The Cleveland Museum of Art has acquired Soil Horizon (Cleveland), a site-specific commission by artist Teresita Fernández, in the form of two large-scale glazed ceramic wall murals. The work will be installed in the museum's Jane and Jon Outcalt Family Concourse, beginning in February 2027. The museum announced the acquisition this week, describing the work as a site-specific commission created for the concourse.

The murals are composed of thousands of tiny square ceramic tesserae arranged across two walls, and they will visually and physically connect the museum's Horace Kelley Art Foundation North Lobby with the Ames Family Atrium. The acquisition marks the final phase of a renovation project designed to improve movement between those two spaces.

The North Lobby itself was renovated in 2024, and the new commission completes that sequence of improvements, giving the museum's main circulation route a work of art made specifically for it. Fernández is known for work that rethinks landscape through material, and the Cleveland commission extends that inquiry into architectural space. Tesserae is the term for the small tiles used in mosaic work, and the Cleveland murals rely on thousands of them to build their surfaces.

Fernández received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2005, and her work appears in major collections across the United States and Europe. The installation is scheduled for February 2027, after which the concourse will serve as both a passage and a destination in its own right. The murals will give visitors an encounter with her practice at architectural scale, in a space every museum visitor passes through, rather than in a gallery they must choose to enter.