Performance | Halsted Street
February 24, 20266:00 pm - 7:30 pm
Pablo Helguera performing The Boy Inside the Letter (2008) at the Queens Museum. Image courtesy of
Pablo Helguera.
About the Event
Halsted Street is a new performance by Pablo Helguera created in conjunction with the MCA exhibition Collection in Conversation with Pablo Helguera. The performance takes its title from director Conrad Friberg’s 1934 silent film of the same name; the film uses a single camera to move in an unbroken drive down Chicago’s major north-south running artery, revealing stark social and racial disparities along its route. Helguera—who lived in Chicago throughout the 1990s and debuted his first major theatrical work on Halsted Street—bridges the museum’s collection with his own memories of coming of age as an immigrant walking the city’s streets. Weaving together themes of visibility, resilience, rebellion, and creativity under constraint, Halsted Street revisits the city as a site of labor struggle, migration, and artistic formation.
Access Information
CART captioning is provided at this event. To request additional accessibility services, please contact us at [email protected] or 312-397-4076.
About the Artist
Pablo Helguera (b. 1971, Mexico City, Mexico; lives in New York, NY) is an artist working with installation, sculpture, photography, drawing, socially engaged art, and performance. Helguera’s work focuses on a variety of topics ranging from history, pedagogy, sociolinguistics, ethnography, memory, and the absurd, in formats that are widely varied including the lecture, museum display strategies, musical performances, and written fiction. His project The School of Panamerican Unrest is one of the most extensive socially engaged public art initiatives on record. Helguera has exhibited at major institutions worldwide and received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has held key roles in museum education, including at MoMA and the Guggenheim. Currently, he teaches at The New School and writes the weekly column Beautiful Eccentrics. He is the author of Education for Socially Engaged Art (2011) and Parable Conference (2014).
Funding
Event
Lead support for the 2025–26 season of MCA Talks is made possible by The Richard and Mary L. Gray Lecture Series through a generous gift to the Chicago Contemporary Campaign.
Generous support is provided by The Antje B. and John J. Jelinek Endowed Lecture and Symposium on Contemporary Art; the Kristina Barr Lectures, which were established through a generous gift by The Barr Fund to the Chicago Contemporary Campaign; The Gloria Brackstone Solow and Eugene A. Solow, MD, Memorial Lecture Series; and the Allen M. Turner Tribute Fund, honoring his past leadership as Chair of the Board of Trustees.
Exhibition
Lead support is provided by the Pritzker Traubert Collection Exhibition Fund, Cari and Michael Sacks, and the Zell Family Foundation.