CLEVELAND, Ohio — Every artist has an origin story, but Derek Hess ’ starts in a place many Cleveland kids love: the dinosaur-hallowed halls of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History , or CMNH.

Before he was creating poster art for some of the world’s most intriguing bands; before the gallery shows and the cult-level devotion, before his linework became its own emotional language, there was just a 5-year-old kid staring up at dino bones and deciding—clearly, decisively— I’m going to be a paleontologist.

His new exhibition “Rock of Ages: The Evolutionary Art of Derek Hess” opening today (Friday, Nov. 21) and running through late March 2026 at CMNH, is both a homecoming and a full-circle moment.

It’s also a mammoth undertaking that, somehow, came together in around four months’ ti

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