Alum Pablo Helguera Talks Collaboration, Conversation, and Curating New MCA Exhibition

A burlap-and-wood form (Cage, Magdalena Abakanowicz, 1981) and a set of mechanical wings, (Brush Wings, Rebecca Horn, 1988) greet visitors ascending the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s (MCA) central stairwell, where recorded voices echo through the space reflecting on belonging, uncertainty, and creative exchange.

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Rebecca Horn, Brush Wings, 1988. Mixed media; 16 × 16 × 15 in. (40.6 × 40.6 × 38.1 cm). Collection Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Gift of Helyn Goldenberg and Ralph Goldenberg in honor of the MCA's 40th anniversary, 2008.17. Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago.

This multisensory encounter anchors Collection in Conversation with Pablo Helguera, on view through July 5, 2026, which reimagines the MCA’s collection as a living dialogue shaped by 20 Chicago artists, writers, activists, and educators. Curated by School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) alum Pablo Helguera (BFA 1999) in collaboration with the museum’s curatorial and learning teams, the exhibition pairs well-known works with sound elements drawn from these conversations, inviting audiences to consider how art shifts meaning through collective reflection. Known for socially engaged projects, institutional critique, and his satirical Artoons cartoons, “post-studio” multi-hyphenate creative Helguera brings his belief in conversation as a creative practice back to Chicago, where his own path began through performance, education, and early roles at the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Museum of Mexican Art, the MCA, and the Guggenheim. 

Helguera will deliver the 2025 Distinguished Alumni Lecture as part of SAIC's Visiting Artists Program on Monday, October 6.

What do you wish someone had told you when you were first starting out?
I am from Mexico City, born and raised. I came to Chicago to study at SAIC in 1999, and I wanted to be a painter. I soon discovered performance arts and became very involved in making that type of experimental, process-based art. At the same time, I started working in museums as an intern in a program that SAIC had called Co-op (now CAPX). That program was really crucial for me because I needed a job, and I ended up doing an internship at the Art Institute. That led me to the Mexican Fine Arts Museum, which is now the National Museum of Mexican Art, then the MCA, and later the Guggenheim. 

I learned so much about contemporary art while working at the MCA, and I wanted to replicate the process of collective learning. My initial proposition was to talk about displacement, what it feels like to be outside of something. That was how I felt when I first came to Chicago, as an immigrant and an artist trying to find my place. 

I never described myself as a curator. My work has always been about conversation and dialogue. In my museum work, the best projects came from collective exploration. We would say, ‘Here is an issue we want to explore. Let’s try to figure it out together.’ From those conversations, ideas and exhibitions would emerge

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Instituto de la Telenovela (2002-present). Museo Jumex, Mexico City, 2017. Image courtesy of Pablo Helguera.

I left museums in 2020 and I have always been what you might call a ‘post-studio artist.’ My practice resides in people and conversations, not in being locked in a room making art. Of course, I have a private practice of writing and research, but much of my work is in the field: walking, talking, absorbing. For me, working in museums was like being an artist in residence. I absorbed everything, and a lot of my work became commentary on the art world itself. 

Many SAIC students are experimenting with socially engaged or community-based practices. How do you recommend they approach collaborations?
First of all, be curious about others. About the world around you, about the life stories of people who surround you. They are fascinating and have so much to teach us. You can often learn more about yourself through the stories of others than by just focusing on yourself. We are much less unusual than we think. That lack of unusualness is what makes us universal.

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The Mayfly Conference, workshop/performance at the Chalupecky Society, Prague, 2017. Image Courtesy of Pablo Helguera.

Second, document everything. Maybe that is the historian in me, but I believe every part of life experience is fieldwork. When I was 16 or 17, I started a diary where I wrote to myself in the future. Years later, it was moving, rediscovering documented things I had completely forgotten about. You never know what will matter later, and you will forget how you felt at certain moments. So diaries, photos, videos, all of it is important.

Lastly, learn to listen. In museums, I realized the job of an educator is not to make it about yourself. You cannot give a tour and say, ‘I hate this artwork,’ or ‘I love this artwork and that is the final word.’ When you pay attention to what others say, you discover extraordinary things. I have given tours of artists whose work I disliked, but my job was to make people see how interesting it could be. That is a skill, and sometimes I even changed my own mind in the process.

I prefer looking at art less as a critic and more as an anthropologist. What can this artwork teach us about the world it comes from? That shift is essential. Studs Terkel, the Chicago oral historian, taught us that everyone has a story worth learning from, whether they are a construction worker, a baseball player, or an artist.

When you look back at your early projects, what seeds do you see that have stayed with you, even if they looked very different then? How can students learn to trust those early impulses?
So much of what I explored in school had enormous consequences. In Professor Barbara Rossi’s drawing class, we created hybrid objects, like a chair combined with a coffee cup. I took it further, making hybrids of hybrids, creating a combinatory system. I have continued with that idea of hybridity ever since.

I was also editor of F Newsmagazine, even though my English was poor at the time. It prompted me to write constantly, and that writing practice has been central to my work ever since. Not as art criticism, but as a way of listening and learning from others.

In 1992, I made an artist book titled America. You would open it, and it would turn into a building. Many years later, I created The School of Panamerican Unrest, a nomadic project where I built a portable school and drove from Alaska to Chile. Only afterward did I realize that the book I made at 21 looked exactly like the school.

That is why I say: document everything. What you make in your diaries and sketchbooks may look modest now, but in many ways, it prefigures what you will do later

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MCA Chicago visitors interacting with Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s “Untitled” (The End), 1990. Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago.