CGN Insights: Janine Mileaf, The Arts Club of Chicago
By ABBEY KOT
Janine Mileaf has served as the executive director and chief curator at The Arts Club of Chicago since 2012. This week, we sat down with her to discuss her educational background and time at The Arts Club.
Chicago Gallery News: As both director and curator at The Arts Club of Chicago, it’s almost hard to imagine the depth of your involvement in each exhibition. Are there any areas within your process that you look forward to, or that you find particularly challenging?
Janine Mileaf: I find it extremely gratifying to work directly with artists to help them realize a particular project. It is especially exciting when an exhibition takes form specifically around the opportunity to show work in the context of The Arts Club of Chicago. Our long history often provokes new ideas for artists or new ways in which to situate their work. I love when that happens.
CGN: As a student of art history, how do you feel your own research and understanding of the art world impacts what you are drawn to as a curator?
JM: I come to curation from the point of view of a historian, but I find that this does not necessarily draw me to historical works (although sometimes it does). More frequently, I’m compelled by artists who themselves are engaged in historical or research-based thought. I try not to go after trends, but rather to work with artists whose ideas and objects will endure beyond the moment and who are making things that make me think or feel something new.
CGN: In 2010, you published Please Touch: Dada and Surrealist Objects After the Readymade. What ultimately moved you to write about the Dada movement, a period which can be difficult to digest in many ways?
JM: That is exactly why I wanted to write about Dada! I chose to think about Marcel Duchamp’s readymades and their aftermath because at the time they were conceived, they were understood to be the farthest thing from a work of art–and yet, in the long-run, that very idea is hard to grasp because the object-as-art has become so commonplace. I wanted to look at that difficulty and the gesture of inserting something so problematic into the context of art and figure out what that tells us about the category “art” and its function.
CGN: During your time working at The Arts Club of Chicago, has there been an exhibition that stands out to you as a critical learning moment?
JM: Our most recent exhibition Haegue Yang: Flat Works has reminded me not to shy away from ambitious projects. Each time I start a conversation with an artist about what they want to make, it is a risk—something of a challenge—to see how the institution is equipped to meet their intentions and to find out what we can do to surpass any limitations. In this project we surveyed work that Yang has been making for 30 years, but that has never been considered as an entity; we fabricated an exquisite display to tell the history of Yang’s most recent series of paper cuttings known as Mesmerizing Mesh; and we published a book that will be distributed internationally by Skira and outlast the exhibition. In the end, The Arts Club provided a venue for the artist to showcase long-term thought processes that are at the core of her practice and to discover the unifying concept that has to do with abstraction.
CGN: What advice would you give to those wishing to work on the business side of the art world?
JM: I’m sure this sounds trite, but I would say to follow your passion, not the market. If you do that, you will develop a point of view and a distinct program that are authentic and lead to meaningful and genuine engagements.
Image: Headshot by Frank Ishman