London fashion designer raids city’s walls to create ‘Seeing Chicago’
So many art exhibitions are precise, exacting, mixed like a bracing cocktail and meant to be taken in sips. “Seeing Chicago,” the Museum of Contemporary Art’s new eclectic gathering of Chicago-owned art convened by London fashion designer Duro Olowu, is more like a punch bowl of a show, a myriad of seemingly disparate ingredients swirled together to miraculously arrive at a tasty whole. Imperfect as it is, the adult-beverage metaphor comes to mind because I’ve seen the exhibition twice now, once on walk-throughs with Olowu and MCA senior curators and once as a museum patron, and the phrase I keep coming up with to describe it is: “drunk with art.” Not sloppy drunk, mind you, but gloriously, giddily tipsy.
Has Henri Matisse been on a wall with Chicago photographer Dawoud Bey before? Probably not, because that isn’t how museums think. But here the way Bey’s “Muhammad,”a Chicago boy on a bicycle, and the subject of Matisse’s “Laurette with a Cup of Coffee” both meet your eye, one hung on top of the other, makes them seem close cousins, despite the images being made an ocean and almost a century apart.
And then the geometric patterns in the Matisse painting correspond to those in the adjacent photo of a girl in a red-dress against a Moroccan tile backdrop, which reflect back the exuberant fabric of Olowu’s own fashion against the opposite wall, which then speaks to the soft pink and glitter adorning Kerry James Marshall’s lyrical “Vignette (Lalala),” back on the Matisse wall.
A love letter to the city written in visual language, “Duro Olowu: Seeing Chicago” is composed of pieces that normally live in Chicago museums and in the homes of its art patrons, and it feels like a new and thrilling mode of presentation. The sheer volume of art is a little overwhelming, yes, but the arrangement is warm and welcoming as it helps you spot how Martin Puryear works with Rene Magritte works with Wesley Willis works with Cindy Sherman.
It’s how you imagine your place might look if you had the eye of a dandy and the money of a swell. And very, very high ceilings. “I could just put a mattress down,” said Olowu, 55, a Nigerian Brit probably most famous here for being one of Michelle Obama’s go-to designers. “It’s my dream. They’re the kind of rooms that I’d like to wake up in and go to sleep in at the end of the day.”
More than 360 pieces from 67 collections now hang on the MCA’S fourth-floor walls and on new interior walls there mimicking art-storage screens that Olowu had built for the occasion. They merge painting and sculpture, “outsider” art and what we might as well call “insider,” a phalanx of mannequins in the designer’s dazzling, mixed-pattern vision of high fashion and a whole gallery of works in which the subjects gaze straight back at you. “Work that is happy together is not claustrophobic,” said Olowu. “Everything somehow should be here, whether it’s AFRICOBRA or surrealism or photography or sculpture.”
More than 360 pieces now hang on the MCA’S fourth-floor walls and on new interior walls there mimicking art-storage screens that Olowu had built for the occasion