Handforth’s penchant for the surreal is exercized in another work that pairs a giant bone, not dissimilar from an oversized femur, with an equally out of scale telephone handset. The handset, rendered in bright yellow, cradles the bone as if thrown together by the force of nature, and together with the other works on the plaza, gives the sense of a strange collection of detritus that has magically blown off the city streets and deposited itself here. A fourth piece, a crumpled safety cone topped by an English Bobby hat cast in stainless steel and covered with layer upon layer of colorful paint, completes this ensemble and contributes further to the impression of playful discards washing up on the shores of the MCA.

Object Design League (July 5-10): Caroline Linder and Lisa Smith usually describe themselves as product designers, but under the collective name Object Design League they are known for projects that involve the intangible and temporal—events, pop-up spaces, charettes, and curated exhibitions—rather than actual products.

Golden Age (July 12-17): Artist Marco Kane Braunschweiler and Martine Syms run a small yet internationally connected West Loop project space/workshop/bookstore called Golden age. Projects from the space take on many forms: exhibitions, screenings, performances, and printed matter.

Tim Parsons & Jessica Charlesworth (July 19-24): Product designer/writer Tim Parsons arrived from London last summer to join the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as Associate Professor in Designed Objects. Parsons continues a series of ongoing collaborations with his partner, British designer, future thinker and researcher, Jessica Charlesworth.

Sonnenzimmer (July 26-31): Nick Butcher and Nadine Nakanishi are artists who both happen to have studied graphic design and now run screen printing workshop Sonnenzimmer, a space where they produce printed art and design work for other artists, music and cultural clients, and themselves.

This exhibition puts Cornell’s work into direct dialogue with objects from the MCA’s collection to illuminate the continued relevance of his pursuits while also grounding even very recent work within a historical continuum that yields surprises to this day. Across more than 60 years, and including media from painting and photography to sculpture and video, the exhibition relies on loose and playful juxtapositions to prompt new appreciations of his career and shows the work in a decidedly different and distinctively contemporary light. Examples of such pairings would be the nascent minimalism of Cornell’s rigorously geometric “Dovecotes,” which resonate with sculpture by artists such as Sol LeWitt, or later architecturally oriented photographs by Andreas Gursky. Likewise, the repeated imagery found in Cornell’s “Medici Slot Machine” sculptures make for prescient harbingers of the work of Andy Warhol, Wallace Berman and others, not to mention the brooding mournfulness of Christian Boltanski’s photo-based installations.

Cornell’s brash collage aesthetic, where disparate images collide to form surprising new meanings, is also echoed in the work of David Salle, John Baldessari, John Stezaker, and many others from the postmodern generation. The far-reaching ricochets that visitors will glean from such a comparative approach will open up fresh considerations of Cornell’s place in art history and allow audiences to see an artist that they thought they knew well in an entirely new way.

An anthropologist of his own environment, Bradford describes himself as a “modern-day flaneur,” saying, “I like to walk through the city and find details and then abstract them and make them my own. I’m not speaking for a community or trying to make a sociopolitical point. At the end it’s my mapping. My subjectivity.” The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by the curator, an interview with the artist, and three commissioned essays by specialists in the field. The exhibition is organized by the Wexner Center for the Arts.

Metzger’s paintings suspend the difference between these two traditions aimed at creating an awareness for the difference between reality and illusion. The result is a visual experience where what the viewer sees and what the viewer knows-the sensual and conceptual experience of the surface of objects-equally contradict and support one another. The result of this paradoxical situation is a chance to reflect on how our perception of surfaces and colors shape and form our understanding of objects.

For his UBS 12×12 exhibition Lehnerer and DeptUS presents a project titled Roadside Attractions that looks at such ubiquitous and abundantly available urban elements, or “attractions” that are perpendicular to the road: doors, roofs, windows, lobbies, stairs, or walls. The exhibition examines how these can become protagonists, which, if exaggerated, over-extended, or misused, can form the urban between structure and situation. The project materializes as a three-dimensional relief along the walls of the 12×12 space creating a consistent, yet constructed urban reality.

