FEATURE STORY — September/October 2009

 

Molon’s Beat

Dominic Molon learned a lot about his current position as a curator for Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art from his first MCA job as a guard, including where the hidden treasures are stored

By Anne Ford
Photography by Callie Lipkin

Dominic Molon

At the end of his first day of graduate studies in art history and criticism at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, an elated Dominic Molon ’91 AA came back to his dormitory and found one of his new classmates staring blankly at the wall. “He said, ‘Do you ever get the feeling you made a really, really, really big mistake?’ I was like, ‘Oh my God, I feel absolutely the opposite,’” recalls Molon.

Now curator at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Molon has yet to waver in his enthusiasm for 20th- and 21st-century artwork. It’s a passion rooted in many childhood visits to museums, followed by an undergraduate experience shaped by professors who saw the potential in “this little dorky bohemian kid from the south suburbs of Chicago,” as Molon describes himself.

That “bohemian kid,” now 38, has become a well-respected curator whose flair for ferreting out undiscovered and up-and-coming talents has helped him simultaneously shape the MCA’s collection and bring emerging artists into the spotlight.

“He really does have a nose for who the next important person or movement will be, which is a very valuable thing in a contemporary art curator,” says fellow curator, Lynne Warren, who has known Molon since his undergraduate days. She mentions photographer Sharon Lockhart and conceptual artist Gillian Wearing as two important figures that Molon spotted early on and highlighted via shows at the MCA.

“He really does have a nose for who the next important person or movement will be,” says Lynne Warren

Not only that, “Dominic works hard at keeping in touch with what’s going on, and I don’t mean just what’s going on in the world of art,” Warren adds. “You never know what is going to influence contemporary art, so you have to stay in touch with the culture at large. Generally, he is a little ahead of the curve.”

Molon’s passion for art stems from his childhood in Palos Park, where he was raised by working-class parents who frequently took their children to museums, including the Art Institute. He remembers being especially enraptured by a particular painting there: René Magritte’s “Time Transfixed,” a 1938 surrealist work that depicts a locomotive emerging from a fireplace. “I grew up a pretty cultured kid,” Molon says.

That doesn’t mean the young Molon had Picasso prints lying around the house, however. At home, his parents’ taste ran more to what he remembers as “bad reproductions of ‘The Last Supper.’” But he had plenty of art books to absorb himself in. “One book my parents gave me for Christmas one year was this great pictorial history of art from prehistoric times up through Jasper Johns,” Molon says. “No text. Nothing but images. It really gave me a pretty thorough sense of art history.”

Still, the idea of pursuing art history and criticism as a career wouldn’t occur to him for years. “All through high school, I don’t think I took a single art class,” Molon says. Instead, he was absorbed in rock music: “I always had this idea that I was going to be a radio disc jockey, spinning records at WXRT at two in the morning.” In particular, Molon loved to discover rock bands that no one had heard of yet, to be “the first one on the block to have heard Nirvana or the Pixies. Always being drawn toward alternative culture—I can’t really identify where that came from.”

Not until his senior year of high school did he end an Art Institute visit thinking, “Wow, working in a museum would probably be kind of cool,” Molon recalls. Then, on a campus visit to UIC, he wandered into the university bookstore and came across a section called History of Art and Architecture. That’s when the light bulb went off: “Hey, this is actually something you can study! This must be how you get to work in museums!” he laughs.

Though he describes himself as a shy undergraduate, Molon made an impression on his UIC professors fairly quickly. “There’s always a small percentage of students that you think have some chance of making it in this very difficult business, and he was definitely one of those,” says Tony Tasset, professor of studio arts, School of Art and Design.

“I knew quickly that he had potential,” concurs Paula Wisotzki, who then taught in UIC’s art history department and is now associate professor of art history at Loyola University, Chicago. “Potential—and also drive.”

His classes with Tasset and Wisotzki, Molon says, were where he began sharpening the skills that would become critical to his career. “The two studio courses I took with Tony Tasset were huge” in his development, he notes, calling them “probably as important, if not more so, than the art history courses I took. Studio classes train you how to talk about art you haven’t seen before.”

Guard Duty at the MCA

At the same time, however, Molon was starting what could arguably be called his most seminal career experience of all: working as a security guard at the MCA. While he calls the job itself “unbelievably tedious,” it was a first-rate introduction to museum life.

“It was a really great entrée into museum culture, and also—in a way that no class could have done—it advanced my knowledge of contemporary art,” Molon says. All that time he spent staring at artwork while on duty continues to pay off, even today. “Now that I curate shows, I know about certain things that are tucked away, hidden treasures of the collection that I remember seeing in one gallery or another,” he adds.

