MCA exhibit seemed like an answer to inequity
But some artists elected to withdraw their work from ‘The Long Dream’
At the center of it all is “The Long Dream,” an art exhibition named after the Black Chicago writer Richard Wright’s final novel published in his lifetime, about the distant hope for a fairer future.
The sprawling showcase for current Chicago artists on the MCA’s fourth floor was the museum’s big public response to a very challenging 2020. The COVID19 pandemic came from outside, shut the museum for two long stretches and gutted its revenues. From inside, employee and youth groups spoke out during the pandemic’s early months against certain management practices and decisions, everything from how and when it reopened the museum to the public to a broader alleged failure “to address and rectify racial inequities” in the institution.
So the contemporary art museum changed its fall programming plans and quickly put together “The Long Dream” for a November opening.
It would be less expensive, which helped with the budget. It would showcase and pay a wide range of local artists, which helped with calls for diversity and inclusion in a year when that became as central to everything as the virus. And it would be “organized collectively,” meaning employees who don’t normally perform those functions would be helping to pick the art, place the art, and write the descriptions to go on the wall.
“Going back to the origin when we planned the exhibition as a team ... I think we really, genuinely wanted to sit with artists, sit with their words, and really think through this moment,” said Naomi Beckwith, who was the museum’s Manilow Senior Curator and just recently left to become deputy director and chief curator at the Guggenheim in New York City.
“How do we address what have been ongoing and long-term issues in this country? How do we address racism? How do we address health inequities? How do we address, together, anxiety? But also, how do we imagine a better future? And for all the artists who said yes to participating in the exhibition, I like to think that, you know, they want to walk with us on that journey.”
It was, on paper, a savvy, almost ideal answer to the range of issues that confronted the MCA, just as they have confronted many other old-line, and almost by definition hierarchical, cultural institutions across Chicago and the nation. In almost any previous year, the quick and canny programming shift might have been marked as a triumph.
So where did it all go wrong? Or did it go wrong?
Last month, after a meeting MCA Director Madeleine Grynsztejn held with a group of “The Long Dream” artists to discuss some of their concerns about the institution, a number of them elected to withdraw from the show. Where their art hung, labels on the wall now say, “This artwork was removed from the exhibition at the request of the artist.”
Withdrawing were six individual artists and dozens more who created a collective pandemic journal known as Quarantine Times, which the MCA listed as
one among more than 70 works in the show. Central to the withdrawal decision was the museum laying off workers in January, 17 of 162 full-timers and 24 more (out of 49) who worked part time.
The artists’ move came “in solidarity with the workers who were laid off and with the staff who have felt disparaged, who are really, you know, part and parcel of the Chicago arts community,” said Max Guy, a 32-year-old showing at the MCA for the first time who pulled a video he had made from the exhibition.
Indeed, the open letter about the withdrawal also cited the worker grievances from last summer, an MCA management the artists saw as unresponsive to its staff, and the very goals of the “Long Dream” exhibition itself.
“The signaling, I think, is at the very least unintentionally disingenuous,” said the artist Sarah Bastress, who chose to remove from the show work Bastress described as “nine charcoal drawings kind of ruminating on being a lonely lesbian artist, sort of mockingly but also serious.”
“But,” Bastress continued, “it’s pretty murky to have our work stand in for them creating equity. I think it asks a lot of us and our art, rather than, I think, a much more simple task of listening and engaging with their workers — or even us, even the artists.”
The vast majority of the “Long Dream” artists, though, elected to stay in the exhibition, albeit with many signing a statement in support of the departing artists.
In that way, perhaps, the MCA is proving its overriding point: that it is an institution trying to change and asking its communities to have faith in the sincerity of its effort. Certainly the handful of withdrawals were not the mass exodus that would have delivered a sharper rebuke to the museum.
Or maybe the scant numbers are just affirmation of the power of the MCA, with its half-century of history in the arts community. Even artists who pulled out talked about how tough that was on a professional level because, as Bastress said, “Showing in Chicago at the MCA is a goal many artists early in their career have, so it felt pretty special.”
In “The Long Dream” emerging artists like Bastress and Guy were presented in the company of well-known Chicagoans including Dawoud Bey, Amanda Williams, Nate Young and Nick Cave.
Said Guy, “It’s such a shame, you know? It was an honor to have my work in that show with so many people that I know or admire, to bring people together in that way, and to celebrate just the entire cultural kind of landscape.”
Seen from the outside, a lot of the issues seem like failures of communication — or the clash of different communication styles, patient realist institution vs. urgent idealist collective. The “Long Dream” artists and the group that said it spoke for disaffected MCA workers, organized under the banner MCA Accountable, wanted the museum to respond formally to sweeping lists of demands that they published.
The MCA Accountable group beginning in July demanded that the museum not reopen until “current front-facing staff unanimously feel safe returning to work on-site.” (The museum reopened, with COVID safety precautions in place, July 24, roughly on par with peer institutions.)
The Accountable group’s demands also included anti-racism training throughout the institution and ideas that American businesses rarely enact, such as museum-wide pay transparency and health benefits and paid time off for part-time workers. MCA Accountable’s letters are easily found with a Google search.