Moro states, “I am interested in how gestures can be a catalyst for self-expression and self-reflection, and in contemplating the accumulated historical weight that each of us inherits in society.” While the bowing gesture is deeply Japanese in nature, such gestures of submission and apology are found in many cultures and also inform Moro’s thinking, especially as he explores how cultural histories interact with personal histories to define identity.

Philipsz deliberately selects particular pieces of music to reinterpret vocally and then separates the multiple audio tracks so that the “viewer” experiences different voices as they move through a space, creating a situation in which familiar music is heard differently and the human voice is understood in a radically different and physically disorienting manner.

We Shall Be All is a sound installation commissioned for the MCA Collection that “explore[s] the spatial properties of sound, utilizing aspects of Chicago’s… complex political history” – particularly the use of slogans and statements associated with collective groups such as the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World).

She states: “against the backdrop of the modernist architecture of the city I see the voice as a means to infiltrate spaces, like a ghost in the machine, and return experience to a human scale.” She also “see[s] the voice as a means to address people both individually and as a collective. Experiencing a lone disembodied voice in a public setting can produce a strange experience among an unsuspecting audience, like feeling alone in a crowd.”

We Shall Be All also considers the broader context of song in relationship to Chicago political movements and historical events (such as the 1968 Democratic National Convention or the election of Barack Obama as President), as well as the city’s rich and expansive musical history.

The MCA is also presenting an earlier work by Philipsz, The Internationale (1999), in the second-floor atrium as a complement to We Shall Be All and to provide a better sense of the artist’s overall practice.

For her UBS 12×12 exhibition, Bass presents her film and video work in a site-specific installation. In addition, her recent films Shoals (52 mins) and Waking Things (25 min) will be screened on Sunday, February 6. Waking Things was co-produced by the performance company Every house has a door, and features members from their ensemble. The screening is co-presented as part of the performance, Every house has a door: Let us think of these things always. Let us speak of them never (Feb 9-13), and symposium, Reconstructing Utopia: Cinema, Performance and Ex-Yugoslavia (Feb 6).

While it was undoubtedly inspired by mid-twentieth century pop culture, especially comic books, advertisements, jukebox and pinball machine art, and street signs, Nutt’s art also explores the formal devices and techniques of historical painting. Northern European portraiture of the 15th and 16th century; Colonial American painting; the color and line explorations of Henri Matisse and Joan Miró; the quirky individualism of such artists as John Graham, Max Ernst, Arshile Gorky, and H. C. Westermann all offered lessons as Nutt has matured over four decades of artistic development. A fully illustrated catalogue is planned. This exhibition is organized by MCA Curator Lynne Warren.

Based on the MCA Collection, and augmented with loans from private collections, Seeing Is a Kind of Thinking includes work by more than 50 contemporary artists that resonates—either formally or through its subject matter—with aspects of Nutt’s work. The exhibition is organized into four thematic sections that examine how artists look to comics, folk art and non-Western art as source material; representations of surrealist psycho-sexual dramas; the traditional portrait bust genre; and an architectural approach to materials that oscillates between 2-D drawings and 3-D forms.

Nutt’s voracious appetite for art history, surrealism, non-Western artifacts, baroque opera, new wave cinema, and comics provides the inspiration for the exhibition’s dense hanging. The result is a visual encyclopedia that suggests sources beyond contemporary art to show how artists today use all manner of visual and cultural material for inspiration, and in dialogue with other forms, to create their own dynamic visual language.

Artists represented in the exhibition include: Gertrude Abercrombie, Tomma Abts, Nicholas Africano, Kai Althoff, Jean Arp, Francis Bacon, Enrico Baj, Don Baum, Hans Bellmer, Victor Brauner, George Condo, William Copley, Aaron Curry, Carroll Dunham, Jean Dubuffet, Oyvind Fahlstrom, Tony Fitzpatrick, Leon Golub, Miyoko Ito, Mike Kelley, Jeff Koons, Wilfredo Lam, Eric Lebofsky, Fernand Leger, Richard Lindner, Robert Lostutter, Jim Lutes, Rene Magritte, Margarita Manzelli, Kerry James Marshall, Matta, Wangechi Mutu, Bruce Nauman, Rachel Niffenegger, Gladys Nilsson, Paul Nudd, Jim Nutt, Ed Paschke, Lari Pittman, Kerig Pope, Christina Ramberg, Martin Ramirez, Richard Rezac, Suellen Rocca, Kay Rosen, Peter Saul, Diane Simpson, Steven Urry, Chris Ware, H. C. Westermann, Frances Whitehead, Sue Williams, Scott Wilson, Joseph Yoakum, Ray Yoshida, and Claire Zeisler.