It was during that period that Molon met Warren, who already worked at the MCA and would become his colleague there years later. She, too, attributes at least some of his curatorial expertise to his guard days: “Curators—we can sit behind our desks and go to artists’ studios, but if you aren’t down in the galleries watching how visitors interact with, or look at, or talk about the art, you’ve left out part of the equation.”

Being the staff equivalent of a fly on the wall initially suited the naturally reserved Molon, who admits worrying at first that he’d be out of his element among the more experienced employees: “I went into the MCA thinking, ‘God, is everybody going to be too cool for school, and I won’t be cool enough?’” he says. “I was really, really shy up until a certain point. The people I worked with in security were like, ‘We thought you were never going to talk.’”

But gradually, his more social side emerged. “It was a much smaller institution at the time, so I did an internship in the curatorial department while I was a guard, and was even able to get to know the museum’s director and volunteer for a lot of things,” says Molon. “Even as a guard, you kind of interfaced with everyone on staff.”

Molon also had the chance to observe the curators giving tours and realize “the degree to which they had to have these very social, vocal sorts of personalities. It was something that I had to develop.” He practiced by giving a tour of an MCA show about Japanese sculpture to Tasset and some UIC classmates. “It prepared me for giving public tours,” Molon says.

“It was very rewarding to watch him develop into an experienced, savvy curator,” says Amada Cruz

After graduating from UIC, Molon headed for his master’s degree at SUNY Stony Brook, where he was greatly influenced by a professor named Ann Gibson and her championing of women artists and artists of color. “She provided a more current sensibility in terms of how to look at art,” he says. “Through Ann, I developed critical thinking that was much more progressive.” During his graduate studies, Molon also interned at the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan (coincidentally, one of his fellow interns was James Rondeau, who now heads the Art Institute’s Department of Contemporary Art).

Hunch Pays Off

At the completion of his degree, Molon found himself wondering whether to pursue a doctorate or look for a job. But he didn’t wonder for long. Knowing that the MCA was planning to expand into a new, larger space, he had a hunch that the museum would be expanding its staff as well. “I came back to Chicago in May of 1994, and by June had been hired at the MCA,” says Molon.

He started as a research assistant, and found himself working with Amada Cruz, then the MCA’s curator of exhibitions and now program director of the United States Artists Foundation in Los Angeles. “It was very rewarding to watch him develop into an experienced, savvy curator,” says Cruz.

She especially remembers Molon’s level-headedness in the face of an ambitious 1997 exhibition called “Performance Anxiety,” a large group show consisting mostly of room-size installations with which the viewer was supposed to interact in some way, such as by dancing or jumping. “That was a very complicated show—we still talk about the craziness of it,” says Cruz. “He [dealt well] with the artists.”

Molon recently paid homage to his love of progressive music by curating “Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967,” a 2007 show that examined the relationship between the visual arts and the culture of rock and roll. “That show definitely aroused passions,” says Warren. “It got a great deal of acclaim and stirred up some controversy. At the MCA, we never try for controversy, but when people [become] passionate enough about something to try to stir up controversy, you have to think that something’s getting through.”

Dominic Molon’s work takes him to studios of artists such as Cody Hudson and to the homes of donors. Here he reviews some of Hudson’s pieces that incorporate found materials and spray paint/

A Dream to Work With

The man who once walked the halls as a shy undergraduate security guard has become a gregarious professional adept at interacting with artists and donors alike. “In a given day, my job can involve going to an artist’s studio in Humboldt Park at 10 in the morning, and then at 7 that night visiting the penthouse of some phenomenally wealthy person who happens to be a major art collector,” Molon points out. “It’s such a rigorously social job.”

Part of his socializing consists of serving as a mentor of sorts to younger or less experienced artists, particularly those in the “12 x 12: New Artists/New Work” monthly exhibition series, which highlights the works of emerging Chicago artists. “With a lot of the artists in the 12 x 12 program, it is, if not their first show in a gallery space, then their first show in a museum,” Molon explains. “They really lean on you as the curator.”

And then there are the more established artists, some of whom know exactly what they want from the museum and aren’t shy about demanding it. Molon is known for handling them, too, with tact and respect. “Because artists have so little power, they often have big demands,” says Tasset (who notes that he isn’t speaking of himself). “Artists are always trying to break the rules, and I think a good curator respects that. Dominic is a dream to work with.”

As much as his curatorial career has shaped Molon’s personality, at least one core aspect of his character remains: his love of alternative culture in all its forms. In recent years, that love has taken the shape of a rabid devotion to professional soccer, which, though extremely popular abroad, garners little attention in the United States. Not only is it relaxing; it also provides him with a sort of lingua franca in the international art world. But one suspects that in the end, it is soccer’s status as an American subculture of sorts that appeals to this curator of the alternative. “It’s like liking the band that no one else is listening to,” he says.