Profound changes in demographics, modes of cultural participation, and approaches to social interaction and community creation are making accessible, inclusive and diverse cultural institutions more possible and more necessary than ever. What does an architecture of participation look like at a civically-minded, contemporary art museum? Following an introduction by MCA Pritzker Director Madeleine Grynsztejn, museum advisor and writer Elaine Heumann Gurian and artist Mark Bradford address the topic participation as it relates to museums, artists and audiences. The event then turns to discussion as both audiences and speakers respond to the ideas presented.

Ben Russell is a media artist and curator whose films, installations, and performances foster a deep engagement with the history and semiotics of the moving image. Formal investigations of the historical and conceptual relationships between early cinema, ethnography, and structuralist filmmaking result in immersive experiences that reveal an ongoing concern with communal spectatorship and ritualistic performance. For his UBS 12 x 12 exhibition, Russell presents a site-specific installation of the most recent installment of Trypps, a series of seven films that the artist describes as "an ongoing study in trance, travel and psychedelic ethnography." Trypps #7 (Badlands) (2010) charts, through ...

With an unyielding interest in the formal explorations and history of abstraction, Carrie Gundersdorf's drawings and paintings reflect her interest in how line, form, color, and spatial compositions can be derived from other source materials, concerns similar to modernist artists such as Ellsworth Kelly and Piet Mondrian. Her work articulates light spectrums as well as the progress of stars and planets through abstract compositions consisting of bars of color against atmospheric backdrops, taken from reproductions of astronomical photographs in books. Gundersdorf says, "My drawings and paintings refer to astronomical images that are created by time-lapse photography, spectroscopes, and computer-enhanced ...

Drawing from George Bernard Shaw's classic play Pygmalion, with a Busby Berkeley twist, visitors may perform in short, scripted scenes playing the role of Henry Higgins, Eliza Doolittle, or a supporting character. On July 27, at 7 pm, a large-scale Busby Berkeley dance scene utilizing audience members is performed and filmed on the MCA Terrace. During the week, audience members are invited to act and are given cards with a description of a scene, along with a minimal costume that represents the character. Scenes are edited by Duguid and presented the following day on television monitors in the gallery, culminating ...

For this work, the gallery becomes a place of learning, listening, contemplation, and dialogue, as it incorporates the ideas of studio practice, re-use of materials, and an examination of the local waste stream. Live Station Project aims to be an evolving "tool-box" where the public is invited to build, draw, write and share. Various stations such as a construction station; salvaged material station; research, archive, and listening station; and contemplation and interaction station, allow the public to learn how to create objects with salvaged materials. Materials, from the waste stream at large, are prepared for reuse and the objects may ...

The orangerie, a type of building which grew oranges on estates such as the Palace of the Louvre before the French Revolution, serves as an inspiration for this work. On Tuesday, a temporary free restaurant serves a communal meal which includes citrus foods. Seating in the restaurant is made from surplus materials such as pallets and crates related to the fruit industry. Throughout the week, lectures and discussions about the culture of food, agriculture, and the emancipating potential of exhibition space take place at various times in the gallery. This summer, the popular performative art exhibition Here / Not There returns, ...

In "the world's smallest comedy club," visitors may experience an array of programs and events such as stand-up comedy, DJ dance parties, academic lectures, screenings, and musical performances. Every day features extended open-mic sessions for audience participation. Complete with a stage, disco ball, and DJ booth, Club Nutz is an eclectic and lively temporary venue connecting audiences with a shared Chicago culture of performers, artists, musicians, and filmmakers. This summer, the popular performative art exhibition Here / Not There returns, and asks how participatory actions within structured events can encourage a collective act of creation. The viewer, rather than the artist, ...

How do artists see the familiar anew, and how can viewers do the same? In this opening conversation, MCA curator Lynne Warren engages artists Jason Meadows and Jason Middlebrook, and Calder Foundation registrar and scholar Jessica Holmes in a discussion about creative reuse in sculpture, relating contemporary methods of art making to Calder's process and work.

Caleb J. Lyons' practice focuses on cultural detritus; mining and resurrecting the presence of melancholy and absurdity in cultural production from (very) recent history. His series of paintings, Real Pirates (a reference to piracy as a form of appropriation), and a related grouping of ceramics take on "high art" and address a turn to what might be called an aesthetics of failure in contemporary abstract practices, exemplified by cheap materials and unskilled craft. Lyons's work employs the formal strategies of this "careless and wounded aesthetic," borrowing passages and marks from the art of contemporary painters and sculptors. Yet Lyons's works, ...