The exhibition is curated by Julie Rodrigues Widholm, MCA Pamela Alper Associate Curator.

Jeffrey Brown’s autobiographical works examines modern relationships with discomforting detail and intimacy. His comics are drawn in a deliberately awkward and simple style that heightens both the emotional impact and charming humor of the stories. Each comic is written and drawn in an individual sketchbook, and Brown is showing a selection of these original books as part of the exhibition.

Lilli Carré is an animator and cartoonist who has produced a series of celebrated comics, illustrations, and hand-drawn, animated short films. Her work combines an elegant visual style with elliptical narratives that are imbued with an absurdist, and at times, unsettling humor. Along with a series of original illustrations, the exhibition includes a selection of Carré’s short films.

Paul Hornschemeier’s widely acclaimed comics incorporate complex, self-referential narrative structures that knowingly appropriate various comic book styles. A selection of his original blue graphite and ink drawings are on display.

Using a sparse aesthetic and narrative style, Anders Nilsen creates existentialist fables that revolve around the interactions between animals (birds and dogs) and young men. Nilsen shows a selection of original graphite and ink drawings from his recently completed 600-page comic Big Questions, which is to be published by Drawn and Quarterly in 2011.

Labatte is a recent graduate from the MFA program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her formal explorations of everyday objects and materials focus on color and shape while emphasizing a collage aesthetic grounded in both the illusionistic tendencies of photography and the still life tradition. By manipulating the picture plane on her large format camera and emphasizing a deceptively flattened space, Labatte asks us to consider the photographic space and its relation to both the picture frame and the two-dimensionality of the paper support.

On first look, her three-dimensional arrangements will often appear two-dimensional. However, clues are deliberately left (often in the form of small shadows) to remind us that these are photographs of objects. Recent large scale works such as The Alignment and Chasing the Carrot showcase detritus collected from the street or found in the studio, meticulously arranged to give a sense of formal order to the cluttered world of things that surround us. Labatte’s work continues the trend towards abstraction found in many contemporary photographic practices.

Beginning in the 1960s, artists such as Carl Andre and Richard Serra used industrial materials to create sculptures that left behind the traditional pedestal to enter the “real” space of the viewer, producing a new understanding of how work could be experienced. This engagement of the viewer was extended in a more performative way in the 1970s with the work of Dennis Oppenheim — whose figurative sculptures are often triggered to move based on the movements of the audience — and Michelangelo Pistoletto, whose mirrored works combine figurative renderings with the viewer’s reflected image.

Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, and Bruce Nauman also emerged during the 1960s and 1970s with work that frequently required the direct participation of the viewer to complete them. Their work had a profound influence on artists who came to prominence in the 1990s and 2000s such as Liam Gillick, Gabriel Orozco, Dan Peterman, and Andrea Zittel, whose multidimensional work invoked the interaction of the audience to reflect the manner in which architecture and internet technology have encouraged a more networked social sphere. In recent years, even artists working in film and video, such as Aernout Mik, have rejected the idea of theatrical spectatorship, framing their cinematic narratives within architectural and sculptural presentations that the viewer must walk around to fully appreciate.

Complementing the objects on display, a program of performance-based works are presented in the galleries over the course of the exhibition, further emphasizing the critical importance of interactivity and the physical relationship of the viewer to the experience of contemporary art. Without You I’m Nothing: Art and Its Audience is co-curated by Chief Curator of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis Dominic Molon and Associate Curator Tricia van Eck.

The MCA’s new James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator Michael Darling, artist and writer Michelle Grabner, and critic Lane Relyea delve into these questions, looking at examples from the United States and internationally. A book signing of the just-released publication Can I Come Over to Your House? The First Ten Years of The Suburban follows the talk. The book features essays by Forrest Nash and Michael Newman. Design by Jason Pickleman.

