Museum of Contemporary Art

Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Museum founded in 1967 by a group of art lovers in Chicago who thought that the city's major gallery, the Art Institute, gave insufficient representation to modern art. It opened that year in a turn-of-the century building in East Ontario Street that was originally a bakery and had later been the home of Playboy Enterprises. The building was modernized and the exterior was embellished with a large copper frieze by Zoltan Kemeny. In 1977 the museum expanded into an adjacent building, and in 1996 it moved to a large new building designed by the German architect Josef Paul Kleinhues in a park-like setting near Lake Michigan. The museum was established to cover ‘the untried, the unproved, the problematical, and the controversial’ in art, and from the first has mounted a broad-ranging exhibition programme covering diverse fields. It has also built up a large permanent collection.