Pablo Helguera and Joey Orr Discuss the MCA’s Newest Collection Exhibition

JOEY ORR:
Pablo, you have a dynamic practice as an artist. Throughout your career you’ve also worked in and with museums. How did that come about? Is it related to your investment in pedagogy and social engagement?

PABLO HELGUERA:
I literally worked in museums as an employee for 29 years, all while maintaining a studio practice. So working in a museum has defined, in many ways, my views as artist.

My entrance into the museum world was accidental. I was in art school, out there in the city of Chicago. I needed a job, and I ended up landing in an internship at the Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas at the Art Institute of Chicago, working for Richard Townsend, the renowned Aztec scholar, in a show that was titled The Art of the Sacred Landscapes. It was an important exhibition about Mesoamerican art that opened in 1992.

At some point in that job, I had to give a tour. It was, of course, my first exhibition tour and as such it likely was not a great experience for the public—but I was very energized by the experience. I loved being with the artworks and, it being hot during the summer in Chicago, I loved the air conditioning within the galleries. It was a very transformative experience for me.

The school and the museum coexist[ed] largely in one building. So, I would change my dirty studio clothes and then have preppy clothes to wear in the offices. This back and forth defines my career-long relationship between art making and art presentation, as well as my understanding of art. And I feel that still is true today.

As I say, it was an accidental encounter, but I loved art education and I worked in many museums after that, including the MCA. That’s where I later realized that this process of presenting, understanding, and discussing arts needed to be more integrated into my artistic practice.

JO:
I wonder how you see those two things, Pablo educator, Pablo artist. Are you sometimes one and not the other? Do they coexist? What’s the relationship in your practice between those things?

PH:
I feel that when you work in a museum, you function in the capacity of a public servant. You need to focus on not just yourself, but on the public. You need to focus on values that are institutional, not just personal.

When you are an artist in the studio, it’s of course a very different dynamic. Your job is to really express and present your ideas and assume full responsibility for them. But even before I was fully aware of it, I was becoming influenced as an artist from the standpoint of the museum and vice versa. I found those two things very interesting, and I think that informed the kind of work that I produced later.

JO:
What kind of role does the MCA play in your story?

PH:
The MCA was an important school for me. When I graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago, the school, I did not go on to pursue an MFA. I instead started working in a museum in Pilsen, the National Museum of Mexican Art (then called The Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum). At that time, it was a very small institution, one that helped me make sense of my relationship to my Mexican heritage as an artist, and also introduced me to art education at all levels and also what it meant to work as an artist with a community. However, even though I had had an art school education—and I was already doing performance art and I was working in a museum—I had very little understanding, I felt, of contemporary art. It was not until I started working at the MCA that I not only got a better understanding of conceptually driven and process-based practices, but I also started meeting artists who were practitioners and doing it in real time.

I was hired at the MCA in 1995 by Wendy Woon, then-Director of Education at the MCA and someone who became a very important mentor to me. Wendy was also a graduate from the Art Institute (she had obtained her MFA there) and as a result was very enthusiastic and supportive of hiring an artist to work in the Education Department.

My job at the MCA was as a coordinator, and later manager, of public programs. This meant that I got to meet many living artists and curators from all over the world who would come to the museum to talk about their work and discuss some of the main issues that concerned contemporary art practice. This became my true introduction to contemporary art practice.

I became interested in institutional critique and relational aesthetics, which were central to many debates and exhibitions. I became really fascinated with issues of fiction and truth (and in fact toward the end of my time in the MCA in 1998 I organized an exhibition at various venues in Chicago precisely on that topic, titled Concerning Truth—one of my only forays into curatorial practice). I became fascinated with how artists appropriated the language of the museum and the voice of authority from the institution, and inevitably, I also started using those strategies in my own work.

JO:
I’ve been thinking a lot about curators as access points for our publics to author their own questions using institutional resources—the collection, the spaces of the museum, our expertise, our networks, whatever it may be. For me the question is, how can we facilitate ownership and relation-building between the works of art in the MCA’s collection and the publics in whose trust we preserve and display them? How do we actually build those kinds of relationships?

