Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Photo: Sean MacGillivray.

Sasha Lee: Can you talk a little bit about your position at the MOCA and the various projects you oversee, maybe your favorites?

Denise Gray: There’s one particularly that comes to mind, and that is the high-school apprenticeship program. The program has been around since the ’90s, it started out because we originally had a high-school program for students interested in having conversations about art with their peers. It ended up being successful and students wanted to continue the dialogue, so MOCA decided to formalize that program, resulting in the MOCA apprenticeship program. We conduct a pretty vigorous interview process–with anywhere from eighty applicants for twelve spots, usually. It’s highly competitive, consisting of students who have identified themselves as interested in pursuing a career in the arts, whether as a curator or as an artist or educator. The program is great because it’s very hands-on. We use downtown as a resource, so for example today we’re going to the art walk. We use the library at REDCAT and visit exhibitions and attend events related to art, so as to compare and contrast the different kinds of art that’s out there. Sometimes we’ll even have artists who are exhibiting at the MOCA or invite other artists to do special programs with MOCA apprentices.

The apprentices also host events. In 2009, we’re going to have our seventh annual teen night. It’s an amazing opportunity for the apprentices to take the lead and create events for their peers. Usually there’s a student art exhibition that they curate, they bring out live entertainment, along with other activities. It’s like this big art party for teens; we don’t turn away the adults but it’s definitely designed for teens–creating a real ownership for them over the event. Last year, related to the Takashi Murakami exhibition, we collaborated with TOKYOPOP [publishers and distributors of Manga] to hone in on the Japanese pop culture connection–we had a photo booth, young performers, etc. The event was called Eye Candy.

Last year they actually had a slumber party at MOCA! This group had bonded so much that they wanted to have a sleepover at the MOCA. They were hanging out at 2 a.m. in the gallery–and the challenge was intentional insomnia–so to stay awake, we hung out with security and explored behind the scenes of MOCA.

Read the full interview here.

Detail of Academic Connections: Media Atlas, 2014, an undertaking of Professor W.J.T. Mitchell’s Theories of Media class students, in a gallery at the Smart Museum of the University of Chicago. Photo: Saul Rosenfield.

At the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art, visual-culture scholar W.J.T. Mitchell and the students of his “Theories of Media” class have colonized a gallery to realize a contemporary version of German art historian Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas (1925–1929). The result is what Mitchell calls a “media atlas.” Each student was invited to choose an image, describe why, and tack the image and the description to a wall covered in black fabric. Warburg sought to uncover the interconnections among forms and around themes that he observed resonating throughout history. Like Mitchell’s students, he pinned images of paintings, sculptures, buildings, and cultural ephemera, including magazines and newspaper photographs, to black panels. The resonances among the images on a particular panel might be more or less obvious, and during the utopian project (which was unfinished when he died), Warburg constantly moved images and revised relationships. As an undertaking, the Mnemosyne Atlas stands as a monument to the processes of visual association, history making, and memory,^[i] and, as Mitchell puts it, “helps frame contemporary questions about how we use and understand images.”[ii]

Installation shot of Academic Connections: Media Atlas, mixed media on three 8 x 4-foot homasote panels, totaling 96 x 144 inches, and selections from the Smart Museum of the University of Chicago. Photo: Sarah Mendelsohn. The Media Atlas is a collaborative effort of Professor W.J.T. Mitchell’s Theories of Media class; the accompanying selection of artworks were chosen by Mitchell and visiting scholar Francesco Gori.

Mitchell’s students have the option of explicitly demonstrating Warburg-like resonances among the images by stretching different colors of yarn from one image to another in order to suggest connections: “visual similarity” (red), “common technical basis” (yellow), and “historical adjacency” (blue). The resulting wall collage invites museum visitors to adopt Warburg’s openness to the processes of connection by engaging the specific examples of Mitchell’s students and the interconnection of following the yarn trails, and it displays these processes as concrete and visually compelling.

