Carla Acevedo-Yates, the Marilyn and Larry Fields Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, credits artists for inspiring her career. “Artists are my teachers,” she says, “All of my ideas come from my long-term dialogue with others and especially artists.”
Growing up in Puerto Rico, Acevedo-Yates was surrounded by an art world markedly different from the one she finds herself in today. Art was not scarce, but the infrastructure was fragile, comprised primarily of DIY and artist-run spaces, with galleries often found in unconventional spaces such as shopping malls.
Acevedo-Yates grew up in a home with art on the walls and parents who took her to museums, but her first love was literature. After moving to New York City to study literature and poetry at Barnard College, Acevedo-Yates returned to Puerto Rico where she discovered a real need for critical writing on the arts, an opening she cites as her entry point into a career in the visual arts. She met Christopher Cozier, an artist who became a close friend and who Acevedo-Yates would curate in shows such as the recently closed “Forecast Form.” “He really encouraged me to start writing about the work that I knew, the work of my friends,” she says.
Edra Soto (b. 1971, San Juan, Puerto Rico; lives in Chicago), Tropicalamerican, 2014. Inkjet prints on silk and red thread; five parts, each: 67 x 43 in.; installed dimensions variable. Collection Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Gift of Warren A. James in memory of Dr. Magdalena Bernat and Warren Alger James, 2021.10. Installation view, Elmhurst Art Museum Biennial: Chicago Statements, Elmhurst Art Museum, December 11, 2015 – February 20, 2016. Photo: James Prinz Photography, courtesy of MCA Chicago and part of the upcoming “entre horizontes”
José Lerma (b. 1971, lives in Puerto Rico), Dorothy, 2023. Acrylic on burlap; 8 x 6 ft. Courtesy of the artist and Diablo Rosso and part of the upcoming “entre horizontes”
As her involvement in the art world deepened through writing and criticism, she began to think about creating the shows she wanted both to see and write about. “My background is very much proactive and independent,” she says. As a burgeoning curator in Puerto Rico she took inspiration and encouragement from the DIY ethos with which the Puerto Rican arts community was infused, managing everything for exhibitions from fundraising, to producing the catalog, to securing work.
Her decision to return to school in the United States was motivated by a very specific objective that has served as the throughline in her career ever since: to establish a career as a curator at a museum in the United States in order to present work by Caribbean, Latin American and Latinx artists in an institutional context.
Rather than pursue art history, another common path toward museum curation, Acevedo-Yates earned a master’s degree in curatorial studies from Bard. It was yet another decision motivated by what she had learned from artists like Cozier. “I think I learned from artists how they would like their art to be presented and included,” she says. “Curatorial studies teaches you to curate artistic practices rather than objects.”
At Bard she was taught an approach to curation that encouraged an attention to how the exhibition feels to a visitor, focusing on design elements such as light and sound. “Curatorial studies really encourages you to think spatially,” Acevedo-Yates says. “To think about the exhibition as an experience, as choreography.”
Carla Acevedo-Yates/courtesy MCA Chicago
After graduating she once again went south, working as an arts critic and independent curator. She worked primarily in Latin and South America, curating shows across the region, before returning to the United States for a job at the Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University in 2016 where she worked under the Swiss curator Marc-Olivier Wahler.
“He really gave me carte blanche to explore,” she says. At the Broad she worked on many shows with Wahler as well as a number of shows with artists that she continues to collaborate with including Duane Linklater, whose work is currently on view at the MCA, and David Lamelas, an Argentinian artist whose work is now in the MCA collection. She also curated Claudia Peña Salinas’ first institutional museum show as well as an important group show entitled “The Edge of Things: Dissident Art Under Repressive Regimes.”
When Michael Darling, the chief curator at the MCA, reached out about an open position, Acevedo-Yates knew it was a city and an institution where she could make a contribution. Although she didn’t have much experience with the city, she was familiar with the Puerto Rican community here and the proximity to water reminded her of home.
Acevedo-Yates arrived in Chicago in 2019, just in time to work on shows that would open in the heart of the pandemic. Her first project was a mural by the Argentinian artist Ad Minoliti for the MCA atrium and the second was a solo exhibition of work by Carolina Caycedo.
