Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

How do artists see the familiar anew, and how can viewers do the same? In this opening conversation, MCA curator Lynne Warren engages artists Jason Meadows and Jason Middlebrook, and Calder Foundation registrar and scholar Jessica Holmes in a discussion about creative reuse in sculpture, relating contemporary methods of art making to Calder’s process and work. Recorded Saturday, June 26, 2010, 3 pm.

In his latest series of paintings and drawings, renowned artist Kerry James Marshall takes up as his subject the presence of the Black artist in his or her studio. Marshall discusses these visually stunning works and invites us to reflect on this question: how do portrayals of famous artists in their studios influence our perceptions of who is an artist? Recorded Saturday, May 22, 2010, 3 pm.

Internationally renowned artist Andrea Zittel speaks about her work and describes how her studio in the high desert of California serves both as a space for exploration and as a place for crafting and presenting objects, materials, spaces and ideas. Zittel’s sculptures and installations transform everything necessary for life — such as eating, sleeping, bathing, and socializing — into experiments in living. Recorded Monday, April 5, 2010, 6 pm.

Join some of today’s brightest playwrights who are saying something new about the American experience. Focussing on the migrant’s viewpoint — descendants of the Mayflowers and Amistads of history alike — they tap this moment’s national consciousness to make theater that is pumping with the music and language of the largest cross section of people to ever come together in one land. Jonathan Wilson, director of TimeLine’s ‘Master Harold’…and the Boys, moderates the discussion between Young Jean Lee, author of The Shipment; Tanya Saracho, adapter of Steppenwolf’s The House on Mango Street; Kristoffer Diaz, author of the off-Broadway bound The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Diety; and Tarrell Alvin McCraney, author of The Brother/Sister Plays. Recorded Tuesday, March 23, 2010, 6 pm.

Since the early part of the 20th century, artists have created works that might best be described as events: situated in place, unfolding in time, and often performative or interactive in approach, these works ask the audience to reconsider the very nature of the art experience. In recent years, event-based artworks and actions have proliferated in museums, galleries, and public spaces in Chicago and elsewhere. Moderated by art historian Irene V. Small, this panel discussion looks at the modes of art making and motivations that are leading artists to produce event-based works today, while connecting these current activities to earlier moments in the history of contemporary art. Panelists include artists Laurie Palmer, Adam Pendleton, collaborators Mark Jeffery and Judd Morrissey, and MCA Associate Curator Tricia Van Eck. Recorded Saturday, March 13, 2010, 3 pm.

In the 1960, tape recorders, film cameras, and reproduction machines of all kinds entered the studio. Noted art historian Caroline Jones traces this development and examines its impact on artists and art works. A professor of history, theory and criticism at MIT, Caroline Jones is the author of the groundbreaking book Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist, and co-editor of Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art. Recorded Tuesday, February 16, 2010, 6 pm.

Transformation, mediation, gesture, embodiment. The artist is both performer and observer in the studio, and the protagonist of the myths that surround this space. Three artists in the MCA exhibition Production Site: The Artist’s Studio Inside-Out, discuss their own works in the show, using them as a springboards for reflecting on the creative acts of the studio. Recorded Saturday, February 6, 2010, 3 pm.

Since their first riotous appearance in 1985, the Guerrilla Girls have dedicated themselves to exposing sexism, racism, and corruption in the art world, the film industry, and popular culture. Adopting the names of dead women artists and decked out in full jungle drag, these anonymous avengers use facts, humor, and outrageous visuals to skewer institutional bias and inequality. In this program, the Guerrilla Girls give a guided tour through the history of their many public interventions, perform satirical skits, and inspire us to create our own sophisticated acts of aesthetic resistance. Recorded Tuesday, November 10, 2009, 7:30 pm.

Born in the 1960s in England, artists Jeremy Deller and Liam Gillick have engaged the economic, cultural, and political conditions of the last two decades in markedly different ways. The two join MCA Curator Dominic Molon for a conversation about their concurrent exhibitions at the MCA, their artistic strategies, and the ideas that inform their work. Recorded Saturday, October 10, 2009, 3 pm.

Recorded Saturday, September 12, 2009, 2 pm.

Anthony McCall, Barbara Stafford and Paola Bertucci with an introduction by Madeleine Grynsztejn. How do immersive artworks, such as those created by Olafur Eliasson, play upon our attraction to the spectacular and a fascination with the mechanics of how things work? Presentations by internationally renowned speakers trace the history of this phenomenon in art and science, and relate it to wide-ranging developments in consumer culture, optics, psychology, philosophy, and technology.