Madeleine Grynsztejn
When Madeleine Grynsztejn moved from Caracas, Venezuela, to London with her family at age 11, she spoke only Spanish and Dutch and harbored a passion for art that went largely unnurtured by her family. At Tulane University in New Orleans, she tried painting and quickly concluded that she had no talent for it. Then she took an art history class, and it all clicked.“The minute those lights went out and the slides went up, I was done [for],” says Grynsztejn, 46, who was recently named director of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art and, as a longtime curator, has spent her career acting as translator between artists and audiences. “I know what it’s like to be left out of language. Art is a language you have to learn. Art opens up a conversation.”
If Grynsztejn has her way, the MCA will be starting plenty of conversations. “I want to make it one of the authoritative voices in the field,” she says with a newcomer’s zeal in her gleaming white, window-lined office. Grynsztejn is immaculately turned out in a slim Paul Stuart suit, crisp royal blue shirt and smart black frames. Though she’s been in the top post for only three months the day we meet, she admits she’s already preoccupied with “inventing a 21st-century model” for the contemporary art museum.
She hopes to invite artists “to do more than simply give us something to install in the galleries,” but to help the museum rethink what it does. “I’m seeing artists using the museum as their subject, artists getting involved in areas that were once the role of the educator or curator.” To create more “convergence” among the MCA’s departments, she wants artists to participate more “in its back-of-the-house operations,” she says.
To that end she regularly consults artist friends like Olafur Eliasson, whom she met in 1997 while scouting talent for the 1999 Carnegie International. In Eliasson’s view, Grynsztejn brings a fresh mind-set to running a museum, though her ideas for the MCA are only in the planning stages. “When people step into the museum, they don’t want to step out of the city; they want to get closer to it,” Eliasson says. “What’s fantastic about Madeleine is that she’s not polarizing herself into an against-all-the-others museum. Her approach is more unpredictable and liberating for art.” (“Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson” arrives at the MCA next spring.)
As a curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Museum of Art and most recently at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Grynsztejn displayed wide-ranging tastes. At SFMOMA she mounted a major exhibition on Richard Tuttle and then one on Eliasson. “You’d be hard-pressed to imagine two more different artists, and yet Madeleine is passionate about both of them,” says SFMOMA director Neal Benezra. “It’s so important for a museum director not to be too monochromatic. She has a capacity for peripheral vision.”
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