Madeleine Grynsztejn to Step Down as Director of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art After 18 Years
Madeleine Grynsztejn, a central force in Chicago’s contemporary art ecosystem, will depart as director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA) at the end of this year, concluding an 18-year tenure marked by ambitious retrospectives, major collection growth, and a sharp rise in the museum’s financial capacity.
In a phone interview, Grynsztejn framed the timing as both practical and symbolic: 2026 will bring the MCA’s 60th anniversary, and she said she wants the institution’s next chapter to be led by a new director. “I asked myself, who should be on the dais in January 2027? Should it be the person who brought the museum to this moment for the last 20 years, or should it be the person who will take the museum forward for the next 20 years?” she said. “The answer was easy for me.”
Grynsztejn, who joined the MCA in 2008 after serving as senior curator of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, became known for a program that paired scale with range. During her directorship, the museum mounted surveys for artists including Colombian artist Doris Salcedo (b. 1958), Japanese artist Takashi Murakami (b. 1962), American artist Howardena Pindell (b. 1943), American designer and artist Virgil Abloh (1980–2021), and Belgian artist Luc Tuymans (b. 1958). The MCA also took on large traveling exhibitions, including a recent monumental survey of Japanese artist Yoko Ono (b. 1933) that had not previously toured the United States before the MCA presented it.
Unusually for a museum director, Grynsztejn also maintained a direct hand in shaping exhibitions. Among the most prominent examples was the MCA’s 2016 survey of American painter Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955), a show she initiated that later traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles.
Marshall, in an email, underscored the balance museum leaders are expected to strike between public reach and curatorial rigor. “No one gets to lead a major museum for eighteen years who has not demonstrated a commitment to growing the size of both its audience and its supporters while maintaining the highest critical and aesthetic standards,” he said, describing his relationship with the MCA as “a meaningful partnership for, myself, the museum, and the visiting audience, alike.”
On the institutional side, Grynsztejn said she doubled the MCA’s operating budget and helped secure significant additions to the collection through both gifts of art and philanthropic funding. A watershed moment came in 2022, when Greek collector Dimitris Daskalopoulos donated around 100 works to the MCA; the museum jointly stewards most of them with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. (Additional works from the same gift went to Tate in London and Greece’s National Museum of Contemporary Art.) The Daskalopoulos donation brought works by artists including American artist Robert Gober (b. 1954), Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta (1948–1985), British artist Sarah Lucas (b. 1962), French American artist Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010), British Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum (b. 1952), Kenyan American artist Wangechi Mutu (b. 1972), and American artist Paul Pfeiffer (b. 1966) into the MCA’s orbit.
Chicago collectors Marilyn and Larry Fields also made a major contribution, giving 79 works to the museum along with $2 million in funding.
Other donors supported the institution through targeted gifts. In 2012, the MCA received $10 million from Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson to name the museum’s theater, and another $10 million from Sam and Helen Zell. The museum used the Zells’ gift to help establish Marisol, the Michelin-starred restaurant located at the MCA.
Grynsztejn has argued that collection-building and programming were inseparable from a broader mission of access. She said that gifts of art helped diversify the museum’s holdings, and connected that goal to her own biography, citing an upbringing across Peru, Venezuela, and England. “I grew up in places where I was excluded, either by language or other means,” she said. “I have always been deeply, deeply invested in making a place as warmly accessible and inclusive as possible.”
She declined to outline specific next steps, but suggested her future work will move closer to direct artist support. Her next project, she said, will allow her to “replicate my support for artists more directly on a larger scale than I can devote now.”
Her departure sets the stage for a consequential leadership transition as the MCA approaches its 60th anniversary — a moment when museums nationwide are being pressed to reconcile curatorial ambition, donor expectations, and public accountability, while continuing to define what contemporary art institutions can be for their cities.
