There is no such thing as overnight success. Jadine Collingwood, Pamela Alper Associate Curator at MCA Chicago, has carved her own path through the world of art, moving between scholarship, institutional practice and contemporary exhibition-making with a consistent interest in performance, feminist theory, new media and the pressures produced by contemporary life.
At the MCA, she has curated or worked on projects including Chicago Works: Caroline Kent in 2021, and Gary Simmons: Public Enemy with René Morales in 2023. She holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Chicago, previously worked at the Walker Art Center, and before that was an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Art Institute of Chicago.
The latest recognition of her work has come in the form of The Studio Museum in Harlem’s 2026 Arts Leadership Praxis. The annual six-month programme was conceived to support mid-career museum professionals of colour and those deeply invested in Black cultural production. It is aimed at people with roughly five to ten years’ experience in curatorial, education or public programming roles, and its long-term purpose is to help address inequities in arts institutions by developing the next generation of museum leaders.
The participants in this year’s Arts Leadership Praxis with Ilk Yasha, Director of the Studio Museum Institute at the Studio Museum in Harlem (front row left): Maggley Vielot, Camille Brown, Annissa Malvoisin, Jadine Collingwood, Mia Matthias, Devin Malone, Michael J. Ewing and Ilk Yasha.
© Shanta Lawson / The Studio Museum in Harlem.
The 2026 cohort brings together eight mid-career professionals of colour for a programme built around seminars, conversations with senior arts professionals, studio visits, individual mentorship, in-person workshops in New York, Los Angeles and Detroit, and the building of a cross-institutional professional network.
Across her practice, Collingwood thrives when working in dialogue with others, an attitude very much encouraged by the Arts Leadership Praxis. “To have a cohort of other curators has been great to generate ideas and to think more broadly about the curatorial field as a whole and about what I would like the future to look like. This programme has given me the chance to realise that institutional leadership is actually one of the ways to reshape the values and priorities that you want to see in the field.”
This question of institutional leadership is central not only to Collingwood’s development, but also to the MCA itself. Since opening its doors in 1967, MCA Chicago has built its curatorial philosophy around being an artist-activated and audience-engaged institution. Unlike traditional fine art museums that often focus on preserving the past, the MCA prioritises the work and ideas of living artists and the social contexts of our time.
From its early performances by artists such as Charlotte Moorman, Nam June Paik and Carolee Schneemann, the museum has long given space to practices that test the boundaries between art, performance, technology, politics and the body. Underpinning this strategy is the museum’s commitment to course-correct historical imbalances in the art world. According to the Burns Halperin Report, the MCA collects historically underrepresented artists at rates significantly higher than the national average, with women-identified artists, Black American artists and Black American female artists all represented well above national acquisition figures.
Jamillah James, Manilow Senior Curator at MCA Chicago since 2022, shares that ethos. “We’ve been very supportive of different emerging practices at early stages of their visibility. Performance, installation and video are all very present in our programme. We have different initiatives to support emerging talent, among them the Ascendant Artist series, which features career-defining first major museum exhibitions and catalogues for artists, offering them a significant platform for their work.”
Artists who have benefited from this kind of support include Christina Quarles, Carolina Caycedo and Martine Syms. Another of the MCA’s key initiatives is Chicago Works, a solo exhibition series highlighting local Chicago-based artists. One such artist is Rashid Johnson, known for his exploration of Black identity. It was at the MCA that Johnson had his first major museum survey, Message to Our Folks, in 2012. Later this year, the museum will host his retrospective, A Poem for Deep Thinkers. “We have the capacity to throw our institutional weight behind artists,” says James.
A third initiative worth mentioning is the Marjorie Susman Curatorial Fellowship, considered one of the premier curatorial training opportunities in the nation. The Fellow assists the Deputy Director and Chief of Curatorial Affairs and the Manilow Senior Curator with all aspects of exhibition programming and organisation.
Taken together, Collingwood’s selection for Arts Leadership Praxis and the MCA’s wider programme form one story: museums need talent, but they also need structures that allow that talent to grow.
There are clear benefits for the MCA too. “Since Jadine joined,” James continues, “she has brought a really innovative way of thinking and of working with artists. Her participation in the Praxis programme is not just an opportunity for her to expand her work as a curator, but also to bring ideas and intelligence back to the museum and its programme. Her forthcoming show, Slow Dance, is going to reframe how the MCA has interfaced with performance historically and is taking up many ideas that Jadine has brought to the table.”
Opening in September 2026, Slow Dance brings together artists Brendan Fernandes, Gordon Hall, Geumhyung Jeong, Carolyn Lazard, Melanie McLain and Cally Spooner. The exhibition looks at performance in two senses: as a live artistic medium and as a social demand placed on bodies under capitalism. Its core subject is not dance in the spectacular sense, but the body under pressure.
Left: Installation view, Gary Simmons: Public Enemy, MCA Chicago (2023). Photo: Shelby Ragsdale, © MCA Chicago.
Right: Melanie McLain, Peripersonal, 2020. OTRXS MUNDXS, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, (2020–21). Courtesy of the artist. This installation/performance work will show at Slow Dance, at MCA Chicago, opening in September this year.
The exhibition asks what happens when artists slow down, suspend, wait, pause, fail, recover or refuse. It looks at fatigue not simply as weakness, but as a condition through which new forms of intimacy, reciprocity and resistance might emerge. “In this exhibition,” explains Collingwood, “artists investigate the use of different forms of slowness in order to resist this contemporary demand to constantly perform. It is about returning to the body, restoring it.”
That concern with art as a way of testing social structures is visible in Collingwood’s previous work too. In Gary Simmons: Public Enemy, the MCA presented the most comprehensive survey of Simmons’s work to date, spanning 30 years and around 70 works. Simmons’s practice examines histories of racism within American visual culture, drawing on hip-hop, sports, vintage cartoons, horror, science fiction and other popular forms.
By supporting curators such as Collingwood and James, while giving emerging and under-recognised artists the space to test new ideas, MCA Chicago is proving that a museum can be more than a place of display. It can be a training ground, a public forum and, at its best, a structure through which culture learns to move differently.
Author: Julia Pasarón
Exhibitions at MCA Chicago covered by I-M Inquisitive Minds include The Living End: Painting and other Technologies, 1970–2020 (2025); City in a Garden: Queer Art and Activism in Chicago (2025-26); and Dancing the Revolution (2026).
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