Left: Jan Tichy. History of Painting (detail), 2014, at the Chicago Cultural Center. Photo: Jan Tichy. Right: Tiffany Dome and mosaics of Preston Bradley Hall in the Chicago Cultural Center. Photo: Saul Rosenfield.

The visual experience of Warburgian interconnection reaches an aesthetic crescendo at the Chicago Cultural Center, a Beaux Arts wonderland with two stained glass domes, two grand staircases, and enough floor, wall, and ceiling mosaics to pave a city of Roman baths. To maximize Chicago artist Jan Tichy’s History of Painting (2014), enter on Randolph Street, climb the center’s more modest staircase, view the more modest dome, and tread the more modest mosaics. History of Painting emerges on the top floor landing as the grandest mosaic of all.

Tichy has taped together 9,261 color 35mm slides from the teaching collection of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Tichy segregates the slides by predominant hue, and the resulting three mosaic panels, each one 140 by 100 inches, pave a spectrum of color that stretches thirty feet across three windows, which gather light from an internal courtyard. Each labeled slide depicts an artwork, and the collection was once integral to art-history classes. The result is first a spectacular stained-glass window, a translucent mosaic; then a memorial to a not-so-distant pre-digital age; then an archive, visible all at once, of both art-historical icons and their lesser-known kin; and finally an atlas, like Warburg’s, of visual resonances.

Left: Jan Tichy. History of Painting, 2014; 35mm slides, tape; three panels, each 140 x 100 in. Photo: Jan Tichy. Right: detail of History of Painting, 2014. Photo: Saul Rosenfield. History of Painting is part of aroundcenter <http://www.aroundcenter.org/>, a nine-part project by Tichy at the Chicago Cultural Center, including photographic, video projection, and light sculpture installations.

From close up, the works converse across time. A random glance reveals both serendipitous formal connections, for example, between Stuart Davis’s Premiere (1957), Will Barnet’s Orange and Green Space (1958), and topical connections, for example, between Eileen Cooper’s If the Space Fits (1987) and Felix Vallotton’s Mulatto Woman (1913). The slides, rather than focusing attention on the failure of the reproductions to replicate the experience of viewing the original artworks, reconceive the experience as both sensually and intellectually stimulating, reminding the contemporary viewer of the capacity of film photography to produce sharp, clear images even when tiny, and through Tichy’s ministrations to create a work whose power resolutely resides in both its parts and their sum.

From afar, History of Painting recalls the simpler mosaics I’d already seen and foreshadows their increasing elaboration, which culminates in the Preston Bradley Hall, a 135-by-49-foot room that is tiled floor to ceiling with mother of pearl, glass, and stone, and surmounted with the largest Tiffany glass dome in the world. It is hard to maintain a position of asceticism here. At first, the hall—the whole building—seems open to characterization as the glorifying edifice of a 19th-century city asserting its stature through the pomp and circumstance of a civic palace. But the 1897 building, completed just 26 years after the Chicago fire and known as the “People’s Palace,” was in fact the first home of Chicago’s public library, and the Hall’s first use was as the library’s book-delivery room. Tichy’s panels end up resonating with Warburg’s undertaking in more ways, since the library as well as the Art Institute are each archiving institutions, and History of Painting is the archive made manifest, accessible both aesthetically and conceptually to the adventurous viewer. And like the Mnemosyne Atlas, History of Painting also scrambles the canon-defining process of art historiography.

Lilli Carré. One Second (Eucalyptus), 2013; video still. Courtesy of the Artist and Western Exhibitions, Chicago, and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Finally, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, there emerges the unlikeliest Warburgian connection of all: a small show of drawings, videos, and ceramics by animator Lilli Carré. Here, what comes into view are not the resonances of diverse images but the resonances of diverse experiences of movement and stasis. At one moment, the visitor engages Carré’s icon-/dingbat-like squiggles and shapes as stationary and isolated drawings; at another, their transformation, through combination and motion, into active and integrated elements of storytelling. Drawings of vaguely vegetal shapes that resemble sectioned or whole fruits or vegetables becomes animated, transforming on the screen into the activity of a village of organisms seen through a microscope, or into a bird’s-eye view of a street scene on a planet inhabited by non-humans. Even its apparently representational title, One Second (Eucalyptus) (2013), leaves this productive confusion intact.

