24 Hours
Penny Pritzker describes one of the museum's popular round-the-clock solstice celebrations.
Well, my role was first in—I was one of the chairs of the opening of museum, so all those events that we did, and if you recall, we imagined—First, we opened the museum for 24 hours straight, and we had this massively positive response to that. People showed up and it was the first time, I think, the MCA was a real civic happening, where you had lines around the corner and people had to be a part of that event as much as a part of seeing the new building, and that was really exciting.
The concept was, it was Chicago's MCA. It was the world's MCA. It was not an MCA for the elite or for the few, and that was really what we were trying to express with the opening events. Of course, we had galas and we had fundraisers associated with the opening, but it was really—the first things we did were all about embracing our city and embracing the population within our city, and that was really fun and exciting.