Chan is a Chicago based artist with-in the words of Chan-a Bay Area heart. His rigorous paintings, works-on-paper and durational performances record the minutia of daily life, while combining historical and fictitious narratives to reflect on such themes as spirituality and environmental sustainability. Chan develops his work through a highly personal, meditative practice that involves making daily Sumi ink drawings that give “value and meaning to everyday life through painting.”

For the UBS 12 x 12 series, Chan has created an installation with a performative element that developed out of his recent trip to Black Mesa, New Mexico, as well as his research into the resistance of North American Indigenous tribes and the history of U.S. Treaty violations. Black Mesa is the site where the Pueblo Tribe withstood the Spanish conquistadors.

Chan produces paintings, works-on-paper, and an artist’s book based on the daily records of a fictional monk’s travels to the Black Mesa in honor of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. The book is produced in collaboration with Golden Age, and is on view as part of the exhibition.

Other paintings and drawings reference the Alcatraz Indian Occupation of 1969. That year, representatives from many North American tribes occupied Alcatraz Island and offered to purchase it with glass beads and red cloth – the price paid to Native Americans for Manhattan Island. The works in the exhibition examines and compares the histories of struggle and resistance inherent in these two locations.

The exhibition brings together a retrospective of the magazine combined with a space transformed into a physical manifestation of its pages, as if exploded into three-dimensions. The installation charts networks of influences upon urbanism such as politics, economic growth, governmental policy, and planning, and how these translate to citizens’ often spontaneous and informal decisions and the impact this has upon cities. Offering an expanded narrative of how cities undergo changes, for the Chicago presentation Urban China: Informal Cities investigates the dynamics of urbanism and how metropolitan cities across the globe grow and change as they adapt to multiple influences including reurbanism and informal transformation. Urban China uses “informalism” as a catchall term that combines notions of the informal, or underground economy, with popular vernacular modes of remaking objects, buildings, and lives.

For Urban China, informalism is a way for individuals to exert direct agency over the basic elements of their daily lives and reconfigure their immediate reality. Informal systems-spatial, economic, and utilitarian — can subvert the highly structured nature of Chinese cities, which have historically been planned, as well as US cities, such as Chicago, which began with Daniel Burnham’s Plan For Chicago. The exhibition compares urban China’s growth with urban Chicago’s growth to highlight the parallels between Chicago and Chinese cities. It also offers space in the gallery for discussion where the public can respond to questions posed by Jiang Jun as well as about urbanization.

Now that more than half of the world’s population lives in urban areas, Urban China as a research network, think tank, documentary archive, and a tool for artistic production and urban activism, aims to offer processes and interpretative strategies to better understand not only China’s and Chicago’s socio-political conditions but ways of having more direct agency upon where and how we live in the global world.

This afternoon symposium explores these questions through literature, experimental theater, and visual art. Opening with an introduction by MCA Pritzker Director and Luc Tuymans co-curator Madeleine Grynsztejn, the program features a reading by writer Aleksandar Hemon; a conversation with members of the performance group Superamas; and a conversation with artist Luc Tuymans led by curator and writer Hamza Walker.

Interested in the lingering effects of World War II on the lives of Europeans, Tuymans explores issues of history and memory, as well as the relationship between photography and painting, using a muted palette to create canvases that are simultaneously withholding and disarmingly stark. Drawing on imagery from photography, television, and film, his distinctive compositions make ingenious use of cropping, close-ups, framing, and Luc Tuymans sequencing, offering fresh perspectives on the medium of painting, as well as larger cultural issues.

The artist’s more recent work approaches the post-colonial situation in the Congo and the dramatic turn of world events after 9/11. These series have led Tuymans to a sustained investigation of the realms of the pathological and the conspiratorial.

The installation also includes an archival film still of Conrad Schumann defecting from East Germany in 1961. The printed still depicts Schumann jumping over the barbed wire which constituted the Berlin Wall in its third day of construction. Graham questions the associations of freedom and escape generally attributed to these iconic images by asking us to consider the life-narrative that extends beyond the historical moment represented in the photographs.

