees.

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MOCA Cleveland. Steven Litt, The Plain Dealer

The program echoes diversity, equity and inclusion efforts at other art museums around the country, including a new initiative announced in 2018 at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

The changes at MOCA also mark an important step in an institution with a history of being a local renegade.

The museum, a non-collecting institution focused on exhibitions, events and programs, opened late in 1968 in a former dry-cleaning storefront in University Circle as the for-profit New Gallery for Contemporary Art.

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Marjorie Talalay, left and Nina Castelli Sundell in the early days of the New Gallery for Contemporary Art, now MOCA Cleveland. Image courtesy MOCA Cleveland

It was the brainchild of art lover Marjorie Talalay and Nina Castelli Sundell, daughter of prominent New York art dealers Leo Castelli and Ileana Sonnabend, who first championed Pop Art and other cutting-edge movements in the 1960s.

In effect, the gallery became an outpost of the New York scene at a time when the Cleveland Museum of Art looked askance at contemporary Art.

The New Gallery, which later became the nonprofit Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, and then, MOCA, was the place where Clevelanders first encountered the works of Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Christo, Jasper Johns and Frank Gehry.

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MOCA Cleveland. Steven Litt, The Plain Dealer

Carl Thoma, founder and managing partner of the private equity firm of Thoma Bravo, said that MOCA’s new initiatives are placing it on the leading edge once again, but in workforce training and audience outreach in the art museum field.

He said he chose MOCA to receive the first grant from a new program at his foundation aimed at enabling mid-sized American art museums to enhance public engagement while reducing obstacles to careers in museums.

“It will make the arts better, more approachable and more engaging,” he said. “If we can get more people in the building to enjoy the art, every little bit helps.”

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Christo & Wrapped Paris NYC Jan 4,1986. Christo wrapped the storefront of the New Gallery for Contemporary Art in Cleveland, which later became MOCA Cleveland. © Abe Frajndlich 1986/2019

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Marjorie Talalay led the New Gallery, later the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, until her retirement in the early 1990s. Plain Dealer file

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Laurie Anderson at the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, 1978, © Abe Frajndlich

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The Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art occupied a former Sears store in Midtown on Carnegie Avenue from the early 19902 to 2012. Plain Dealer file

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Pop artist Jim Dine at the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art in 1984. © Abe Frajndlich 1984/2019

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Art dealer Leo Castelli in New York in 1992. Castelli was a leading New York dealer in the Pop Art era. His daughter, Nina Castelli Sundell, co-launched the New Gallery in Cleveland in 1968, later the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland. © Abe Frajndlich 1992/2019

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The Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art in 1998 in its Midtown location.