trailerpilot

Friday morning I attended a preview of Starting With The Universe, the MCA’s fascinating retrospective of the life and work of R. Buckminster Fuller.  Inspired by the many sketches and studies the show includes (as well as this week’s analog LT), I’m forming this review around scans I made of the notebook I carried through the exhibition tour led by the museum’s James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator Elizabeth Smith, Fuller’s loveable daughter Allegra Fuller Snyder and her son, Jaime Snyder.

Madeleine Grynsztejn‘s podium was decorated with Bucky-inspired models from the MCA store.  As Blair Kamin has noted, the exhibit is highly-Illinois-centric, massaged from its original form at the Whitney to underline his multiple returns to Chicago and the midwest, his affiliations with IIT and SIU, and surprising marketing collaborations with Marshall Field.  I’ve never attended a formal opening at the MCA, but in her introduction of Smith and the Snyders Grynstztejn made the comment that Friday’s was to be fully open to the public, in contrast with the museum’s standard method of staging separate functions on each floor of the museum “digressively exclusive” in that the top floor is most VIP, each floor down filled with P increasingly less I.  Not really surprising, I suppose, but interesting one would bring up the fact that one’s parties are designed to limit interaction between not just two, but multiple classes of people.  I also had to write out the correct pronunciation of Olafur Eliasson, whose name I’ve been saying oh-LA-fur ELLIE-a-son. Read More…