Gravitation and Counterpoint
Notes for an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.
Through my years as an educator and facilitator, I often operated—mostly by instinct—on the sense that any group conversation, no matter where it begins, will eventually reveal a gravitational point. By this I mean that, with the right balance of attentive, non-leading questions and intentional listening, a shared and authentic concern will surface. I later discovered that this idea had been formally articulated by leading thinkers in education and communication. For example, German psychotherapist Ruth Cohn developed the concept of Theme-Centered Interaction (TCI), which frames group dialogue around three “poles”: the “I” (individual), the “We” (group), and the “It” (theme or problem), all situated within a larger “Globe” (context). The vitality of the exchange depends on keeping these poles in dynamic balance, with the “It” serving as the thematic center. In a different field, game theorist Thomas Schelling described a similar principle in his notion of the focal point—the solution people naturally converge on without explicit coordination, guided by what feels most salient in the context.
I witnessed these dynamics repeatedly in my exchanges with curators, artists, and educators, where conversations often evolved into fertile discussions that, at times, even seeded exhibitions.
About a year ago, Joey Orr, Chief Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, surprised me with an invitation to curate a show from the museum’s collection. The MCA was, in many ways, my postgraduate education—the place I arrived at in 1995 as a bright-eyed 24-year-old with only a beginner’s grasp of contemporary art. I was hired by Wendy Woon, who at the time was the new Director of Education at the MCA and who would become one of my most important mentors. Over three years of organizing the lecture program, I received an immersive and demanding education on the subject. I have strong memories of the many nights where I ran evening lectures in at the big, recently inaugurated MCA auditorium (often slide lectures, as we then still used 35mm slides): I have many memories of hosting the speaker and funders after the lecture at a nearby restaurant, but mostly, of turning off the lights of the empty auditorium after all the images had been shown, the lecture had been given, and all attendees had left the space.
Those years were also formative for another reason: as an immigrant, a white middle-class Mexican artist with a classical training, I found myself without a natural place in Chicago’s social or cultural circles. I often felt adrift. Contemporary art gave me an identity—a space where my eccentricities, obsessions, and quirks could find meaning and take visual form. Meeting the many artists I invited to lecture—Pipilotti Rist, Mariko Mori, Chuck Close, Stan Douglas, and others—confirmed for me that this eccentric, non-conforming streak was not an obstacle but a shared creative force.
So, when we began planning the exhibition, my first instinct was to gather groups of local Chicago artists, writers, and activists to see where conversation might lead us (their names are mentioned at the end of this piecee). We formed three separate groups, so in order to include as many voices as possible but also to keep the conversation sufficiently intimate and fluid). The starting point—or perhaps the provocation—was the subject of displacement. For me, it carries a personal resonance in Chicago, but it also poses a rich philosophical question for artistic practice: that the most vital works are often those that do not sit comfortably in their context, that unsettle or disrupt. This kind of displacement, I believe, is not only inevitable but also profoundly generative.
It so happened that the first series of group meetings we had to start our conversations was precisely two days after the presidential election. In a darkly ironic way, the subject of displacement had acquired an ominous reality. As I entered the building, on that cloudy November morning in the rather placid Water Tower neighborhood where things were moving at the usual, ordinary pace, I felt a terrible sense of foreboding.
As our conversations evolved, three distinct themes started emerging. The first concerned the notion of invisibility in a social context- the notion of feeling erased or as a community, and its implications in political and economic terms. This was best articulated by one of the conversation participants (who requested to remain anonymous in the process) when they said “for me the darkness is precisely when you don't see anything bad happening, when everything looks really, really nice in the belly of empire.” Outward order and cleanliness is only a mirage, a package that conceals the undercurrents of oppression.
The second topic concerned the embodied experience: the fact that the social and political changes one hears about in the news might feel remote, but sooner or later they are felt, and understood, physically. This is to mean also that the battle is not merely intellectual, but something that can and should be experienced, and fought, directly with our bodies. The participant shared: “think there's a reason why we, or at least I have found myself always going back to the Baldwins and the Morrisons or the poets or the writers because they are tapped into a source with their words that just makes it continue to be relevant in somewhat of a crushing way. But also […] important that's is the work that can bring me back to my body, like a somatic [process of connecting myself to] my emotions.”
