1967
October – November:
Pictures to Be Read – Poetry to Be Seen
Claes Oldenburg: Projects for Monuments
November - December:
Two Happening Concepts: Alan Kaprow and Wolf Vostell
December – January 1968:
Dan Flavin: alternating pink and "gold"
1968
Fantastic Drawings (37 Chicago area artists, lower gallery)
January - February:
Made With Paper (400 objects from 16 countries)
March - April:
Jean Tinguely
Alain Jacquet: Screened photographic images
Marial Raysse: collage-paintings and neon sculptures
April - May:
George Segal: Twelve Human Situations
Robert Whitman: Cinema Pieces
May-June:
Jackson Pollock: Works on Paper
June – July:
Tom Wesselmann: The Great American Nude
Maurice Lasansky: The Nazi Drawings
The Baron and Bailey Light Circus
(17 projectors: 12 for slides, 3 for movies, 2 just for light, various screens and objects, and a rock band)
July – September:
Works from the Mr. and Mrs. Robert B. Mayer Collection
(80 works in six categories: pop, surrealist, abstract expressionist, mathematic form works, color-field paintings, physically-optically active)
September – October:
Directions I: OPTIONS
(90 works by 64 American, European, and Latin American artists - “a collection of audience-participation works”)
October – December:
From Painting and Sculpture to the Constructed Relief:
Relief/Construction/Relief
November – January 1969:
Violence in Recent American Art
New British Painting and Sculpture
1969
January – March:
Christo: Wrap In Wrap Out
January – March:
H.C. Westermann: Sculptures and Drawings
March - April:
Beverly Pepper
Don Baum Says, "Chicago Needs Famous Artists”
"28 artists including 3 art groups –
Hairy Who:
oldest of 3 grad Art Institute generations – Karl Wirsum, Jim Nutt, Gladys Nilsson, James Falconer, Suellen Rocca, and Art Green
Nonplussed Some:
2nd generation – Edward Flood, Sarah Canright, Ed Paschke, and Richard Wetzel
False Image:
Christine Ramberg, Phil Hanson, Roger Brown, and Eleanor Dube"
April:
Meredith Monk choreography among the Beverly Pepper show
April – May:
Franz Kline
Contact: Cybernetic Sculpture with Les Levine
May – July:
Laszlo Maholy-Nagy
July - September:
European Painters Today
Steven Jay Urry: Dribblescapes
September – October:
Tower
Paul Van Hoeydonck: Spaced Out
October – December:
Art By Telephone
(sculptors, painters, composers, poets, and dancers will transmit by telephone instruction for the construction oor performance of their art.” (34 artists from USA & Europe)
December – February 1970:
The Joseph Randall Shapiro Collection
1970
February – March:
Roy Lichtenstein
March – May:
Richard Koppe, Lillian Florsheim, Kazys Varnelis
Earth and Water Projects
May – 1 week:
Roof Works
May – June:
Permutations: Light and Color (16 west coast artists)
July – September:
Andy Warhol
September – October:
Ellsworth Kelly, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Frank Stella
Lasers and Holograms
October – December:
The Graphics of Robert Rauschenberg
December – February 1971:
The Architectural Vision of Paolo Soleri
1971
February – March:
Murals for the People: Jesus Rafael Soto
April – May:
49th Parallels – New Canadian Art
May – July:
Radical Realism
Cosmo Campoli
July – September:
Allan D’Arcangelo
Jasper Johns graphics
September - October:
Enrico Baj
October – December:
Lucas Samaras Boxes
Extended Structures: Ferrer, Graves, Hesse, Morris, Saret, and Scanga
December – January 1972:
White on White, Arp, Johns, Kelly, and others
December – January 1972:
Terry Allen, mixed media drawings
1972
January 4, Gene Siskel: A New Film Series: “The Museum of Contemporary Art is getting into the movies in a big way. Beginning tonight, and on each Tuesday evening thruout the year, the museum will present a program of traditional or experimental films.”
