I was asked to give a presentation for the Education Committee at the Museum of Contemporary Art a few weeks ago. The committee is comprised of educational and curatorial staff, along with a few trustees and patrons. I had worked with Jackie Terrassa, MCA's recently appointed Assistant Director of Public Programs, when she was the education head at the Smart Museum of Art a few years back, and had actually known her before that through her work in Columbia College Chicago's Photography Department. So when she invited me to

give a presentation at MCA I readily accepted, though I wasn't exactly sure what the exact context was. I did know that Jackie was familiar with the project based work I have done at various museums since the early 1990s, and this work was consistent with her own interest in museum education and the museum as an inclusive and dialogical space of participation. I also knew that I have definite ideas about how institutions like MCA can use the current moment of economic and social turmoil as a moment of opportunity, a moment to embrace an expanded paradigm of what and how a museum can exist as a part of the socio-cultural fabric of society.

In the past I have only done these kinds of presentations at museums where I am already slated to do a project or, at the least where the institution is consideration extending an invitation to me to do a project and wants to do a presentational "meet and greet" with the staff before committing. I didn't know exactly what MCA or Jackie was thinking, but I was game, having a work in the museum's collection which has been shown there on previous occasions, and being a fairly regular attendee, not to mention perpetual member. Indeed MCA is one of the few museums, through its ongoing 12X12 exhibition program of emerging Chicago artists, to have shown itself to be genuinely responsive to artists in its immediate orbit while also maintaining a meaningful diversity in its other programming as well. It's given the institution an even greater vibrancy while affirming its commitment to talent at its own doorsteps. The question of how to maintain national and global relevance and stature while being responsive to one's local community is one that most museums have simply shied away from entirely, or responded to in a token way when they have responded at all.

My private presentation was preceded by two public events at the museum that took place in the immediately preceding weeks that I thought signaled a significant shift for the museum; both of these were fostered by Theaster Gates, a dynamic young artist from Chicago's South Side, who is himself devising an evolving art practice that directly engages public ritual and social structures, seeking to use his practice to satisfy both his own expansive sensibilities, but also his need to bring together diverse social communities to bridge prevailing social structures. To that end Gates created a series of performances and events in venues across Chicago that included Shine King, a far west side shoeshine stand, the MCA, Little Black Pearl, an arts center in the Kenwood-Hyde Park neighborhood, and Sonotheque, a club on the north side. At the opening performance in his 12X12 installation Temple Exercises (with his ever evolving cast of cohorts The Black Monks of Mississippi) at MCA Gates--much to the surprise of the museum I'm sure--brought his whole merry overflowing band of enthusiasts to the museum for his performance. Spilling out of the small 12X12 gallery space and out in the MCA lobby, and winding its way up the grand stairway, the capacity audience was a grand celebration of the kind of diverse crowd one would hope to find populating a contemporary institution but all too often don't.

Along with his scatter site performances and events, Gates facilitated a dialogue with Project Row Houses' Rick Lowe and Kyong Park, founder of New York's Storefront for Art and Architecture. Both Lowe and Park have also devised institutions and practices that are broadly and socially engaging, so their presence at MCA during Gates' exhibition project suggested a interesting confluence of sensibilities. This program too was well attended, suggesting a real desire for these kinds of programs, which the museum again must have noted. So I was looking forward to following up on this with my presentation for the education committee, giving my own take on the museum as an active social and aesthetic space.

I had also been thinking about a few other recent projects that tilted the museum experience in a provocatively engaging way, such as Vik Muniz's recent curatorial project at New York's Museum of Modern Art, "Rebus." The show, which garnered much critical and public praise--friends called it a "must see" show--was the result of handing over the curatorial reins to an artist, who then brought a keen and sometimes humorous sensibility to bear on the selection and arrangement of a wide range of fine and design objects from the museum's collection, mixing mediums along with the high/low function of the objects in a way that created an entirely new and out of the box context for considering the work. This is, in fact, the ninth in MoMA's artists curated projects, "Artists' Choice." The exhibition was revealing and refreshing for what it said about how a new and meaningful museum experience could be fostered by being willing to reconsider the artist's role, allowing their "work" as such to be the shaping of an exhibition. Muniz's unconventional selection and presentation, with its own quizzically challenging logic, revealed a conceptually refreshing approach to curatorial practice that suggest one way that museums can shake things up by loosening the conventional reins and seeing what results. It was also a way to create a very different kind of conversation around the collection and around the presumed role of an artist.

As I can hear my more conservative curator friends starting to huff and puff quietly, there is one caveat I'll offer here: not all artists--even interesting ones--make interesting curators. But there have been enough effective ones to give one pause as to what other such opportunities would reveal. (Artist Mickalene Thomas' recent curated exhibition at Collette Blanchard Gallery, "The Brand New Heavies," suggests a similar sense of an astute artist-curator at work, albeit within a commercial gallery context, and provides strong evidence that artists are not only good at presenting their own work. Kara Walker's "After the Deluge" at the Met in 2006 was yet another provocative and successful artist curatorial project.)