In the spirit of childhood scavenger hunt games, Hide and Seek challenges the formal constructs of where and when art occurs, and offers a new mode of visitor engagement by exhibiting works that are meant to be actively sought out, rather than passively viewed. Often the most intriguing works of art cause the viewer to reconsider what art truly is. Because the MCA frequently exhibits art that stretches the definition of art, Hide and Seek plays off of viewers' expectations of what art is and where it can be placed. Visitors have unexpected encounters with works placed outside the galleries ...

In his latest series of paintings and drawings, renowned artist Kerry James Marshall takes up as his subject the presence of the Black artist in his or her studio. Marshall discusses these visually stunning works and invites us to reflect on this question: how do portrayals of famous artists in their studios influence our perceptions of who is an artist? Kerry James Marshall is one of the most important artists working today, known for formally stunning large-scale paintings, drawings, sculptures and other objects that take up the visual representation of race and, specifically, African-American identity and history, as their subjects.

Ilya Kabakov's narrative, collaborative, and performative works, developed over thirty years in Moscow at the height of the Cold War, both presaged and influenced the work of many younger artists today. Throughout his career, he has created ambitious multi-disciplinary works that serve as monuments to history and memory, including a wide range of graphic books, paintings, drawings, installations, public projects, stage sets, costumes, theoretical texts, and extensive memoirs. His wife and collaborator Emilia Kabakov and University of Chicago art historian Matthew Jesse Jackson join him in this talk to reflect on past projects and their place within contemporary art. ...

This exhibition presents a selection of works on paper from the MCA Collection. The works represent or evoke a sense of conflict or alienation, often in a disproportionately cartoonish manner. Laylah Ali's gouaches from her Greenheads series, for example, translate complicated and dysfunctional human interactions into hermetic, visually streamlined narratives, while Peter Saul's drawings depict American excess and violence in the 1960s through extremely stylized forms. The distinctive draftsmanship of Karen Kilimnik and Raymond Pettibon is represented in multiple works by each artist. Kilimnik combines imagery redolent of fashion sketchbooks with distracted texts written in the margins ...

Steve Krakow, aka Plastic Crimewave, is an artist, musician, and curator widely known for his info strip, The Secret History of Chicago Music, which runs every two weeks in the Chicago Reader, with a musical segment/show aired every second Sunday on the Nick Digilio show on WGN 720. Comprised of approximately a hundred 8 x 11 in. drawings that incorporate extensive research by the artist, The Secret History of Chicago Music has developed into an important study of the obscure blues, jazz, rock, funk, soul, folk, R&B, and punk musicians from Chicago's rich and diverse musical history. As Krakow ...

Robert Smithson (American, 1938-1973) is widely held as one of the most influential and significant artists of the twentieth century. His writings, drawings, sculpture, and, most famously, his earthworks have become touchstones for contemporary artists for their rigorous artistic and theoretical investigations and for the way in which they married concept and form. This exhibition brings together three works from the MCA Collection: Smithson's film Spiral Jetty (1970) that documents the production of the landmark work of the same name; Mary Brogger's Earthwork (2000); and Sam Durant's Partially Buried 1960s/70s Dystopia Revealed (Mick Jagger at Altamont) & ...

Bad at Sports hosts this month’s Cabinet of Curiosities at the MCA, an ongoing “grab bag of ‘un-lectures’” presented by different groups from around Chicago. Bad at Sports has curated an evening on the subject of Magic. Stephanie Brooks will speak on the Magic of Language and Love. Industry of the Ordinary (Mat Wilson and Adam Brooks) will explore the magical through an investigation of God, football, and extra-marital conduct. Elijah Burgher will give a talk on Sigil Magic, a system of spell-casting outlined by early 20th century occultist, Austin Osman Spare, and popularized more recently ...

Chicago artist Daniel Everett discusses his work on view in the UBS 12 x 12: New Artists / New Work series.

Internationally renowned artist Andrea Zittel speaks about her work and describes how her studio in the high desert of California serves both as a space for exploration and as a place for crafting and presenting objects, materials, spaces and ideas. Zittel's sculptures and installations transform everything necessary for life—such as eating, sleeping, bathing, and socializing—into experiments in living.