The third and final topic concerned the subject of constraint, in how authoritarianism seeks to restrict free speech and dissent, often by force, and how one should engage with it. A participant recalled a scene in a film where a prisoner, in solitary confinement, starts playing soccer with an imaginary ball, within his head creating a narration and imagining the roaring of the fans. “moment of this total absolute freedom, liberty, even though being in the darkest moment that you could have in your life.”
The thematic clusters generated in the conversation gave us clear marching orders to encounter works that enter into dialogue with the previously mentioned ideas. Each of them offered a form of dichotomy that is crucial in musical counterpoint, where a theme (subject) is then followed by a response (countersubject) and intertwine with it: visibility/invisibility, embodied/externalized experience, and constraint/freedom.
Perhaps because of my lifelong connection to music, I have always felt that singing exerts the most profound physical impact of any art form—an impact amplified when one’s voice joins others in a collective song of protest and struggle. This is why Susan Philipsz’s We Shall Be All (2011) felt central to the theme of embodiment. Her work features songs tied to the history of workers’ collectives and their struggles for fair conditions and wages. In The Internationale, she sings the famous labor anthem, popularized in the 1890s (the title We Shall Be All comes from the American version in the Industrial Workers of the World songbook). The work references the events surrounding the 1886 Chicago Haymarket Affair and its aftermath. This piece resonates deeply for me: my first years in Chicago were spent in Pilsen, a neighborhood with a strong activist spirit, only a mile from Haymarket Square—still a living embodiment of the May Day legacy.
In the area of visibility and invisibility, a work that felt particularly fitting to that conversation is Joseph Grigely’s What did I Say? As a deaf artist, Grigely developed a practice of archiving everyday dialogues through notes that hearing individuals write to communicate with him. He calls these works “conversation pieces,” which function as small documents of daily conversations. This particular piece visualizes the ephemeral nature of spoken words—moments captured and preserved, yet incomplete, ambiguous, or repeated. The work makes language visible, but mostly it unveils the complex process undertaken by someone who is unable to participate in auditory life.
The last section, which dealt with constraint, we wanted to both point at a vivid real-life example that most of us still have very present: the confinement we experienced during the pandemic, and the racial reckoning that this period triggered during the period of George Floyd’s murder. Of that time, a project that I felt was very meaningful was Public Collector’s ( led by Marc Fischer) Quaranzine. Fischer is one of the founders of Temporary Services, a Chicago collective that produces artist books and many experimental publications. When we all went into quarantine, he used his resources to put out a daily, single sheet publication that ran for the first 100 days of the global lockdown under the imprint of Public Collectors. It is a key artwork that both documents this period and also shows the importance of how we needed to find creative ways to process and overcome this extraordinary and sudden condition of isolation.
Some works encompassed all three themes. Howardena Pindell’s Free, White and 21 is a deeply powerful reflection on the racial divide. Appearing in whiteface, Pindell futilely attempts to fit into a cosmetic culture defined by whiteness, exposing the futility of seeking acceptance in an unjust system that systematically erases her existence. I have long admired her work, not least because, like me, she spent years working inside a museum.
Through our process of assembling this exhibition, I realized that the conversations, the works, and my own history with the MCA formed their own kind of fugue. Each theme—visibility and invisibility, embodied and external experience, constraint and freedom—became a subject or countersubject, echoing and refracting through the voices of artists, activists, and audiences. The gravitational center was never fixed; it shifted, expanded, and deepened as we listened.
Artists hope that their works might speak for themselves, while curators hope that the works might speak to each other. As for me—privately, and perhaps only importantly to me—this exhibition carries the memory of my early museum days at the MCA, decades ago, uncertain of my place. I remember locking the auditorium door after a lecture, the words and images still resonating as I stepped into the cold Chicago night. I was still uncertain of my place, but each evening I left with a slightly clearer sense of how art can help us engage with the world.
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Dialogue partners for this exhibition included Olivia Gude, Tempestt Hazel, Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford, Ankit Khadgi, Maira Khwaja, S. Y. Lim, Stephanie Manriquez, Magdalena Moskalewicz, Nissa Rhee, Monica Rickert-Bolter, Mérida M. Rúa, Pia Singh, Carlos Salazar-Lermont, Sufyan Sohel, and several others who wish to remain anonymous.
My collaborators in this exhibition included Miguel Aguilar, Manager of Learning, School Partnerships and Curriculum, and Iris Colburn, Curatorial Associate.
A conversation with Joey Orr on the making of this exhibition can be found here.