Inside the White Cubicle: Meet the Staff of MCA Denver

Ever wondered about the hopes and dreams of the staff of MCA Denver? How long have they toiled away in their windowless basement under the museum? Where did they come from? What did they want to be when they grew up? What is their least favorite mode of transportion? What embarrassing songs did they once listen to? What do they look to in terms of an inspirational quotation? Here are their answers, part of a new, semi-recurring feature we are calling: MCA Denver: Inside the White Cubicle.

Nick Silici, Exhibitions Manager (pictured above)

Nick has worked with the museum since 2007. He was born in Fairfield, California and has lived in Denver since 1993. While growing up Nick always wanted to be a scientist but then gave up and became an artist. His least favorite mode of transportation is running. Although Nick claims to have exceptional taste in music, he did once own an album by WHAM, a fact he denied until George

Five Questions About Teen Music Night

Kamron Hazel and Bailey Luke curated the upcoming Teen Music Night at MCA Denver. Kamron is a former Teen Council (TeCo) intern who has spent the past summer working for MCA Denver’s special events and programs. Kamron went to Cherry Creek High School in Aurora and joined TeCo during his senior year. Bailey is also a former TeCo intern who attended Colorado Academy in Denver and joined TeCo during her senior year. She has worked over the summer as the technical assistant during Mixed Taste: Tag Team Lectures on Unrelated Topics.

MCA Denver: What is Teen Music Night and who can attend?

Kamron Hazel: Teen Music Night is an event this Saturday, July 10 from 6–9PM. It is an opportunity for teens to come down to MCA Denver to hear six of Denver's most promising young bands play sets on the museum's roof deck. Anyone can attend – teenagers, their parents and siblings or anyone who wants to see local talent.

Bailey Luke: People can hang out with their friends while supporting and learning about Denver's music scene. The evening is FREE for everyone under 18, thanks to the Merage Foundation Grant we received. It is 10¢ for anyone else.

Mothersbaugh & Lerner's Mexican Vacation

In preparation for Mark Mothersbaugh’s upcoming exhibition at MCA Denver, Mothersbaugh (left) and Director & Chief Animator Adam Lerner traveled to Ceramica Suro in Guadalajara, Mexico to begin fabrication on Motherbaugh’s large-scale fiberglass work Farewell Arch to Luxemburg City, a sculpture which resembles a My Little Pony, but with two, err, rumps.

The Artistics: Fayette Hauser

I recently returned from the Mills College Art Museum, where the exhibition I co-organized with Elissa Auther, West of Center, opened to great countercultural, gender-bending, DIY fanfare. And thinking about the spectacle of opening-night performances, I was reminded of the extraordinary nature of one of the event’s key organizers Fayette Hauser.

Why I Love This Art – John McEnroe's Beauty Does

Why I Love This Art features museum employees, volunteers, and interns talking about art they love from the exhibitions at MCA Denver. Here Director of Programming Sarah Kate Baie writes about John McEnroe's Beauty Does, on view as part of the celebration of the 2013 Biennial of the Americas from July 17 – Sept 29, 2013.

John McEnroe uses specially formulated industrial polymers to create large scale sculptural forms. For his installation in the atrium of MCA Denver, I found him balanced twenty-five feet in the air on

You are Welcome Here

Beginning in July 2013, admission to the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver is FREE for anyone age 18 and under. We are so proud to be the first museum in Denver where children and teenagers can

The Doctor Rates Your Pain with Brett Littman

The Doctor Rates Your Pain is a new (hopefully) recurring feature in which MCA Denver Director & Chief Animator Dr. Adam Lerner interviews visiting artists and guests about hypothetical scenarios that might evoke pain. The featured guest today is Brett Littman, Executive Director of The Drawing Center in New York and curator of Guillermo Kuitca: Diarios, on view through September 15, 2013 at MCA Denver.

Guillermo Kuitca's Diarios

Guillermo Kuitca began making what he calls his Diarios in 1994. Currently on view at MCA Denver, each of these works begins as an abandoned canvas––often as the beginning of a

The Highlights from Feminism & Co.

