The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
February 2020
February 29–September 13, 2020 Nigerian-born British designer Duro Olowu turns his cosmopolitan eye to Chicago. Drawing from the city’s public and private art collections including works in the MCA’s collection, Olowu curates a show that reimagines relationships between artists and objects across time, media, and geography. Moving away from traditional exhibition formats, Olowu combines photographs, paintings, sculptures, and films in dense and textural scenes that incorporate his own work. Through the selection of these artworks, Olowu highlights artists whose practices address the prevailing social and political concerns of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Artists primarily concern themselves with making art but time and time again have asserted themselves as citizens who engage with the social and political world. The Trophy (2013), a painting by South African artist Marlene Dumas (b. 1953), depicts a naked female prisoner restrained by guards, highlighting aspects of misogyny and colonialism. American artist, writer, and activist David Wojnarowicz (1954–1992) sets a butcher's shop against a background of surrealist battle sites in North/South: The New Legionnaires (1986) to offer parallels between how both war and disease ravage human bodies.