This guide is designed to help you navigate the museum. There are four floors in the building, and an ever-changing array of contemporary artwork. You don’t have to see it all. Here, we present four stories about four objects, one for each floor (story) of the museum. You’ll find information about the art and artists as well as videos, photos, and maps. We hope you enjoy your journey.

The artists in this issue of 4 Stories consider different types of communities—the cities and towns where you live, artists working together, and the informal groupings you create at the MCA.

By taking the cement mixer away from the gritty job it once had and placing it in front of the MCA, Da Cunha envisions his work in conversation with the building, plaza, and the city as a whole. In placing it in a new context, he asks us to rethink something we see all the time.

Alexandre da Cunha was born in Brazil and lives in London. He thinks about an object’s use, surface, and materials to create a work of art that devises new meanings for that object.

Watch the installation

The organic materials in this gallery make up the instruments for Child of Tree, a work by American composer John Cage. Each object is connected to a microphone so that it can be played and heard. Every time they are performed on, a new and completely unique performance is created.

eighth blackbird is a six-person music ensemble that commissions and performs contemporary classical compositions. Their innovative style of music is heavily influenced by John Cage and the experimental ideas he introduced to the music world.

Like the musicians often working in the adjacent gallery, you can create your own composition using the instruments found here.

For inspiration, explore the archival information on display.

As you interact with the space, consider what you are seeing and hearing.

Whether it’s the rustle of the leaves, or of the clicking of someone’s shoes as they walk by, music can be found all around you.

Claes Oldenburg moved to New York City in 1956 and became a prominent figure in the city’s performance art scene. He is best known for his giant sculptures of everyday objects (like green beans) and also produces public sculptures, including Chicago’s Batcolumn.

The shiny green exterior of the beans are made of vinyl, while the interior white plaster gives them their shape. Oldenburg often uses fabric and other materials in his sculptures to challenge what sculptures can be made of, like burlap cheeseburgers, canvas ice cream cones, or metal candy.

Pop artists, influenced by the growth of mass manufacturing after WWII, used everyday objects as subject matter. Oldenburg commented on the commercial nature of art by comparing commodity prices to the prices of his fabricated objects.

Czarnopys was walking in the woods of his childhood when he came across a hollowed out tree. He wrapped the bark around his arm and became inspired to create works that showcase the relationship between the human body and nature. His works are created using bark and other natural materials sourced from Michigan, which he often forms around casts of his body or another live model.

Tom Czarnopys is a Chicago-based artist who finds inspiration from a childhood spent hunting, fishing, and exploring in the woods near Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Mallarme Installation view, The Figure in Chicago Art: Selections from the Permanent Collection, MCA Chicago, February 19–March 31, 1985. Photo: Joseph Mohan, © MCA Chicago

This work was first displayed at the MCA in 1985 as part of the exhibition The Figure in Chicago Art: Selections from the Permanent Collection. It has been displayed in the museum nine other times, the most recent being The Body Present: Effigies, Decoys and Other Equivalents, which took place in 2002.

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