Ordinary Miracles: Robert Glenn Ketchum’s Photographs of Cuyahoga Valley National Park
August 8, 2025 - January 25, 2026 | Fred and Laura Ruth Bidwell Gallery
A fan favorite of the Akron Art Museum collection, Robert Glenn Ketchum’s photographs have been displayed frequently over the years in smaller groupings, but Ordinary Miracles: Robert Glenn Ketchum’s Photographs of Cuyahoga Valley National Park will be the first solo exhibition of the artist’s work at AAM since the late 1980s. From 1986–1988, Ketchum documented what was then known as Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation Area (CVNRA) and is now Cuyahoga Valley National Park (CVNP). Ketchum aimed to make each of his CVNRA images a metaphor for larger themes behind the park’s existence, stating “To draw my readers into these pictures, and prevent the images from seeming specifically regional, I have attempted to create a new, more generic kind of photograph: an icon of the landscape, not a specific and documentary description. It is my intent that these pictures also sustain the idea of the Cuyahoga as a national metaphor, so the photographs have been made with the hope they will have a ‘universal’ sense about them.”