Dialogue Archives

The Dialogue Series features eminent speakers presenting innovative work happening across disciplines, panel discussions, and opportunities for open dialogue between local arts professionals and audiences.

While this decade-plus public program series has morphed over the years, it is now a yearly set of programs with a rotating theme. The Dialogue is part of a museum-wide commitment to sustained inquiry about museum practice, access, and inclusion.

Past Programs

The theme for this year’s Dialogue is “Public.” While public is traditionally understood as open, free, and accessible—in contrast to the closed, unfree and inaccessible world of the private sphere—this year’s speakers question this common assumption, while also finding alternative pathways for engaging with and generating new publics. Events are presented with the Chicago Humanities Festival—as part of their Year of Public—and with the Public Art Fund based in New York City.

This year’s keynote event will feature the poet, writer, and president of the Mellon Foundation, Elizabeth Alexander, in conversation with Romi Crawford on Tuesday, November 15, 2022, at the Edlis Neeson Theater in the MCA Chicago. Alexander, will read from her recently published book The Trayvon Generation – an expansion of her viral essay that spoke to the persistence of race as an ongoing issue at the center of the American experience. Then, Crawford, professor of visual and critical studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, will join her in discussion on the work and its implications for the public sphere in the United States.
What happens when the legacies we inherit are not the ones we would choose? Building on last year’s exploration of inheritance, the 2021 Dialogue Series provides a space to think about dissent and how pushing against existing structures strengthens our social bonds.

Throughout the spring, we’ll consider how we talk with each other, nurture each other, call each other out, and ask more of each other and the structures that are built around us. Through a series of live virtual events, invited speakers and audience members discuss the power of dissent and disagreement paired with connection and mutual care. For the first time, the Dialogue exploration begins with an artwork, a performance built out of a years-long conversation and configured for this contemporary moment and virtual environment. Series speakers include theater-makers, scholars, chefs, media personalities, and artists.

The Dialogue Series is organized by January Parkos Arnall, Curator, with the Performance and Public Practice team.