Art and Life

2010s Artists Chicago Community Staff

Omar Kholeif talks about the overlap of his life and art at the MCA.

Even before my first exhibition at the MCA, which was a show of Basim Magdy's, I actually started working on Michael Rakowitz's exhibition. And through getting to know his work better, I got to know the man behind the work better. And I kind of fell in love with him as a human being 'cause he was so generous and so warm-spirited that I decided to actually move to his neighborhood in Edgewater just to be near him and his family because it became my Chicago family. And, for me, it's this great synergistic thing about how art and life kind of intertwine. For me, the great privilege of my job is that I don't just clock into someone; I devote myself to people, and we form relationships and those relationships yield things that stay with you for the rest of your life. And so I hope that whatever I do here will affect people and maybe stay with them for the rest of their lives. But whatever happens, the MCA has already made a huge difference to my life in the two years that I've been here so far.

Related Stories