In many ways, that massive question was my invitation to you on this project. And so broadly speaking, how did you approach that question?

PH:
My approach was informed by the experiences that I have drawn from working in different kinds of museums, both as a full-time employee and then as an artist. Some of them were encyclopedic museums, sometimes modern art museums and contemporary art museums. I have encountered and worked with many kinds of curatorial teams and seen many kinds of curatorial practices on display. What was very clear to me early on as an educator was that when you deal with issues of a historical nature, the voices that predominate are the connoisseurs, the scholars, the art historians. In the case of modern art, the narratives that curators explore or present are largely settled except for a number of specific or yet-unexplored chapters or angles (such as, for instance, the monoprints of Degas, or the overlooked work of women artists or artists of color from historical periods), but by and far, the aesthetic arguments of those periods are no longer significantly contested in their value or their relevance. And because those general aesthetic arguments are largely settled, the tendency toward presenting those exhibitions was toward sharing scholarship and relaying historical information.

In contrast, to me as an art educator, the contemporary field felt much more exciting because it dealt with very unsettled and very open-ended questions—questions that not even a seasoned curator can fully answer because of the mere fact that these are works being made in the time that we are currently living, and none of us is an expert of the present because none of us has distance from it. That presents a challenge, but also an opportunity to think about connoisseurship in a different way and to think about expertise in a different way.

Another one of my mentors (and at some point my supervisor at the Guggenheim) was Kim Kanatani, who was Deputy Director and Gail Engelberg Director of Education of the Guggenheim Foundation. Kim used to speak about the concept of shared authority. With contemporary institutions, we have to work with more inclusive platforms of collaboration to create knowledge. That’s something that was important to me as an educator: to create access for audiences and show them that what they were looking at was not just this insider-y knowledge. These were works connected to things we’re dealing with, things that we’re living through today, issues that are still very present with us.

I am always very interested in trying to find ways in which we can create structures to foster that shared authority or shared expertise. And become useful listeners.

JO:
For this new exhibition at the MCA, you were interested in being in conversation with artists, educators, and activists throughout Chicago. How do you move from the idea of shared authority into actually constructing something with these folks? How did you conceive that process?

PH:
I have always been interested in the workshop process as a way to make ideas happen or to develop ideas. That’s something that comes from education but it’s also often used in theater and architecture.

I have always been interested in coming into a room with a group of people with whom I share a collective set of concerns. In other words, I love to collectively explore questions to which we do not have answers. The humility of not knowing, I feel, is very important, and it opens a door for a lot of interesting ideas to emerge. So, for the purpose of these workshops, I really wanted us to collectively go through this journey of conversation.

My initial interest was to come to a group of writers, artists, educators, and activists in the city with specific questions about the notion of displacement or misplacement to see where that would take us. It so happened that we had this conversation a day or two after the US presidential election. So, those questions about displacement and misplacement took on a very particular meaning. We were in this very strange moment of uncertainty, of not knowing what the future would bring.

That was the departure point of that conversation. The discussions that we started developing informed the core curatorial team at the MCA, and we began selecting some of the works that we felt spoke to the concerns and interests of the group in relation to those issues.

JO:
So, the curatorial method is in some way guided by the content of the community conversation?

PH:
Yes. To be clear, the process was not about asking a group to select artworks, but to first articulate questions and ideas that would lead to building the exhibition. We wanted to know about the things that were in their minds and, based on their responses, we would go back and rely on the expertise of the core team to find works in the collection that we felt spoke to those issues. We would then go back to the larger group and say, “well, there’s this work in particular that speaks to some of the things that we were talking about at that meeting.” That gave us an interesting way to look at the collection. This, by the way, was not intended to “illustrate” their ideas, but, in the very spirit of the conversation, show them works that we felt offered some resonance.

I can give an example. We spoke about artworks in this moment of uncertainty, and sometimes fear and concern for the future, and the fragility that we all feel. Some participants spoke about the importance of the way art gives you a somatic experience, one that you understand not only with your mind, but also with your body. The idea that knowledge and understanding is somatic, not just intellectual. One of the works that we thought fit this very well is Susan Phillipsz’s We Shall Be All (2011).

