Curator’s Vision Glows at MCA

The personality of one-time-only art exhibits and the feel of a traveling exhibit can vary so wildly, it’s startling.  Both can either showcase the creative expression of a single artist or take on a broader view and feature artists who share aesthetic sensibilities. Few celebrate the vision of a single curator; making Duro Olowu’s Seeing Chicago exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art particularly distinctive.  Opening in late February, the show’s run was cut short by the city’s mandated shutdown due to Covid.  Now with the museum reopening to the public on March 26^th, Chicagoans can now continue to enjoy the overwhelming beauty of a sprawling exhibit that encompasses almost 400 paintings, sculptures, textiles and photographs.

The curator orchestrating the exhibit, Duro Olowu, inhabits a unique position in the world of art and has a special relationship with Chicago.  A world-renowned fashion designer based in London, Mr. Olowu switched lanes early in his professional career and retired his barrister robes in England to design and sale high end clothing from his own shop.  His debut as a designer was so successful, London Fashion Week named him top new designer in 2005; making him the only designer to receive the designation without ever displaying his clothes on a runway.  Of Nigerian and Jamaican heritage whose cosmopolitan worldview was shaped by ample time living in both England and Nigeria, as well as being afforded the privilege of traveling extensively with his family in his youth, Mr. Olowu’s interests are wide ranging and include curating art.   It’s under this guise that Seeing Chicago was born.  Called a “love letter to Chicago” by the MCA’s Pritzker Director, Madeleine Grynsztejn, the exhibition represents one of the most successful collaborations between private art collectors and an impressive contingent of Chicago museums.  Olowu and his MCA team approached private and institutional holders of significant art works and asked to borrow them for the Seeing Chicago show.  The end goal is to highlight Chicago’s singular approach to collecting noteworthy art.

Taught the skill of looking at art and the world in a more penetrating way by his parents, Olowu’s mastering of those lessons fill this exhibition. Not only are visitors able to enjoy and appreciate the marvelous attributes of a single piece of art, but they’re also given the chance to see what one work of art has in common with seemingly quite different, but equally captivating, artistic expressions. In some cases, the common thread is simply shape or it could be how artists represent portraiture, interpret landscape or create their conception of abstraction.

Divided into “rooms” that corral art under broad umbrellas of kinship; there are often additional links within them that tie one piece to another, like the use of a tile pattern as seen in Matisse’s Laurette with a Cup of Coffee and Yto Barrada’s Girl in Red, Tangier.  Spotting these aesthetic links is like finding treasures within treasures.

Of the exhibit’s many wonderful attributes, its layout must be one of its most exciting and memorable.  Arranged in an expansive enveloping studio style that forgoes the standard convention of lining up pictures along a wall at eye level, this exhibition explodes.   Imagine finding yourself on a Star Trek holodeck with works of art swirling around you nearly to the ceiling.  In the portrait room and the rest of the exhibition, the art may be fixed in space, but the effect is the same; you’re wrapped in art and drowning in a sea of creative imagination.  Despite its dramatic impact, the format’s also wonderfully familiar and personal; giving Seeing Chicago the feel of walking into the comfortable surroundings of someone’s sumptuous home.  Or strolling into an extravagantly elegant 18^th century French salon fast forwarded 300 years.

If you’ve frequented other museum’s around the city, you’ll notice quite a few pieces whose real home is on the corner of Adams and Michigan or at another of the city’s arts oases.  Seeing so many of them in a completely different environment, among a new family of “friends”, proves how malleable art is.  It also enhances your appreciation for people like Mr. Olowu whose curatorial vision can conceive these associations.

With so many works presented in the exhibit, there are always discoveries.  Some of the most alluring, magnetic and aesthetically indelible were sculptural like the timeless beauty of Richard Hunt’s bronzes and the radical reimagining of what macramé can become in the hands of someone like Noël Morical.  With the first obtained through the courtesy of the artist and the second on loan from a private collection, each testifies to the generosity of the city’s arts community in making this exhibit so galvanizing.

When asked “why Chicago?” as his location to mount such an ambitious and wide ranging exhibition, Mr. Olowu immediately recalled the extraordinary generosity of the city, as well as Chicago’s confident self-awareness that allowed it to evolve into a “stellar” art collecting megalopolis.  Bookended in front by a thoughtful and powerful homage to Chicago artists who helped define the city’s contributions to the global art world and at the end with a battalion of ebony mannequins decked out in the splendor of Mr. Olowu’s designs, Seeing Chicago might make some wish a fainting couch was around at the end of the show to let them recover from this vastly exhilarating experience.   

Duro Olowu – Seeing Chicago

Through September 27, 2020

Museum of Contemporary Art

220 E. Chicago Ave.

Chicago, IL  60611

mca.chicago.org