February – March:
Chuck Close; Paul Sarkisian
100 drawings from the west coast underground commix
March - May:
Lee Bontecou’s first retrospective of sculpture and drawings
May – June:
Chicago Imagist Art (30 artists over 25 years)
July – September:
James Rosenquist
September – October:
Modern masters from Chicago collections, a survey of modern art from 1910 – 1960 including works of 60 artists taken from 57 collections in the city.
October – December:
Deliberate Entanglements, fabrics as art forms
Braque graphics
1973
December – January:
Raphael Ferrer Environments
Jess’ Paste-ups
February – March:
Alan Shields; Richard Artschwager; Piero Manzoni
April – May:
Post Mondrian Abstraction in America
Diane Arbus Retrospective
May – July:
Eva Hesse: A Memorial Exhibition, 44 sculptures and 28 drawings
My First Car: eccentric sculptures by Don Potts
July – September:
Norman Rockwell: A Sixty-Year Retrospective
Executive Order 9006: photographic documents of the internment of 110,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II.
September – November:
20th Century Master Drawings from Chicago
Collections
Rooms & Shadows, Michael Hurson: miniature rooms;
Thomas Kovachevich: shadow paintings
November – January 1974:
Four Sculptors from Los Angeles: Lloyd Hamrol, Barbara
Munger, John White, and Connie Zehr
Cornell in Chicago, 40 boxes by Joseph Cornell
1974
January – March:
Robert Arneson: a retrospective of his ceramics;
The East is Red, papercuts from the Chinese Revolution
Jose Posada Graphics
January 16:
Philip Glass lecture recital
March - April:
Joseph Raffael; Jack Beal; Jim Nutt (3 one-man shows)
May - June:
The Logic of Vision: Jo Baer, Robert Mangold, Brice Marden, David Novros, and Anne Truitt
Bronzes by Jacob Epstein
June - August:
John D’Andrea and Duane Hanson: The Real and Ideal in Figurative Sculpture
Stephan von Huene, animated sculptures
June 30:
"The Museum of Contemporary Art concluded its series of six weekly jazz concerts last Sunday afternoon."
September - October:
Leon Golub: Paintings from 1947 to 1973
September - October:
George Tooker
October -December:
Alexander Calder retrospective
December - January 1975:
“Holiday Happenings” contemporary toys, a modular environment, family films, and performance events.
1975
January - March:
Made in Chicago, U.S.A. (represented the US in the Sao Paolo Bienal last year and later toured South America and was shown in Washington DC);
Sources of Chicago Imagism
March 8 – April 27:
Body Works: Laurie Anderson, Chris Burden,
Gaston Lachaise, sculpture
March 23, Tribune: “For the strong of heart, here is a list of upcoming Bodyworks performances. All will take place at the Museum of Contemporary Art at 8pm. All are also to be live – if you call that living.
April 2: Dennis Oppenheim explores aging and deterioration of the body; in a second piece he takes identity of a black man.
April 4: Laurie Anderson evokes memories of her childhood in an autobiographical work called “For Instants.”
April 11: Chris Burden undergoes more agony in his continuing examination of danger and fear.