Schumann had ambiguous feelings about his defection and eventually committed suicide. In pairing the archival photographs with the sculpture, Graham overtly addresses such themes as confinement, escape, time, and the non-linearity of historical and personal narratives. Tim Louis Graham is a recent graduate from the MFA program at the School of the Art Institute.

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.

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 an intimate long-take, a young woman’s LSD trip in the Badlands National Park before descending into a psychedelic, formal abstraction of the expansive desert landscape. Concerned with notions of the romantic sublime, phenomenological experience, and secular spiritualism, the work continues Russell’s unique investigation into the possibilities of cinema as a site for transcendence.

The exhibition is augmented by a series of related film screenings throughout the month of September, and by a live, collaborative expanded cinema performance by Russell and Chicago artist Joe Grimm.

While her work is partially submerged in documentation and science, the observable mark-making and its subsequent imperfections gives the work a subjective human element and speak to a desire to draw not only what can be seen but also what can be imagined. The result becomes more about her distillation and construction of illusionistic space, rather than a direct reference to the original source. Gundersdorf exhibits a group of new drawings that continue her investigation of abstractions based on representational source material.

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, is the focus as guests are encouraged to participate in performing and creating works. Remnants and documentation generated by the artist and visitors during each performance are on exhibit in the gallery for the duration of the week through the following Sunday. Visitors are invited to return to the museum throughout the week of each project to witness the results of their contributions. Through these four diverse performances, activities, and events, the artists and public expand an understanding of performance, visual art, and ideas of communal engagement.

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, is the focus as guests are encouraged to participate in performing and creating works. Remnants and documentation generated by the artist and visitors during each performance are on exhibit in the gallery for the duration of the week through the following Sunday. Visitors are invited to return to the museum throughout the week of each project to witness the results of their contributions. Through these four diverse performances, activities, and events, the artists and public expand an understanding of performance, visual art, and ideas of communal engagement.

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, is the focus as guests are encouraged to participate in performing and creating works. Remnants and documentation generated by the artist and visitors during each performance are on exhibit in the gallery for the duration of the week through the following Sunday. Visitors are invited to return to the museum throughout the week of each project to witness the results of their contributions. Through these four diverse performances, activities, and events, the artists and public expand an understanding of performance, visual art, and ideas of communal engagement.

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, is the focus as guests are encouraged to participate in performing and creating works. Remnants and documentation generated by the artist and visitors during each performance are on exhibit in the gallery for the duration of the week through the following Sunday. Visitors are invited to return to the museum throughout the week of each project to witness the results of their contributions. Through these four diverse performances, activities, and events, the artists and public expand an understanding of performance, visual art, and ideas of communal engagement.

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, the paintings framed in brightly colored wood and the oversized pipe-like ceramics planted with cacti and succulents, have a kind of lopsided beauty and strange appeal that belies their preoccupation with failure. Considered together, the paintings and ceramics seem to embody our own unease with consumerism, finish, and quality while pointing to our cultural love affair with the underdog.

Some works refer to the installation process, such as Jeppe Hein‘s Screw on the Wall and Wilfredo Prieto‘s Closed Circuit, which features an ordinary-looking extension cable. Some works explore that which is hidden; M.W. Burns‘ Messenger reveals secrets or words spoken in a hushed tone. Other works refer to that which is not easily communicated or readily apparent, such as Carsten Holler‘s Plant Suicide and Andrei Monastyrski’s Goethe, a work that reveals itself after a visitor has walked through the museum. Many of the works are by Chicago artists; Stephanie Brooks‘ works are scattered throughout the museum, including on the tables of the café. Other Chicago artists include Adam Brooks, Jeff Carter, Harold Mendez, Ellen Rothenberg, and Natasha Wheat.