Lilli Carré. Installation view, The Negotiation, 2013; video still, at BMO Harris Bank Chicago Works: Lilli Carré, MCA Chicago. Dec 17, 2013-Apr 15, 2014. Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago.

Carré’s most elaborate work is a two-video installation, The Negotiation (2013). Each video loops at different rates, so that the combination constantly re-creates itself. As the eye takes in the action—sometimes jumping from one screen to the other as if at a tennis match, other times taking in both screens at once—the stories reconfigure themselves, unfolding in different combinations and juxtapositions, claiming different levels of attention, and inspiring different strategies of seeing. The animation turns the immobile objects Carré has drawn into activity, but the moving video never hides—or seeks to hide—each object’s origin as discrete and stationary; the visitor sees movement and stasis at the same time.

Carré’s objects, Tichy’s slides, and the media images of Mitchell’s students share a mode of operation: the juxtaposition of entities that, separate and stable at a distance, close up reveal resonances that not only expose their intersections but also put them in motion. Each of these deceptively modest installations rewards the visitor who takes the time to view and re-view, to shuffle and repeat, to fall into an extended relationship with the images.

And this is exactly how Warburg treated his atlas, as a work in process, the final years of the historian’s life spent moving images around in an activity of association and combination. What remains today of the Mnemosyne Atlas are the images of the blackboards as they stood at one moment of time, a trace of a product that was, in fact, as shifting as Carré’s videos. The gift of these exhibitions—their synchronicity—as if they had reached out to each other along Mitchell’s tri-colored yarn trails, is the revelation of the role that both intuition and intellect play not only in the composition of art—and indeed, all visual and media culture—but also in our reception of these creative and social activities. It is also the recognition that, once they are set to the music of seemingly random association, neither Mitchell’s media atlas nor Tichy’s mosaic history remain, in the act of viewing, any more still than Carré’s animations.

Academic Connections: Media Atlas is on view at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art through April 13, 2014.

aroundcenter (including Jan Tichy’s History of Painting) is on view at the Chicago Cultural Center through April 27, 2014.

BMO Harris Bank Chicago Works: Lilli Carré is on view the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago through April 15, 2014.

Ana Mendieta, "Silueta Works in Mexico," 1973–77, Details, Color photographs. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

In 2002, feminist matriarch Judy Chicago co-curated an all-women art exhibition in China, in a place called Lugu Lake, historically a matriarchal society. At the last minute, just before the show’s opening, another curator, a man, arrived with a piece his wife had made. “You know, if I didn’t know better, I’d think that was by a man,” Chicago said to a friend. As it turned out, it was. “The guy used his wife’s name and thought he’d put one over on me,” recalled Chicago, who has looked at countless artworks by men and women and become an expert at distinguishing the sometimes slight differences in perspective. After all, telling the girls from the guys is a necessary ability when your aim is getting more girl artists onto the playing field. Though, in the past six decades, the girls have often made announcing their gender key to their projects.

Two shows up in Los Angeles right now feel like smart reunions of member of an all-girl gang, one that banded together in the 1960s then began to thrive ‘70s and continued into the early ‘80s. Not all the key members actually knew each other. But they probably knew of each other, given that they shared a goal: to show how much women mattered and how criminal it was they’d been excluded from art, which stood in for life at large.

The Personal is Political, a headily titled exhibition of work culled from the collection of MOCA Los Angeles, includes some goose-bump worthy gems. Ana Mendieta’s gently insidious Siluetas, showing of the outline of the artist’s petite body in blood, sand, dirt and greenery; pages of handwriting by Adrian Piper, chronicling the artist-philosopher’s youthful, overtly optimistic dive into Kantian metaphysics; Alice Neel’s figure painting, defiant yet wholly comfortable in its own skin. Most of the women in this compact exhibition seem bent on proving the mind to be as potent and powerful as the body, a project particularly feminine since the minds of women had been downplayed for eons.