The “Long Dream” artists pulling out of the show seconded those demands in their March letter and added ones including “immediate restructuring of the board to include a majority of those most impacted by the decisions it makes and the budgets it approves — Chicago artists and MCA workers.”
The MCA, though, elected not to meet with MCA Accountable staff, instead opening up extra channels of communication for workers internally, it says, and having the museum’s then-Chief Curator Michael Darling reach out to “Long Dream” artists individually to discuss their concerns. (Darling left this year to join a museum-industry startup.)
The MCA Accountable group, as well as artists in “The Long Dream” and prominent Chicago artists who elected not to be considered for the exhibition, saw Grynsztejn not meeting with MCA Accountable as a cardinal sin: If you’re really interested in change, why not hear these people out?
Grynsztejn, though, would not do so because, she said in an interview, “when it comes to changes in workplace culture, I owe (talking about) those to all of my current staff, as opposed to an outside force that I can’t identify.” The second MCA Accountable letter from August, did not list individual signees, but the first, from July, had at least 18 thencurrent employees’ names and titles as signatories. Grynsztejn says several internal reforms give workers the opportunity to be heard.
More differing interpretations: In August the museum converted the visitor experience staff of 28 part-time workers to 10 full-timers. The MCA saw this as a move to give more workers health benefits during a public health crisis. Some of the workers saw it as a way to thin their numbers and as the loss of a valuable part-time gig. The withdrawing artists and people in the MCA Accountable group said the job conversions especially hurt BIPOC staff; the museum says it resulted in a greater proportion of BIPOC staff on the visitor experience team.
The activist groups, too, saw the January layoffs as a betrayal, especially after MCA management talked about not having laid anyone off during the pandemic. Management says, in essence: What could we do, especially after the second forced COVID closure, which came in November, shortly after “The Long Dream” opened, and lasted until March? Senior staff had already taken major pay cuts, the budget was cut dramatically, by almost a third, and the MCA held off on layoffs longer than virtually all the other big museums in town (most of them made significant staff cuts before mid-2020).
In laying off workers, “we were among the very last museums and we did among the very least number,” Grynsztejn said. “So here’s the thing about layoffs. This is so obvious, but it’s really important to say: There is no good way to do a crappy thing. Layoffs are not reflective of a museum’s values. They are reflective of a museum’s extremely challenging circumstances in a plague.”
Internal critics, though, added the worker departures to their list of disappointments. Marya Spont-Lemus is a Chicago artist who was a parttime artist guide within the museum’s learning department. An original public signer of the MCA Accountable letter, she was among those laid off in January.
“The museum leadership in public statements, and internal talking points and meetings, has continued to hide behind platitudes,” she said.
Nobody seems particularly happy at this point. But maybe that’s necessary. What seems to be coming out of all of this is an institution that may not be converting immediately to the non-hierarchical management with a whole new board of directors that its critics insist on. But it is one that appears to be deep into self-analysis and attempts to change along the lines that the artists and employees have been seeking — albeit at a slower pace.
A new page on the MCA website lists a wide range of actions it has and is taking, from seeking to add BIPOC members to the museum’s board to conducting anti-racism training to holding “small-scale conversations moderated by a racial healing practitioner” to giving part-time employees “120 hours of sick time, triple our previous allocation,” the MCA Call to Action page says. “The MCA believes deeply in the values of inclusion, diversity, equity and accessibility, or IDEA, and we are committed to enacting structural change by turning our beliefs into actions.”
Director Grynsztejn sounds devoted to such changes in the institution she has led for a dozen years, and she asks to be held accountable.
“Artists are putting a new kind of pressure on museums, including the MCA, to not just demonstrate equity in their exhibitions, in their collections … but also to demonstrate equity behind the scenes in our operation,” she said. “I believe that’s why the museum is being held to a very high account, and perhaps even more than other museums in Chicago.
“The reason is because we are the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago — because we are these artists’ natural home, and like your own personal home, you want your museum to reflect who you are. You want your museum to reflect your values. So I actually don’t believe this vivid conversation happening in the artists community about the MCA is negative. I welcome it. I really welcome it as a call for us to continually do better. I could not be in more agreement with the artists’ desires for a more sustainable and equitable future.”
“The Long Dream” may not be the clear-cut triumph the MCA hoped for. But as it remains up through May, you could argue that it is functioning almost exactly as the museum lays out in its exhibit explanation: “Against the backdrop of a global pandemic and a renewed reckoning over racial justice and inequality, ‘The Long Dream’ invites visitors to see the city of Chicago, the world, and themselves, through the eyes of more than 70 local artists whose work offers us ways to imagine a more equitable and interconnected world.”
The Richard Wright novel the exhibition is named for is partly about a Black Southern businessman who makes compromises with his town’s white power structure in exchange for access to wealth and power, but it is also, of course, about the racism, the rank systemic unfairness, that forces such deals.
With its own “Long Dream,” the MCA wanted a show of people responding to a fraught moment in history. But what the new absences on the gallery walls demonstrate is that the museum itself was unable to stand outside that moment.
What the MCA got is a show that not just in the art but in its very existence is about inequity and perceived inequity and compromise — and about people in such circumstances trying to do better and to force others to do better.