Mark Jeffery and Judd Morrissey‘s The Living Newspapers is a hidden performance/installation comprising pairs of “museum visitors,” seemingly engaged in pedestrian conversation. Acting as embodiments of the collective voice of social discourse, the performers’ conversations comprise real-time information harvested from Twitter, the social networking platform that enables users to send and receive short text-based entries, which often log daily experiences, thoughts, and opinions in a virtual living archive. The performance is inspired by a genre of socially engaged theater known as Living Newspapers, which were constructed from current, factual information and were often designed to educate or mobilize audiences. Living Newspapers were produced by the Federal Theatre Project established by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s. As the contemporary re-imagining of this form, The Living Newspapers is driven by a computer program that constructs dynamic dialogue from cultural chatter. The wings, which reveal to the public that this is a “constructed situation,” reference a WPA sculpture at the Hoover Dam.

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.

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. A Russian-American conceptual artist of Jewish origin, Ilya Kabakov was born in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine. He left the Soviet Union in 1987 and two years later began collaborating with Emilia. The two now live and work in Long Island.

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 that blur the boundaries between homage and obsessive fandom. Pettibon similarly uses image and text as a way to displace the viewer while making arch observations on the more fallible aspects of the human condition.

Mike Kelley‘s Disembodied Militarism refers to the classic newspaper comic “Sad Sack” in a suite of drawings that wryly comment on the dispensable role of the soldier through ironic humor, while Henry Darger‘s drawings depicting the unusual scenarios articulated in his narrative “The Story of the Vivian Girls,” in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion.

Krakow hand-draws and writes each installment of the strip in a style that references such iconic comic artists as Robert Crumb, while the series itself continues a tradition pioneered by Folkways Records and Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music of documenting and disseminating America’s musical heritage.

For his UBS 12 x 12 exhibition, Krakow presents a selection of The Secret History of Chicago Music strip that dates from 2005 to the present. The exhibition also includes a series of Tuesday night performances by musicians who have been featured in The Secret History of Chicago Music. The performance series takes place in the UBS 12 x 12 Gallery.

In addition to The Secret History of Chicago Music, Krakow’s Galactic Zoo Dossier, a hand-drawn “psychedelic magazine” is published by the Chicago-based label Drag City, and his illustrations have been commissioned for numerous magazines, album covers, comic books, and promotional posters. Krakow is also a member of the psychedelic rock band Plastic Crimewave Sound, and curates the Million Tongues music festival at the Empty Bottle in Chicago.

Spiral Jetty is a 1,500-foot long, 15-foot wide counterclockwise coil made entirely from mud, salt crystals, basalt rocks, earth, and water that extends from the northeastern shore of Utah’s Great Salt Lake. Smithson created it just months after the completion of the work Partially Buried Woodshed, a dilapidated wooden structure upon which Smithson had dirt piled until its central beam cracked and then left as site-specific work, half exposed, half covered in dirt. Spiral Jetty was an extension of many of the ideas Smithson also explored in Partially Buried Woodshed, the work to which Brogger’s and Durant’s works specifically refer, including the concept of entropy-the inevitable disintegration or decay of all matter and energy over time-as well as the use of natural materials and the expansion of art-making into the landscape on a grand scale. Located on the campus of Kent State in Ohio, Partially Buried Woodshed subsequently accrued new meaning through its context—it became an unofficial monument, signified by the addition of graffitied text, to four students who were shot and killed by the Ohio National Guard in a Vietnam War protest that turned violent.

Brogger’s Earthwork, a birdhouse in the form of a scale-model of Mies van der Rohe’s seminal Farnsworth House, takes on the legacy of modernism with a wry tongue-in-cheek reference to Smithson and his earthworks. Piling birdseed in the center of the transparent home, Brogger suggests the potential for an icon of architecture to become a ruin itself. Durant borrows the materials and formal language of Smithson’s oeuvre-dirt, mounds, and mirrors—for his work Partially Buried 1960s/70s Dystopia Revealed (Mick Jagger at Altamont) & Utopia Reflected (Wavy Gravy at Woodstock). Durant explores, as the title suggests, the utopic and dystopic shift the two music festivals heralded. Durant parallels this symbolic historical comparison with the way in which Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed came to memorialize not only the students who were killed at Kent State, but in many ways the promise of the 1960s, an entropy unto itself.

The exhibition is presented on the third floor, where a selection of books and ephemera on Robert Smithson and some of the historical issues raised by Brogger’s and Durant’s works are available. The exhibition is organized by Michael Green, Curatorial Assistant, and Diana Nawi, Marjorie Susman Curatorial Fellow.