Mary Beth Edelson, "The Last Supper," 1972.

Only a few miles away, at Subliminal Projects in Echo Park, a similar sort of corroboration plays out in an exhibition called Eve. Artists Mary Beth Edelson, Judy Chicago, Lisa Steele and Hannah Wilke—women who also belonged to the groundbreaking girl gang—again assert themselves as bodies with minds that deserve a place in history. There’s an urgent energy to their work, most of which aims to reform the art world itself. Edelson superimposes the heads of female artists on figures in da Vinci’s The Last Supper—Georgia O’Keefe appears as Christ—and Hannah Wilke poses topless in a print that posits feminists as fascists, warning the art world to watch out.

It’s a lot of fun to immerse yourself in history through these artists, especially since art has that singular ability to not just record what happened but to be what happened. Edelson’s Bringing Home the Evolution (1979), which puts maternal mastermind, sculptor Louise Bourgeois in revolutionary garb at the helm of a peace walk, not only reflects a sentiment of the time. It actually is the means Edelson used put that sentiment into the world.

But here’s the problem with Eve at Subliminal Projects, and other shows like it: in attempt to trace a trajectory, it includes work by younger female artists, who, perhaps with the exception of politically pointed Ayanah Moor, clearly do not belong to the same gang. This makes the younger artists seem more diffuse and undirected than they otherwise would.

Born in 1969 and after, they’re barely old to have witnessed third wave feminists and, as much their work grapples with experiences of women, it doesn’t aggressively assert this experience, or carve a place for itself in spheres of culture. Kim McCarty’s flowing figures are ghostlike and lost in themselves. Alex Prager’s well-dressed ladies are lost in thought as well, and the photos live in a psychological space that sometimes becomes Lynchian, while Stella Vine’s dripping, big-eyed paintings of Princess Di or Lisa Lopes humanize celebrity.

Alex Prager, "Christine," 2007.

There are other women artists who would probably fit better into the legacy of 1970s feminism than those presented here. But the point is that time has changed enough that women working today feel comfortable in a space of ambiguity. Not only has this resulted from their far less dire circumstances—women now have retrospectives at MoMA and MOCA, they get gallery shows, etc.—but out of a changing cultural landscape.

When she reviewed the feminist blockbuster exhibition WACK!, critic Hunter Drohojowska-Philp commented that the catalog cover, a sea of sexy naked bodies culled from pop culture by Martha Rosler was originally a “critique of representation.” But, “Today, it looks like an advertisement for The L Word.”  Explicitness doesn’t have the same sway as it did forty and fifty years ago, but, at least in Eve, putting ambiguous artists next to the explicit, driven women of first and second wave feminism, makes the former appear weak-willed. It’s not fair, and it’s not informative. There’s something to be said for letting history stay in the past.

In it’s final week at  Thomas Robertello Gallery is an exhibition of new photographs and video by Chicago-based artist Adam Ekberg.  Continuing with the use of lens-based phenomena, humble celebratory gestures, and primitive constructs, Ekberg further develops two distinct bodies of work; images created in the woods or nature, and images using his apartment as stage set.

While similar to the performative aspects of Ekberg’s interiors, the outdoor imagery, boundless in many ways, allows the artist to abandon certain restrictive elements and celebrate a personal communion with nature. The positioning of a flashlight on the ground creating an illogically placed beacon of light on the horizon, a duet of balloons in Precise Equilibrium; one helium and one filed with the artist’s breath, and a thrown handful of glitter all point toward self-portraiture minus the actual subject. In his video of a fuse slowly burning on the pavement, the gnarled line gradually disintegrates staining the pavement with a residue of gunpowder, evoking a whole life with beginning, end, unexpected twists, a past, present, and future.

Adam Ekberg resides in Chicago and graduated the School of the Art Institute‘s MFA Photography program in 2006. Concurrently with this exhibition, he is participating in Elements of Photography at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, organized by Michael Green and (Re)Collect at the Hyde Park Art Center, curated by Francesca Wilmott.