May – June:
Menace
Hans Bellmer
June - August:
Video Art, an exhibition surveying the historic and aesthetic dimensions of video as an art form
Man Ray, photographs
September - November:
Contemporary African Fabrics
Bruce Conner, drawings
November - January 1976:
Robert Irwin: light and space explorations
Jeremy Anderson, drawings and sculpture
1976
January - February:
Peter Blume
Five West Coast visionary artists
Drawings by five abstract expressionists
March - April:
Abstract Art in Chicago
Clarence John Laughlin, photographs
May - June:
100 Years of Architecture in Chicago (160 projects dating from the Chicago Fire to the present)
Richard Diebenkorn, monotypes
July - September:
American Crafts ’76: An Aesthetic View
Fashion Photography: Six Decades
September - November:
Sculpture by David Gilhooly, Will Insley, and Joel Shapiro
November - January:
Charles Ross, light works
Manierre Dawson, paintings
John Storrs, sculpture
1977
January - March:
Alfred Leslie, Paintings
The Photographer and the City
March - May:
Antoni Tapies
Robert B. Mayer Memorial Loan
May - July:
Richard Lindner
Words at Liberty
July - September:
Walker Evans
Improbable Furniture
September - November:
A View of a Decade
November - January 1978:
The Mouse Museum/The Ray Gun Wing: Two Collections/Two Buildings by Claes Oldenburg
Survey of prints from Landfall Press
1978
January - March:
Frida Kahlo and June Leaf
January - February:
Gordon Matta-Clark architectural project
March - April:
German and Austrian Expressionism Festival
May - June:
Llyn Foulkes, 50 paintings, collages, and assemblages
Alfred Jensen
October - November:
Buildings Reborn: New Uses, Old Places
November - January 1979:
Adolf Woelfli – 126 colored drawings while confined in a mental institution |
Detail from 1967 clippings book, review of the first MCA exhibition.
Courtesy of the MCA Library & Archives.
Poster for one of the two first MCA exhibitions:
Chicago Sun-Times, December 17, review of Dan Flavin's first-ever solo exhibition:
Courtesy of the MCA Library & Archives.
Chicago Tribune, July 2, 1968, headline for The Baron and Bailey Light Circus.
Chicago Tribune, July 16, 1968, headline for exhibitions in response to the 1968 riots.
Chicago Tribune, January 16, 1969, headline for the Christo exhibition, "Wrap In Wrap Out." In his first wrapped U.S. building, Christo covered the Ontario Street museum in brown canvas, and likewise, wrapped the interior space in white cloth.
Chicago Tribune, September 20, 1970, headline for the show, "Lasers and Holograms."
Chicago Tribune, January 9, 1972. The Tribune's art critic liked the work, but not the presentation of this MCA exhibition.
Chicago Tribune, January 23, 1972, headline about the state of Chicago's contemporary art. The article by Jane Allen and Derek Guthrie begins, "It's a sad fact that art like almost everything else in Chicago is riddled with politics. Genuine divisions of opinion concerning aesthetis and the relationship of art to society seldom emerge, develop or mature here, because the art community is divided on questions of personal and institutional allegiances.
May 14, 1972
1972 exhibition catalogue for Chicago Imagist Art.
Chicago Tribune, April 8, 1973, headline for the first Diane Arbus retrospective, prepared by the Museum of Modern Art after her death. The show originated at MoMA, then traveled to Chicago, Baltimore, Minneapolis, and Ottawa, Canada. See the MoMA press release, here.
Catalogue for Leon Golub's 1974 MCA exhibition
Catalogue for the 1975 exhibition, Bodyworks
Chicago Tribune, January 22, 1978
Although Tribune art critic Alan Artner disliked both Frida Kahlo's and June Leaf's work in this two-person retrospective, he reserved an especially biting misogyny for Kahlo, whose work was presented for the first time in the U.S. in this MCA show:
“Kahlo led the kind of life that makes for a Ms. Magazine version of the romantic agony… All of this shows up in her art, though after several miscarriages and medically ordered abortions, her primary subject became pain… Keeping in mind that Kahlo’s works were created in a climate that was truly repressive to women, one can only marvel at the courage with which she presented all manner of grisly feminine experience. Yet, while her consciously naïve style depicts these horrors with uncommon directness, her psychological makeup was so intensely self-oriented that she was never capable of pulling back far enough to make a more general statement. By the time Kahlo begins painting herself in necklaces of thorns or with nails and arrows piercing her skin, one realizes that this has become an art of monumental self-pity – an art that will satisfy none by the most caterwauling feminist.”
Artner concludes by describing the MCA exhibition as consisting of, “several lame still-lifes and a number of photographs that turn a gifted though minor career into one long, self-indulgent shriek. “
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