It’s a sound piece that deals with protest songs and protest music—songs from the 19th century, originally recorded at the Jane Addams Hull House. Another work in that group is by Mona Hatoum titled Deep Throat (1996). It is essentially a chair and a place-setting, but centered on the plate is a video monitor that displays recorded endoscopic footage of the inside of somebody’s throat and esophagus.

JO:
Outside of specific works of art, what about the exhibition as a whole? It’s three different segments, across three floors, but it’s a cohesive exhibition. How did it come out of the conversation?

PH:
The sections resulted partially from common thematic threads in the conversations.

One thread that emerged concerned the idea of being seen or feeling invisible. It was a conversation about one’s own community feeling vulnerable in the current political climate—and how in this democratic process you feel that your voices were not acknowledged or heard, and what happens when those voices are not heard. And part of that, of course, was the conversation about how art can make the invisible visible.

Another thread of our conversation touched on how experiences are processed somatically: how the body becomes the vessel that goes through experiences like trauma and upheaval.

The last section deals with issues of confinement and constraint. What happens when you find yourself in a situation, whether it’s physical, social, or political, or otherwise, where you’re constrained, when you feel limited? When you are the most limited might be a dark moment, but also there might be moments where you can be enlightened by certain things, by ideas. Constraint is a crucial topic in art practice in general, and we thought it would be interesting to pursue the conversations we had on that topic by looking at works in the collection that are related to it.

JO:
I wonder if someone completely outside of that process—so, someone who was not a participant in the process but who shows up at the MCA and walks through these three galleries in this exhibition—will pick up on the process you’re describing. Is there a way in which this different curatorial process is legible in the experience of the exhibition itself?

PH:
I think I can answer this from my artist’s perspective.

I feel like everything one makes as an artist must be like a multi-layered cake. You can see the whole thing on the outside, and that has to somehow feel appetizing or attractive, otherwise you’re not going to buy the cake. However, if you eat the cake, then you may encounter the other layers. The goal to me of artworks and exhibitions is that they must withstand the “first layer” test. The first encounter with the work needs to be enticing enough that it would compel you to explore further.

Once that happens, then you can actually delve a little deeper and then you encounter something new that’s interesting. And then if you decide to delve even deeper, then more things emerge that are interesting. So, it’s almost like a multi-tiered process of experience that I hope people might want to enjoy.

JO:
One more question. This is an experiment for us, and we are finding ways to ask better questions. How do a public and a collection begin to develop a relationship? How do we begin to rethink curatorial practice, or social engagement as part of the curatorial process? Do you have any takeaways or reflections?

PH:
I always felt two things. First, working in museums—and in the last museum I worked at, MoMA—I wanted to advocate for an approach in curating and education that was more akin to journalism. I felt that it would be interesting to have an “op-ed” gallery, and I felt that it was interesting to sign labels. My ideas were not taken up—I wasn’t successful in communicating them, perhaps—but I strongly felt that it was important to show a voice that was more specific to an individual. These generic institutional voices sometimes feel very empty and bureaucratic. I think it makes more sense when the visitor knows who is speaking to them, and thus starts understanding the human perspective of that person—be it the curator, the educator, the artist, or whoever else. So, my hope for this show was to really put a face to those voices, to those ideas, and not make it institutional, but more personal and more real and more immediate.

And the second thing is that I am a fan of the idea once articulated by Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist who said once that the purpose of questioning is not to come up with a fixed answer, but to refine our understanding to get to deeper questions. In other words, this process of inquiry, especially for contemporary art, is not about finding a solution or a final answer to anything, but about constantly coming up with inquiries that will help you formulate new questions. Because artworks never really give us a solution to anything; they do not offer the final say on anything. And whenever we think we have found a definition for an artwork, immediately there will be something else that comes up or a different perspective. Artworks are forever evolving in how they’re seen and how they’re understood. We’re just part of that flow as we construct questions and conversations and hope that they might, just maybe, give us some insights—but also allow us to create new questions.

See the exhibition Collection in Conversation with Pablo Helguera, on view from August 2, 2025, through July 5, 2026.