Daniel Everett works across media, exploring the possibilities and limits of personal meaning in public spaces, both real and imagined. Much of his work focuses on the aesthetics and implications of the outdated and now-obsolete technology of his youth: videogames, computers, and the early Internet. Everett repurposes these technologies, disrupting their functions and putting them to use in often funny and quite moving ways. Likewise, his photographic works capture uncanny moments within commonplace postmodern architecture—suggesting the presence of spirituality or even godliness in the most banal of places. Creating clean, coolly formal work, Everett projects profoundly personal questions onto the ...

threewalls presents Latent Tendencies, a MCA Cabinet of Curiosities featuring "un-lectures" about artist’s 'other practices.' Hosted by Bad At Sports commentator and artist, Duncan MacKenzie, Latent Tendencies promises to expose what Chicago artists would rather be doing with their lives. Leslie Baum wonders how I might have been a potter: a timeline of the path not taken; Andrea Loest presents Karmic Numerology, a lecture on archetypal cosmology that determines an individual's karmic past, present, and future through the understanding of numerical systems and arrangement; Meg Duguid shares her love of juice in this conversation about fresh ...

Since the early part of the 20th century, artists have created works that might best be described as events: situated in place, unfolding in time, and often performative or interactive in approach, these works ask the audience to reconsider the very nature of the art experience. In recent years, event-based artworks and actions have proliferated in museums, galleries, and public spaces in Chicago and elsewhere. Moderated by art historian Irene V. Small, this panel discussion looks at the modes of art making and motivations that are leading artists to produce event-based works today, while connecting these current activities to earlier ...

During its forty-year history, the MCA has distinguished itself with groundbreaking exhibitions that have contributed substantially to the evolving history of contemporary art. These exhibitions have, in turn, stimulated the museum and its supporters to acquire important and often numerous pieces by these artists. A resulting hallmark of the MCA's collection is the presence of significant, in-depth bodies of work by artists. By displaying several examples of an artist's work, visitors can gain a better understanding of their working process and development of ideas over the span of several years. Rewind presents concentrations of work by artists whom the MCA has ...

The InCUBATE-curated portion of the Cabinet of Curiosities series at the MCA, The Metaphysical Club, is a one-night-only re-convention of the historic conversational society that was active throughout the 1870s in Cambridge, MA. It counted among its members future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, psychologist William James, and polymath Charles Sanders Peirce. It was here that American Pragmatism was born as a "half-ironic half-defiant" reproach to European metaphysics. The event will feature presentations by Rozalinda Borcila, Joe Grimm, Liz Joynt-Sandberg, People Powered (Lora Lode & Kevin Kaempf), Bert Stabler and Fereshteh Toosi. We might think of ...

Featuring Nikhil Chopra, John Neff and Amanda Ross-Ho. Transformation, mediation, gesture, embodiment. The artist is both performer and observer in the studio, and the protagonist of the myths that surround this space. Three artists in the MCA exhibition Production Site: The Artist's Studio Inside-Out, discuss their own works in the show, using them as a springboards for reflecting on the creative acts of the studio.

Throughout art history, artists have reflexively looked at the very site where art work is produced–the studio–as a source of inspiration for their work. Production Site reexamines the artist's studio as subject, presenting work that documents, depicts, reconstructs, or otherwise invokes that space, revealing how the studio functions as a place where research, experimentation, production, and social activity intersect. The exhibition reflects and addresses the pivotal role of the studio in artists' practice while alluding to its enduring status in the popular imagination. The works that comprise Production Site include multi-channel video projections, photographic light-boxes and installations, and life-sized fabrications of ...

With a keen sense of humor, Aspen Mays explores the relationship between scientific investigation and the photographic medium to question what knowledge can be gained through systems of cataloguing, classification and documentation. For her UBS 12 x 12 exhibition Mays produces a site-specific photographic installation titled Every leaf on a tree. The installation consists of two recent bodies of work: Every leaf, which documents every leaf on a tree outside of the artist's studio and consists of over 900 individual color photographs; and Every book, a series of photographs that document every book about Albert Einstein available through the Illinois ...

No Coast presents Heaven is Real, a collection of performances, presentations and activities themed around our abnormal/paranormal/celebratory/transcendent relationship with death and dying, as part of the Cabinet of Curiosities series. The MCA describes the event as "A grab bag of ‘un-lectures’ about a myriad of topics that create a variety show-like evening of artist presentations curated by different groups from around Chicago." We like to think of it as a morbidly fantastic show-n-tell. Featuring performances by Acephalous, Andre Callot, Aaron Dicks & Colin Self, Andrea Fritsch, Rebecca Gordon and Brandon Joyce, Ted Marino and Carnal Torpor. Hosted By Lil ...

Chicago artist Carrie Schneider discusses her work on view in the UBS 12 x 12: New Artists / New Work series in the gallery.