For the most part the kinds of conversations that take place within the museum are private ones: the viewer engages with the objects and has a private, often unspoken response to them, and then moves on to other objects, and so on. The transformative experience as such is one which only the individual is privileged to, and there are few (if any) ways for that response to then enter into the actual experiential framework of the museum. If there were such an opportunity for response, the museum space could become a more conversational one. One of the ways I think museums can transforms themselves into more dynamic spaces is to allow for a space where this usually private conversation can somehow become a public one, one which is then embraced and folded into the fabric of the institution. This conversation need not be restricted solely to artists, and can--with a degree of programmatic finesse--be extended to a number of different constituencies. Muniz's engagement with the collection and the resultant exhibition was an example of this kind of conversation, one in which an artists' individual response was shaped into an exhibition. Of course, within the hierarchical environment of most museums, there exists a rather fixed notion of just who is allowed to shape the viewing experience.

The role of curator has long been defined as the kind of position that comes attached to a whole set of assumptions about professional expertise and training, with this training then being subjectively deployed in the shaping of the experience and perception of the work within the museum going experience. As such, curators have a significant hand in also shaping the larger art historical experience, since museums do make decisions about which works of a given historical moment will be elevated and perhaps canonized by their very display. And while this is certainly one very legitimate way to think about the scholarship and display of art objects within a museum, when assigned instead to an artist or--in the case of my recent project in Baltimore at the Walters Art Museum, assigned to twelve high school age students working with an artist--the results can often bring an even more expansive and certainly unanticipated reading and response to those same objects. Muniz's brilliant and irreverent Rebus at MoMA revealed a selection and arrangements of objects that crossed all boundaries of mediums, notions of high and low, and historical period that is hard to imagine anyone trained in the specificities of any of those single areas doing. My own project at the Walters uncovered works in the collection that were exhibited for the very first time, and in a way that also exploded conservative historical museum notions about how such objects should be displayed and thus experienced. Both projects suggest that artworks need not be solely framed by notions connoisseurship to be with meaningfully engaged with.

One of the things I have noticed about institutions that purport to want to make systemic changes in their programming is that by temperament, training and tradition, a lot of individuals at those institutions are often not capable of out of the box thinking; they might want to, but they just don't know how, and their academic and institutional on the job training certainly didn't prepare them for this. For an institution to do so requires the kind of power sharing that goes against the grain of the aura of institutional authoritative power. But the results--my collaborative curatorial project in Baltimore received a sustained and positive critical response unlike anything the museum had experienced recently, the Vik Muniz show at MoMA received laudatory press and public response, and Theaster Gates' performance and installation at MCA and Little Black Pearl revealed a largely untapped audience--shows that when museums do open themselves up to new paradigms it's a win-win situation for everyone. What is needed now is for even more institutions to step up to the plate and be part of the inclusive conversation that defines the moment that we are in. The current economic and social crisis that we are experiencing should make it clear that we are indeed interconnected in profound ways, and that we urgently need to be thinking out of the box and having a whole new set of conversations in response to this degree of interdependence. That goes for institutions, and that goes for us as individuals as well. Our collective growth and survival depends on it.

I'm probably the last person in Chicago to eat there, so I probably shouldn't even let on, and instead act like I've been in on the deal all along, but I finally got up to Michelle Fire's restaurant Tweet, located in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood on North Sheridan Road. I'd heard that on Sunday the lines and the wait to get in were completely off the chain, so on Saturday morning with my hungry son and nephew in tow we found our way to what various friends and reviewers had described as "the absolute best brunch spot in Chicago." I'd also heard that Fire had an impressive collection of photographs displayed on the restaurant's walls. Having recently met her when she acquired one of my prints of president Barack Obama, I had made it a point to pay her a visit. It turned out to be well worth the trip from Hyde Park and then some. The food was as impressive as I'd heard, with a wonderfully dizzying array of freshly made selections (organic ingredients all), and the photographs on display--salon style--are an absolute treat. It doesn't get much better than having a museum quality viewing experience while downing fabulous food. Among other pictures I recognized on the walls (both in Tweet and the adjacent Fire owned bar Big Chicks) were those by Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Flor Garduño, Lisette Model, Diane Arbus and Bob Thall along with works by Tony Fitzpatrick and the late Ed Paschke, along with other luminaries and emerging talent, hanging side by side. My Barack Obama print gazes down from on high at the front entrance. Can't say I've ever seen anything quite like this place in all my years in New York! Michelle Fire is truly a Chicago treasure. I think I may have found a new hangout.