David Bowie Is Coming to MCA Chicago

Special Announcement

(Chicago) -- The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago has been announced as the US venue for the world tour of the "David Bowie is" exhibition, organized by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 

David Bowie is

MCA Chicago: September 2014 - January 2015  

David Bowie is presents the first international retrospective of the extraordinary career of David Bowie -- one of the most pioneering and influential performers of our time. More than 300 objects, including handwritten lyrics, original costumes, photography, set designs, album artwork, and rare performance material from the past five decades are brought together from the David Bowie Archive for the first time. The exhibition demonstrates how Bowie's work has both influenced and been influenced by wider movements in art, design, theater, and contemporary culture and focuses on his creative processes, shifting style, and collaborative work with diverse designers in the fields of fashion, sound, graphics, theatre, and film. The exhibition's multimedia design introduces advanced sound technology by Sennheiser, original animations, and video installations to create an immersive journey through the artistic life of one of the most iconic figures of our time, David Bowie.

MCA Chicago: "Color Bind" Opens + Curator Announcement

COLOR BIND: THE MCA COLLECTION IN BLACK AND WHITE    November 10, 2012 - April 28, 2013          Marilyn and Larry Fields Endow MCA Curatorship Madeleine Grynsztejn, Pritzker Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, announced a $2 million gift from Marilyn and Larry Fields to endow the MCA Curator position currently held by Naomi Beckwith. Color Bind: The MCA Collection in Black and White is the first collection-based exhibition curated by Naomi Beckwith, whose new title is Marilyn and Larry Fields Curator at the MCA Chicago.

Color Bind: The MCA Collection in Black and White Works of art using a single color has been a major strategy for artists throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, from Ad Reinhardt's mid-century black paintings to Imi Knoebel's contemporary forms that attempt to imagine infinitude. Color Bind: The MCA Collection in Black and White, which runs from November 10, 2012 to April 28, 2013, investigates the museum's rich collection through one of art history's basic formal lenses: the use of the colors black and white. Color Bind looks broadly at the MCA Collection to show how color can be used literally, formally, and metaphorically in art, and to reveal how formal considerations are often rooted in social issues. Many artists represented in the exhibition, such as Robert Ryman, significantly limit their palette or produce works of one color in order to explore and emphasize the most basic formal aspects of art making, such as line, color, and technique. Beyond these formal aspects, artists such as Richard Serra and Félix Gonzáles-Torres use minimal color tones as a critical take on art's representational role. Other artists intentionally use specific techniques combined with a black-and-white palette as a method of introducing social and ethical dimensions into art practice. For example, Raymond Pettibon, Marlene Dumas, and Howardena Pindell appropriate the inky form of newspapers and comic books as a way to comment on conflict and violence. Kara Walker adopts 19th-century silhouette forms to present racially exaggerated bodies, and Glenn Ligon, who does the same in his print series, also uses the monochrome canvas in his paintings as both a metaphor and a foil for depictions of race. Artists such as Bruce Nauman and Barbara Kruger use text to demonstrate how basic language can be co-opted into polemics, or "black-and-white" forms of discourse. With a variety of works in all media, Color Bind considers the ways that the words 'black' and 'white' evoke both simple formal notions and metaphors for race, politics, and historical movements. Set to coincide with the US elections, this exhibition calls attention to the ways seemingly impartial formal terms assume moral dimensions that, in turn, complicate and politicize the very works assumed to be neutral. Marilyn and Larry Fields Curator: Naomi Beckwith Madeleine Grynsztejn, Pritzker Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago, has announced a $2 million gift from Marilyn and Larry Fields to endow the MCA Curator position currently held by Naomi Beckwith. In recognition of this significant gift, the MCA has established the "Marilyn and Larry Fields Curator" endowment, naming this curator's position. "This tremendous gift is a tribute to the Fields and their extraordinary support for the MCA and their long demonstrated passion for curators and their work," said King Harris, Chair of the MCA Board of Trustees. "What is most rewarding about this position being named by Marilyn and Larry Fields is that they both have had a significant history of supporting curatorial work," said Madeleine Grynsztejn. "Even prior to Larry's tenure as an MCA Trustee, he and Marilyn invested in our collection and in the work of our curators who are our thought leaders and creative engines of the museum. We are very honored by this generous gift from the Fields." MCA Trustee Larry Fields said, "We are delighted to be able to make this gift to the MCA. It is very fitting that the first Marilyn and Larry Fields Curator is Naomi Beckwith, an incredibly intelligent and talented curator who is just beginning her career at the MCA, but has already shown remarkable scholarship as a curator who is energizing the museum." "I am thrilled and grateful to Marilyn and Larry for their early and ongoing support, and for this gift, said Naomi Beckwith. "It's an amazing validation of the work that I do on a daily basis while also making an investment in the MCA's future programming. I'm so proud to carry their name into the art world." Marilyn and Larry Fields are avid and knowledgeable art collectors who are very supportive of the MCA and Chicago's art community, as well as the national and international art world. At the MCA they've supported numerous exhibitions, most recently Phantom Limb: Approaches to Painting Today, Rashid Johnson: Message to Our Folks, and This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s. The Fields have also given numerous significant works to the collection, including Alec Soth's Charles(from Along the Mississippi series), (2004) and Daniel, Niagara Falls, Ontario (2004); Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla's Ruin (2005); Thomas Ruff's zycles 3065 (2008); Rivane Neuenschwander'sFound Calendar (2002); Trisha Donnelly's Untitled (Leopard) (2005); Paul Pfeiffer's Study for the Morning After the Deluge (2001) and Memento Mori (2004); Eve Sussman's The Rape of the Sabine Women (2006); Yang Fudong's City Light (2003), and Leslie Hewitt's Untitled (2007) in honor of Naomi Beckwith. Larry Fields has been a member of the MCA Board of Trustees since 2005 and serves on the Executive and Collection Committees. Marilyn has been involved with the MCA Chicago since 1999 when she became a member of the Woman's Board. She served as President of the Woman's Board from 2004-07, during which she spearheaded the Family Education Initiative that engages volunteers in the MCA's family education programs. She most recently co-chaired Vernissage, the MCA benefit that kicked off the EXPO Chicago art fair. ______________________________________________________________________________________     Images: Luisa Lambri, Untitled (Barragan House, #08A), 2005. Collection Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, restricted gift of Verge: The Emerging Artists Advisory Group of the MCA and Bernice and Kenneth Newberger Fund. © Barragan Foundation, Switzerland. Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago. Barbara Kruger, Untitled (We construct the chorus of missing persons), 1983. Collection Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, restricted gift of Paul and Camille Oliver-Hoffmann. Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago. Marilyn Fields, Naomi Beckwith, and Larry Fields. © MCA Chicago.