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 spaces, products, and leftovers of the public domain.

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 ingredients, what can be juiced, what should never be juiced, and how juices can help make brilliant cocktails; Gretchen Holmes & Ross Moreno share their comedy and magic, or the magic of comedy, and Anni Holm leads us in song with Oh, Chicago, a song about her life as an artist.

Rewind presents concentrations of work by artists whom the MCA has collected in depth, or whose pieces in the collection are definitive examples of their singular aesthetic. Showcasing key artists of the last forty years whose work has been and continues to be defining to international contemporary art underscores the MCA’s role as a leader in and incubator of artistic innovation.

Rewind focuses on works from these particular decades to show how the groundbreaking work from the recent past is only now becoming historicized for its critical take on art institutions, identity politics, and new approaches to video and photography in the late-20th century. It includes works by Vito Acconci, Richard Artschwager, Matthew Barney, Alfredo Jaar, Mike Kelley, Sharon Lockhart, Richard Long, Richard Prince, Lorna Simpson,  Tony Tasset and Gillian Wearing.

This exhibition is organized by Julie Rodrigues Widholm, Pamela Alper Associate Curator.

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 these six Chicago-based artists as neo-Pragmatists, sharing the philosophy’s values of experimentation, sensitivity to context, and the assertion that notions of truth are arrived at through lived experience. This rekindling of the historic Metaphysical Club address the ideas motivating a group of artists working to blur the line between art and the everyday.

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.

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 artists’ studios–real and imagined–that either extol the virtues of the studio or problematize the preconceived and often highly romanticized notions associated with it. The exhibition provides the viewer with an unprecedented and illuminating look at how some of the most compelling artists of our time have demystified, remystified, and reconsidered this site within the physical and conjectured space of the work of art.

The exhibition is accompanied by numerous educational programs. The exhibition is organized by MCA Curator Dominic Molon.

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 Collegiate Inter-Library Loan service. These were then organized by Mays according to the color spectrum to create a series of individual “rainbows” — referencing Einstein’s theories about light and gravity. With these works, Mays asks how the systematic presentation of individual parts affects our understanding of the whole.

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 Elote. Special activities by No Coast.

In the series Derelict Self, the artist explores the idea that mimicry can be a way to both gain and lose a sense of oneself. Images from her Fallen Women series appropriate cultural icons from Hollywood and an American folk song, substituting the male lover with a surrogate from nature; while Las Bebidas updates Velázquez’s complex system of gazes, “propositioning the dive bar as the present-day royal court.”

Inspired by her residencies in Helsinki, the natural landscape is often employed as the setting for her work, in addition to the interiors of bars, which also act as a site for a heightened awareness of being, specifically in regards to romantic and otherwise complicated and hierarchical relationships. Citing David Lynch and Finnish filmmakers such as Eija-Liisa Ahtila and Salla Tykkä as important influences, Schneider is undertaking her first major short film project this summer while in Helsinki and plans to debut it in her UBS 12 x 12 exhibition. The film continues her investigation of physical representations of relationships between people incorporating elements of the uncanny and the doubled-self.

Gillick’s work frequently questions the procedures and logic of institutional frameworks, an aspect of his practice that heavily informs his process of selecting and presenting works from the MCA’s Collection. The exhibition reflects his fascination with the role of the collection within the museum, especially in the way that artists whose careers have developed less prominently than others are still represented in such a major institution’s holdings and the circumstances involved in each case. While this sensibility provides the rationale by which Gillick selects the work for the exhibition, he also intends to reconsider the manner in which works are described and interpreted in the wall text for the exhibition by making that aspect of the presentation more pronounced. The exhibition ultimately underscores the degree to which the subjectivities of curators and collectors of a specific museum have affected the seemingly objective way that the MCA’s collection has been historically composed, and is continuously presented and understood.

Whether embracing classical roots or breaking away from traditions, Italian artists active during the past forty years are at ease with the realities of social transformation. Reflecting the idiosyncratic paths carved by Italian artists and resisting the artificiality of groupings and movements such as arte povera, the project attempts to counter a tendency within Italian culture to curb individuality and experimentation.