Although it opened and closed during the pandemic, “From the Bottom of the River” was a significant and early introduction to the perspective Acevedo-Yates has brought to the MCA. Not only was it one of a very few solo exhibitions by a Latina artist presented at the MCA to date, it marked the first completely bilingual exhibition at the MCA, an initiative that has now been made permanent.
Installation view, “Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s-Today,” MCA Chicago. November 19, 2022–April 23, 2023/Photo: James Prinz Photography
Acevedo-Yates’ most significant exhibition at the MCA to date has been the recently closed “Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora 1990s-Today,” an exhibition she had been thinking about for a while.
“The Caribbean group show is a format that keeps popping up in different places and different times,” she says. “It was always something I wanted to do and when I came here to Chicago, because of the history of the MCA and of the city, it just kind of came together.”
Installation view, “Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s-Today,” MCA Chicago. November 19, 2022–April 23, 2023/Photo: James Prinz Photography
The show marked a significant intervention into a history of exhibitions that Acevedo-Yates has always been interested in. Rather than organizing the show around specific regions or countries and focusing on the artworks and artists as magically standing in for a specific place, approaches which had characterized similar presentations in the past, Acevedo-Yates and her team let the form of the artworks themselves guide the ideas and themes around which the exhibition revolved.
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz (b. 1972, San Juan, Puerto Rico; lives in San Juan). Safehouse Side A/ Side B (still), 2018. Two-channel video; twenty minutes. Collection Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Gift of John J. Drammis, Jr. and Ira Levy by exchange, 2022.122
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz (b. 1972, San Juan, Puerto Rico; lives in San Juan). Safehouse Side A/ Side B (still), 2018. Two-channel video; twenty minutes. Collection Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Gift of John J. Drammis, Jr. and Ira Levy by exchange, 2022.122
Up next is “entre horizontes: Art and Activism between Chicago And Puerto Rico,” an exhibition opening in August that marries her deep knowledge of Puerto Rican artists with Chicago’s rich Puerto Rican history and community. Spurred by the Terra Foundation’s call for proposals for exhibitions thinking about migrations to and from Chicago, Acevedo-Yates conceptualized a show organized around the many artists from Puerto Rico who have come to Chicago to study and work. “entre horizontes” will include a recently acquired video installation by Beatriz Santiago Muñoz as well as work by many artists already in the MCA collection, including Rafael Ferrer. “Ferrer is at the heart of the MCA and people don’t know about it,” she says, emphasizing that the MCA has the largest public collection of works by the Puerto Rican artist in the United States.
Although Acevedo-Yates has known many of the artists included in the show for years, the research process was also highly collaborative, informed by input from community members and a great deal of time spent in the Puerto Rican Cultural Center archives, objects from which will also be part of the show.
Frank Espada, “Tommy Jiménez,” 1982. Exhibition copy; Overall: 20 x 16 in. (50.8 x 40.6 cm). Courtesy of the Frank Espada Archive, San Francisco and part of the upcoming “entre horizontes”
Candida Alvarez (b. 1995, Brooklyn, NY; lives in Baroda, MI), “Licking a Red Rose,” 2020. Acrylic on linen; 80 1/4 × 68 1/8 in. (203.8 × 173 cm). Collection Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Gift of Katherine S. Schamberg by exchange, 2021.4. Photo: Tom Van Eynde, courtesy the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery and part of the upcoming “entre horizontes”
“I’ve been thinking a lot about how I work and how the work that I’ve been doing in an exhibition translates into an institutional context,” she says. It’s an approach to her work as a curator that she has already made central to her tenure at the MCA in the museum’s shift toward bilingual exhibitions, something she credits Carolina Caycedo for instigating and which “Forecast Form” established as museum practice going forward. “I’m also thinking about other areas from the retail to the marketing and how to approach these things using a curatorial methodology,” she says. “I am exploring how curatorial methods can inform something that isn’t fully visible but can be felt.”
Perhaps a result of her background in the DIY art world of Puerto Rico, as well as her approach to curation, Acevedo-Yates takes a holistic approach to the museum. She wants to evolve the institution as a whole and has already entered a number of new works into the collection, many of which have already been on display or will be seen in upcoming shows.
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