The Museum of American Porcelain Art has just launched their first off-site exhibit of Cybis porcelain, and the venue couldn’t be more appropriate: a local public library.
The Lee Road branch of the Cleveland Heights/University Heights library system, which was launched more than a century ago, moved into its current purpose-built location in 1968. Richard Barone, founder of the Museum, has long wished to mount off-site exhibits of porcelain in order to introduce these beautiful works of art to the larger Cleveland community.
Because so many of the Cybis sculptures were inspired by literature – and in many cases, by children’s stories – ‘Timeless Tales’ was a logical theme for this first exhibit. MAPA curator Carey Barone explained that the original intent was to have two exhibit cases: one in the Children’s section and the other in the main part of the library. However, when she visited the library in order to measure the display cases she found that only one had been allotted (the one in the main section.) This meant that the adult and children’s characters and stories were combined.
The upper shelf displays Lady Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, Eleanor of Aquitaine (who appears in Shakespeare’s Henry V), and Queen Guinevere (from Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and E.B. White’s The Once and Future King.) The original two-displays plan would have enabled the inclusion of Ophelia, Desdemona, King Arthur, Juliet, Camille, Jane Eyre and Beatrice as well.
The center shelf features Little Red Riding Hood, Peter Pan, Cinderella, Goldilocks and the companion sculpture Panda Bears.
The lower shelf contains Sleeping Beauty, Little Miss Muffet, Thumbelina, the first (pink) Rapunzel, and the retail colorways of The Prince and The Pauper. Although a two-case display would have allowed more storytime characters to be included, the heights of the two lower shelves are perfect for younger patrons.
MAPA hopes to mount additional off-site ‘theme’ exhibits in the future; a holiday collection would be fun, and there are certainly enough Cybis editions to fit that particular bill, including the ‘with-holly’ versions of multiple bunnies and bears as well as the ornament series. A fantasy-literature exhibit could center around novels such as Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn, Madeleine L’Engle’s A Swiftly Tilting Planet (for the Cybis pegasi) and Heather Fawcett’s Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Fairies as well as her two follow-up novels. An exhibit focusing on historical personages would span 30 centuries: from Nefertiti in 1300 B.C. to Mr. President in 1791 (George Washington holding the Bill of Rights) with accompanying fiction and nonfiction books for each.
The MAPA exhibit Timeless Tales will be on display at the Lee Road branch of the Heights Library, 2345 Lee Road, Cleveland Heights, Ohio for two months (July and August, 2025.) Detailed library information can be found here. Cybis sculptures and books are clearly a perfect combination!
Name Index of Cybis Sculptures
Visual Index (for human figures/busts only)
About the Cybis Reference Archive
What is Cybis?
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The Cybis Archive provides the most comprehensive range of information about Cybis ever compiled within a single source. It is not and never has been part of the Cybis Porcelain studio, which is no longer in business.
THE CYBIS ARCHIVE 