2007 View/download PDF - Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

CURATORIAL Report
EXHIBITIONS
The term contemporary-art exhibition always
evokes expectations of the new and
di¤erent, but the phrase MCA exhibition
plays with the very notion of what to expect
and justifies another prediction: visitors
will likely see a first in the art world.
Elizabeth Smith
James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator and
Deputy Director for Programs
The exhibition program for fiscal year
2007 continued this nontraditional MCA
tradition—a longstanding achievement of
firsts:
• The first major US show of
Wolfgang Tillmans’s photographs,
organized by the MCA
• The first large-scale survey in any
museum devoted to Rudolf Stingel’s
unconventional approach to painting,
another MCA-organized show
• The first (and only) US museum to
present Massive Change: The Future
of Global Design, with its inspired
emphasis on sustainability and social
responsibility
These and other exhibitions over the course
of fiscal year 2007 ranged broadly in media
and subject matter. The MCA presented
both solo and thematic exhibitions of work
by local, national, and international artists.
Our summer season opened with a focus
on living artists: the survey of Tillmans’s
works, co-organized with the Hammer
Museum; Patty Chang: Shangri-La through
the 3M project, our ongoing series of cocommissions
with the Hammer Museum
and the New Museum of Contemporary Art
that introduces the work of international
artists not yet well known in the United
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