For the past five years, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) has installed public art projects outside, near the front steps of the building’s main entrance, in order to enliven the city’s landscape with contemporary art and to partially create a “museum without walls.” This summer, the highly acclaimed Brazilian contemporary artist Alexandre da Cunha brings three interactive pieces to the plaza. One is a full-scale cement mixer titled Mix (Americana) (2013), cleaned up and freshly painted with red-white-and-blue stars and stripes. The other two are large-scale sculptures made from Chicago-produced concrete sewer pipes: a 30-foot-tall tower called Figurehead (2015), and Biscuit (2015), a freestanding disk-like piece. In conjunction with the outdoor sculptures, da Cunha presents a floor-to-ceiling indoor wallpaper installation in the museum’s atrium with found images of Brazilian beach landscapes, flipped from a horizontal to a vertical orientation.
Looking at da Cunha’s sculptures, spectators might wonder, “Why is a cement mixer displayed in a museum?” (a reaction similar to the one viewers must have have had upon seeing Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain 100 years ago). Da Cunha’s sculptures force the viewer to find the beauty or interest in these objects. “He creates a sort of confusion,” says Darling, “where people would drive or walk by the MCA Plaza and ask, “What is going on at the MCA; is there some kind of construction going on here?”
