MCA Chicago Hires Carla Acevedo-Yates as Curator -ARTnews

Carla Acevedo-Yates, who currently serves as associate curator at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, will join the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago as curator on July 1.

For the Broad Art Museum, Acevedo-Yates has organized solo exhibitions of work by Johanna Unzueta, Claudia Peña Salinas, Duane Linklater, and others. Most recently, she curated the forthcoming exhibitions “The Edge of Things: Dissident Art Under Repressive Regimes,” which will focus on censorship of experimental artworks created between the 1960s and late 1980s, and “Fiction of a Production,” a show of work by the Argentinian conceptual art pioneer David Lamelas.

Prior to working at the Broad Art Museum, Acevedo-Yates was a curatorial resident at Espaço Fonte in Recife, Brazil, in 2014, and at R.I.C. in Santiago, Chile, in 2015. She has received a Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for an article on the Cuban painter Zilia Sánchez, and her writing has appeared in Art Agenda, Small Axe: A Caribbean Platform for Criticism, Artpulse, and other publications.

“The MCA consistently features the most relevant contemporary voices of our time, and I look forward to contributing to that legacy,” Acevedo-Yates said in a statement. “Chicago is a vibrant city with a rich and diverse cultural history, and I am excited to connect with the many communities that the museum serves.”

Michael Darling, chief curator at the MCA Chicago, said, “Carla is well-versed and well-traveled throughout Latin America which will allow us to continue to build bridges to the artistic communities there. It was also her passion for Caribbean art, and that of Puerto Rico in particular, that was exciting to me because of the large Puerto Rican community in Chicago. I feel that she will be a champion and advocate for artists from that region that we still know too little about.”