Including work by more than 75 Italian artists, Italics is not just an exhibition about art made in Italy but, more importantly, demonstrates how these artists have forged new identities from deep roots blossoming in many different directions. This exhibition is guest curated by Francesco Bonami.

Featuring Christopher Roeleveld, Paige K. Johnston, Hunter Husar, Nicholas O’Brien, Greg Stimac, Lisa Smith and Caroline Linder.

Marco Kane Braunschweiler and Martine Syms will emcee.

In conjunction with the event Golden Age will be publishing A CULTURAL READER containing images and footnotes from the presentations, as well as content that didn’t make it into those 7 minutes. Pick up your copy at the lecture or at Golden Age.

His work joins that of generational peers such as Rirkrit Tiravanija and Philippe Parreno in defining what critic Nicholas Bourriaud described as “relational aesthetics,” an approach that emphasizes the shifting social role and function of art at the turn of the millennium. Gillick’s work has had a profound impact on a contemporary understanding of how art and architecture influence, and are themselves influenced by, interpersonal communication and interactions in the public sphere.

This exhibition is presented in association with the Witte de With in Rotterdam, Kunsthalle Zurich, and the Kunstverein in Munich. It is the most significant and comprehensive exhibition of Gillick’s work in an American museum to date, comprising a major site-specific installation in the gallery ceiling as well as a presentation of his design and published works, and a film documenting projects from the entirety of his career. The MCA is the only American venue for the exhibition.

The exhibition has a publication that reflects the unique nature of this survey of Gillick’s work. This exhibition is curated by MCA Curator Dominic Molon.

Objects meant to stimulate discussion share the gallery with the resident guest experts. The first and most significant artifact that is on display is the remnant of a car that was destroyed in by an explosion on Al-Mutanabbi, a street in Baghdad, in 2007. This tragedy killed over thirty people, and has taken on added significance because the street, named after a well-known Iraqi poet, was the site of numerous book markets and cafés, and was considered the nexus of Baghdadi cultural and intellectual life. Evidence of the violence continuing to take place in Iraq, the car is meant to ground conversation in the facts, figures, and eyewitness descriptions that have been so lacking in most information about the Iraq War made available to the public.

The second is a handmade banner by artist Ed Hall, who has collaborated with Deller in the past and is known for his work for trade unions and other interest groups. The last is a wall graphic juxtaposing two maps — one of Iraq and one of the United States. This visual representation serves as a reminder of the disconnect between two countries that are intimately involved politically and economically, though geographically distanced. However urgently the project encourages discussion about a painful, ongoing situation, this endeavor is nonpartisan, and is unscripted and free form, and as formal or informal as each guest expert desires.

This exhibition is organized by the New Museum. The MCA presentation is organized by Tricia Van Eck, Curatorial Coordinator and Curator of Artist Books. Jeremy Deller: It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq is part of The Three M Project, a series organized by the New Museum, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, to commission, organize and co-present new works of art.

This film is centered on a Halprin dance based on the sculpture Minotaur by Auguste Rodin from 1886 (also known as Faun and Nymph), a work possessing intensely erotic content (it depicts the part-man/part-bull figure from Greek mythology with a naked young female figure in its grasp.) Martin’s Minotaur extends her interweaving of highly conceptualized and choreographed physical movement; complexly layered stagecraft provoking unconventional formal relationships; direct allusions to modernist art history; and editing and cinematographic techniques evoking a broad range of the histories of both mainstream and experimental filmmaking.

According to Martin: “Minotaur combines three spaces of artistic production: the two-dimensional images of Rodin’s Minotaur sculpture in various books; the three-dimensional sculpture itself; and the four-dimensional dance choreographed by Anna Halprin based on the sculpture. It also features three spaces of context: Anna Halprin’s face looking at the books; the dancer’s souvenirs, objects and photographs (skeleton, clay objects, photographs of bodies); and the natural surroundings beyond Halprin’s dance studio, including trees, burnt out trunks, etc. These six spaces are connected through formally inventive edits and physically inventive transitions.

This project is curated by MCA Curator Dominic Molon.