Every spring, Feminism & Co. brings together artists, writers and all manner of scholars to discuss issues around women and gender. This is not your mother’s feminist lecture series. The topics discussed this year included rocket fuel ingredients in breast milk, the resurgence of roller derby in

Looking Back at May is for Mexico

Exhibiting artist Eduardo Sarabia

At the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, May is for Mexico. Throughout the month, MCA Denver produces Huevos Revueltos, an exhibition and series of programs focusing on contemporary

Drawing Drawing

Interview with Artist Maya Gurantz

Co-Directors of Feminism & Co.: Art, Sex, Politics, Elissa Auther and Gillian Silverman, sat down with artist Maya Gurantz to talk about her MCA Denver installation The Whore’s Dialogue, on view at MCA Denver in the Whole Room from April 11 – June 23, 2013. Maya will be speaking at MCA Denver on Thursday, April 11 as part of MCA Denver's series Feminism & Co.: Art, Sex, Politics.

Fem & Co.: Maya, tell us about the history of the “whore’s dialogue.”

Maya Gurantz: The whore’s dialogue is an extinct genre of literary pornography, in which an older libertine schools a young protégé about sex and seduction as well as society (a lot of time is spent dissecting human nature, local politics, manners, survival tips). The main portion of the text of a whore’s dialogue involves the Mother’s advice to her Daughter; it often includes a Daughter’s response, in which she describes her own experience after her wedding night, her first lover, or after having turned her first trick.

Mark Mothersblog

Mark Mothersbaugh stopped by the museum yesterday, and he and Director & Chief Animator Adam Lerner re-enacted a fight scene from Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic.

Teen Council's W3FI Opening

This blog features MCA Denver Teen Council Member Polly Adams guest blogging about the recent Teen Council (TeCo) opening. 

On Saturday, February 23, the Teen Council (TeCo) members held an opening for our latest efforts, the W3FI Project that we completed with the help of artists Laleh Mehran and Chris Coleman.

New Season of Feminism & Co. Announced

Tickets are on sale now for this year's series of Feminism & Co.  The line-up is below.

Why I Love This Art – Patti Hallock's The West is Here

Why I Love This Art features museum employees, volunteers, and interns talking about art they love from the exhibitions at MCA Denver. Here Event and Rental Manager Erin Algiere writes about Patti Hallock's exhibition The West is Here, on view through Sunday, March 3, 2013. 

I would like to admit that I frequently find myself in Patti Hallock's gallery when I am supposed to be at my desk plugging away at accounting spreadsheets. And I realize that I could have gone anywhere else in the building to get away from those spreadsheets, yet chose to be among Patti Hallock’s desert views.

Drawing Drawing

At the Patti Hallock/William Lamson/Ladies Fancywork Society opening last month, we hosted a self-portrait contest (a "drawing drawing"), and the winner we selected is above. As promised, the winner received a critique by museum curator Nora Burnett Abrams (as well as a dual/family membership to the museum).

Photos from the opening weekend of the William Lamson, Patti Hallock, and Ladies Fancywork Society exhibitions

Artist William Lamson

Erica Baum is folding paper (and so are you).

MCA Denver invited artist Derek Beaulieu to guest blog during the duration of the exhibition Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art, in which excerpts from Beaulieu's 124-painting sequence the Newspaper are featured. Beaulieu is the author of 9 books of poetry and conceptual fiction. He teaches at the Alberta College of Art + Design and can be found online at:  www.derekbeaulieu.wordpress.com. This is the final of four blogs for MCA Denver.

Postscript: Writing after Conceptual Art contributor Erica Baum poeticizes our minor gestures. Baum transforms a reading act—the motion of dog-earing a book’s page—into a writerly one.

Why Postscript Matters

Why has MCA Denver curated an exhibition on conceptual writing, and why now? Part of the relevance of Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art stems from our present situation in the digital age. We are flooded everyday with the digital, which, as Artforum argued several months back, "is, at base, a linguistic model. Convert any .jpg file to .txt and you will find its ingredients: a garbled recipe of numbers and letters, meaningless to the average viewer." If the digital is indeed "at base, a linguistic model," then this deluge of the digital indicates a linguistic shift. We are experiencing a linguistic shift about how we process information, and that linguistic shift also has visual consequences; everyday we access information via different technologies, and we process that information via different visual formats. .jpg files neatly summarize these visual consequences, as well as an apparatus like the Kindle might.