Latin School of Chicago

extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself." e art objects he has created and exhibited at nearly every major contemporary art institution around the globe have been some of the most audacious and provocative of the modern era. And after nearly six decades, Claes remains a force to be reckoned with. I caught his most recent show this past autumn of all new work – his rst in 12 years – at Pace Gallery in New York's Chelsea. He has received several dozen honorary degrees and was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2000. Claes was honored in the most recent "e Greats" issue of e New York Times style magazine T, with former Times art critic Randy Kennedy noting that the enormous impact Claes' work has had on 20th and 21st century artists makes it easy "to forget just how radical his work was when it rst appeared, expanding the denition of sculpture by making it somehow more accessibly human and more cerebral at the same time, a feat that has kept it resonant in a rapidly changing art world." Meanwhile, younger brother Dick was part of the Class of '50 and started at the school in kindergarten in 1938. He has fond memories of Latin, including dances with the students from e Latin School for Girls, before Latin was co-ed. Like his brother, Dick's rst passion was writing. He said that the foundation in English and writing that he received at Latin, and later as an undergraduate at Harvard, made publishing a natural career choice, leading to his becoming a top editor and executive at a major house. His move into the art world was "a twist of fate," he said. Speaking to People magazine in 1984, Dick recalled that at a retrospective of Claes' work at MoMA, the museum's head of publications who was about to retire asked Dick if he might want the job, which involved oversight of the art catalogues and books MoMA publishes every year: "Claes was getting quite famous by that time, and I realized I better do something too," Dick joked. at was in 1969. MoMA was in mayhem, plagued by nancial troubles and inghting. Two museum directors came and went within three years, before Dick was asked to take the helm in 1972. During Dick's more than two decades running MoMA, he helped organize dozens of blockbuster exhibitions; increased the budget seven-fold from $7 million and the endowment nine-fold from $20 million; and oversaw a three-year, $55-million renovation of the museum, doubling the previous exhibition space. He went on to chair the auction house Sotheby's. His honors include the Order of the North Star of Sweden and the Order of Arts and Letters of France, and he is a Chevalier of the Legion d'honneur of France. Given that their careers have been largely based in New York, neither brother has kept close ties to Latin. However, during the 2013-14 school year, third graders in the Class of '23 studied Claes's work and made soft sculptures inspired by his. Each child wrote him a letter and sent photos of their artwork. rough his studio assistants, Claes expressed that he was extraordinarily touched by the gesture, and donated a 1996 lithograph to the school. e work now hangs in a place of honor in a high-trac hallway in the lower school. TARA AISHA WILLIS '05, associate curator of performance for the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago Part of what convinced Tara to accept her job curating performance at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago was the realization the museum was taking a risk in choosing her. She was not a career curator, she'd never worked in a visual arts organization, and she had no plans to give up being a working performer and choreographer, nor a doctoral student. She joined MCA last July. "At the museum, I curate music, theater and dance programs," said Tara, who was part of Latin's Class of '05 for high school. "And I am really looking back quite regularly to all the time at Latin I spent doing and thinking about all three at once." Tara came to Latin from Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood and recalled the transition to Latin as "a big switch." She said, "I didn't realize how much of a culture shock the wealth at Latin would be, but I found my niche among the theater and dance and chorus geeks and the 'video yearbook' kids too." Tara had been a student at e Ancona School, where her mother taught. (Her father, a musician, taught in public schools.) Performance was Tara's interest from a young age. She took classes at the Hyde Park School of Ballet, as it was then called; sang with the Chicago Children's Choir; and spent a summer studying dance at Alvin Ailey in New York. Latin's dance program, run by Anna Czajun at the time, was a big draw: "She made us all feel like we were training to be professionals. It was intense, but she passed on a lot of skills around discipline and being able to problem-solve in a rehearsal around movement," Tara recalled. "We learned choreographic skills. I developed a real, specic relationship to music and a sense of musicality that has stuck with me." In her new role at the museum, Tara draws not just on that foundation in dance but also on her experience in the theater department, where she studied with former drama teacher Ann Hartdegen and current upper school drama teacher Nick Baer (also a '96 Latin alum), whose background was improvisation. "I did a project week that was all just seeing theater in Chicago," Tara recalled. "eater was really important to me, but I sort of intuited that I wasn't going to do it." As an undergraduate at Barnard College, she majored in English and dance with a concentration in creative writing, something she'd enjoyed as an elective at Latin too. In a recent prole of Tara in the Chicago Sun-Times, MCA's chief curator Michael Darling called her a "true scholar of performance." She said she is getting used to having the museum's many resources [Dance teacher Anna Czajun] made us feel like we were training to be professionals ... She passed on a lot of skills around discipline and being able to problem-solve... I developed a real, specific relationship to music and musicality that has stuck with me." – Tara Aisha Willis '05 L M » W 29

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