Michael Darling
Jennifer Richard
When Madeleine Grynsztejn became director at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 2008, the then-40-year-old institution was in the throes of what she called “a healthy midlife crisis”: slightly adrift, re-examining its place and purpose in an art landscape dominated by the Art Institute and its coming Modern Wing.
Ms. Grynsztejn vowed to make the M.C.A. more relevant and accessible to a broader audience, to build on its history while attracting a new range of emerging and underground artists. She pledged to make the museum more essential to the city’s overall social fabric while maintaining its ties to Chicago’s core art community.
Gauging her success, of course, will take time. But one critical marker is incontestable: attendance at the museum is at record levels.
Ms. Grynsztejn has made the museum a more youthful place, not only in its programming, which has skewed younger since her arrival, but also in staffing. That movement came into sharp relief Thursday when she announced that she had chosen Michael Darling, 42, to become the museum’s chief curator, replacing Elizabeth Smith, 51, who resigned last year. Mr. Darling takes over in July.
Mr. Darling, the curator of modern and contemporary art at the Seattle Art Museum, has a record that suggests he can embrace high and low culture with equal gusto. He has the requisite degrees: a bachelor of arts from Stanford and a master of arts and Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara. But he is also clued into popular culture.
A case in point: his final exhibition in Seattle is a look at Kurt Cobain’s profound impact on a generation. In hopes of expanding the program’s appeal beyond aging Gen-Xers, the museum will pair “Kurt” with an exploration of Andy Warhol’s depictions of fame, death, gender and loss.
“This got me so excited,” Ms. Grynsztejn said of the Cobain-Warhol juxtaposition. “Michael has a really intelligent way of looking at aspects of art history, like Andy Warhol, that we may feel have been studied to death. He’s addressing it from left field, reviving Warhol and pointing to modern culture and the most important issues of our time.”
Ms. Grynsztejn chose Mr. Darling, someone with established tastes and opinions, because she wanted someone who would challenge her in decisions involving the museum’s collections and exhibitions. “I was not looking for a mini-me,” she said.
Mr. Darling’s appointment reverses his last professional transition, which took him out of a thriving contemporary art environment — the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles — to Seattle, where he became only the second curator of that museum’s modern and contemporary collection.
“I’ve tried, in Seattle, to insert a very active contemporary art collection into an existing museum,” he said.
At Seattle, the emphasis was broader and more general. At the Chicago museum, he said, “I’m looking forward to being all contemporary, all the time.”
Instead of writing a puff piece on Madeleine Grynsztejn Chicago’s art community might be better served by some real investigative journalism. While Michael Darling is a superb choice for chief curator the rest of the story is pure PR for our not so new director. A little digging around would reveal the scuttlebutt on the street that the full cross-section MCA staff is in open rebellion over her controlling management style, reportedly a toxic combination of relentless micromanagement of all departments and dithering over making the smallest decisions. Time will tell if she lets her choice for chief curator do his job or if she tries to do it for him.
Darling, originally an architectural historian is another well qualified curator who began his career at LA MOCA, ironically as Smiths research assistant on her first MCA blockbuster, 100 Years of Architecture, you can look that up in the catalogue. Grynsztejn wowed the board in her interviews by touting her ability to bring a “new vision” to the MCA, almost 2 years later the vision thing is still such a problem that corporate consultants are on the way. That is rarely a good thing for the artistic vision of a cutting edge arts institution.