The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA) has received an anonymous $10m gift to support its performance programme. The gift, which will allow the museum to establish a Performance Fund endowment to support live art programming, comes shortly after the museum hired Moira Brennan, the former director of the Map Fund, to be its new director of performance and public programmes.
“What this gift enables us to do is to reinvest in who we already are as an institution and to make that relevant in the contemporary moment,” says Joey Orr, the museum’s deputy director and chief of curatorial affairs. “Our intention for the Performance Fund is commissioning live arts events, archiving, collecting, documenting—and what all those things mean for performance.”
The gift also comes at a time when the MCA is examining its archives in anticipation of its 60th anniversary in 2027, and foregrounding the foundational role that performance art plays in that history. Orr says: “The MCA was founded in 1967, and the first event they did was a Fluxus happening with John Cage, Alison Knowles and Dick Higgins. Just after that, the MCA was the first building in the US to be wrapped by Christo and Jeanne-Claude. A few years after that, Chris Burden did a really seminal work of his, Doomed (1975), here. And then soon after that, they commissioned Gordon Matta-Clark to do one of his three-floor ‘spatial drawings’. And it just goes on and on and on.”
A scene from Edgar Arceneaux's Until, Until, Until . . . © MCA Chicago
The $10m gift will enable the MCA to build on that legacy of commissioning major live art pieces, including a lineup of four projects this spring under the auspices of its On Stage programme, whereby four artists will present projects in the museum’s Edlis Neeson Theater. Under the theme of “lineages”, the artists Elisa Harkins, Anne Collod, Miguel Gutierrez and Kaneza Schaal will present new works dealing with questions of identity and shared history.
The goal of the On Stage performance series, Orr says, is “to expose Chicago audiences to what’s going on in the broader field”. A companion series staged each autumn, Chicago Performs, is intended “to invest in emerging or new projects, or differently scaled projects by performance artists working in Chicago”, he adds.
In addition to commissioning new projects and thinking expansively about how past performances are documented and archived, the new Performance Fund is supporting how the MCA engages its community through live art projects.
“We don't want to show up and roll out a plan without listening to the people we’re supposed to be serving, so we’re spending a lot of time in the community—locally, nationally and also internationally—as we strategise our next moves,” Orr says. “At the end of the day, curators and museum workers are in public service. We think of museum workers as access points where the publics that we serve can author their own questions given our resources.”