BMO Harris Bank Chicago Works - Laura Letinsky

BMO Harris Bank Chicago Works Laura Letinsky February 7 - April 17, 2012

In February, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago presents the second exhibition in the Chicago Works series with the work of Laura Letinsky. Letinsky is known for elegantly composed still-life photographs that engage with sentiments of desire, fulfillment, and loss, as well as the fleeting nature of time. For her exhibition, Letinsky presents a new body of photographs, Ill Form and Void Full, which opens on Tuesday, February 7, and runs through April 17, 2012, and is curated by MCA Pamela Alper Associate Curator Julie Rodrigues Widholm. Recently, Letinsky's studio-based practice has evolved in a new direction that incorporates photographs - from magazines as well as her own and others - to make images that play with the perception of space in her still-life compositions. Actual objects, such as papaya, cherry pits, silverware, and ripped paper, along with images taken from art reproductions as well as decor and cooking magazines, are carefully arranged, resulting in a disorienting collage within the photograph. By working with pre-existing images, produced by a culture that also consumes them, Letinsky is able to shift, connect, and delight in the process of making meaning. She has long been interested in the genre of still lifes because of the way it indicates a societal trend towards material things and stands in for the psychological and the emotional, as well as for politics and ideology. Laura Letinsky is a professor and Chair of the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago, Born in Winnipeg, Canada, she has a BFA from the University of Manitoba (1986) and a MFA from Yale University (1991) and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000. She has exhibited widely including exhibitions at the Renaissance Society, Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography; Casino Luxembourg; Galerie m Bochum, Germany; and Nederlands Foto Institute. Chicago Works is a series dedicated to artists of all generations, and at various points in their careers, living and working in Chicago. The exhibition series, which launched in November 2011, presents new bodies of work by four artists each year.

Dieter Roelstraete

DIETER ROELSTRAETE Named New Manilow Senior Curator at MCA Chicago

Michael Darling, James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago, announced today that Dieter Roelstraete has been appointed the new Manilow Senior Curator at the MCA. Roelstraete is currently the Curator of MuHKA, the Museum of Contemporary Art (Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst) in Antwerp, Belgium, where he has organized large-scale group exhibitions and monographic shows. He will assume his new responsibilities at the MCA in February 2012. "Dieter is a wildly productive and extraordinarily smart curator who has addressed a wide range of art -- geographically, generationally, materially -- in his writings and exhibitions over the past several years, says Darling. "We felt his range of knowledge and broad curiosity would be perfect for the MCA in our attempt to cast as wide a net as possible in seeking out the most compelling art from around the world. Importantly, I first started hearing about him from artists who found in him a sympathetic and intelligent translator of their projects, and that kind of endorsement is very important to us. He brings with him an international network of colleagues and collaborators which will extend the MCA's reach far beyond Chicago; but at the end of the day, he is also a really charming person who we are all very much looking forward to working with." Originally trained as a philosopher at the University of Ghent, Belgian-born Roelstraete has worked at the MuHKA since 2003. His curatorial projects there include Emotion Pictures (2005); Intertidal, a survey show of contemporary art from Vancouver (2005); The Order of Things (2008); Auguste Orts: Correspondence (2010); Liam Gillick and Lawrence Weiner - A Syntax of Dependency (2011); A Rua: The Spirit of Rio de Janeiro (2011) and the collaborative projects Academy: Learning from Art (2006); The Projection Project (2007); and All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (2009). He is currently preparing a retrospective of Chantal Akerman, opening at MuHKA in February 2012.    In 2005, Roelstraete co-curated Honoré d'O: The Quest in the Belgian pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale. He has also organized solo exhibitions of Roy Arden (Vancouver Art Gallery, 2007), Steven Shearer (De Appel, Amsterdam, 2007), and Zin Taylor (Ursula Blickle Stiftung, Kraichtal, 2011), as well as small-scale group shows in galleries and institutions in Belgium and Germany.    Roelstraete is an editor of Afterall and a contributing editor to A Prior Magazine, and has published extensively on contemporary art and philosophical issues in numerous catalogues and journals including Artforum, Frieze, and Mousse Magazine. He is one of the founders of the journal FR David and a tutor at De Appel in Amsterdam. In 2010, his book Richard Long: A Line Made By Walking was published by Afterall Books/The MIT Press, and a volume of his poetry will be published by ROMA in May 2012. He lives in Berlin with his wife Monika Szewczyk.