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Moca museum chicago5/8/2023 ![]() I saw an ad in this little West Coast magazine called ArtWeek and I sent in a few of my grad school essays. “As a critic with a byline, I felt like a full contributor to culture. Weekly.ĭarling said he loved critiquing art, one of his extracurricular activities while a grad student at UCSB. Narrowing his research, Darling decided to “focus on the work that George Nelson did with domestic spaces, which coincided with a modernizing of the American home after World War II and was a pretty fascinating sociological period as well.”ĭuring the time of his graduate studies and shortly thereafter, Darling worked in many art-related roles: security guard at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art researcher at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles and even an art critic, first for small art magazines, then for Santa Barbara publications, and eventually gaining his own columns in the L.A. Edson Armi, who did not feel that furniture design was an inferior art and that it was worthy of scholarly study.” I felt I could fill a void in that area by writing on Nelson, and luckily I had two advisors, David Gebhard and C. At the time there was very little on George Nelson, who was a contemporary of Charles and Ray Eames. ![]() “I was going around to a lot of rummage sales and garage sales in Santa Barbara during those days, and discovering mid-century furniture (Montecito was a fabulous hunting ground for this material). It was also the era of multiculturalism, so I was exploring and getting to understand that at the time as well, which made UCSB a good fit.”ĭarling’s doctoral dissertation at UCSB was on the furniture of 20th century American designer George Nelson. “UCSB had one of the most diverse and large art history faculties around at that time, with professors teaching in many different disciplines, so that was attractive to me and even suggested by one of my art history advisors at Stanford. “My interests were quite wide and varied,” Darling recalled. ![]() He wanted to pursue a graduate degree, but didn’t know exactly what area of art history to study. So Darling and three other close friends who were water polo and swimming standouts headed to Palo Alto for their undergraduate studies.ĭarling earned his bachelor’s degree in Art History from Stanford in 1990. Stanford University, taking notice of his water polo talents, recruited him to play there. ![]() “Checking out the waves at Rincon on the way up was always a milestone on those road trips!” he recalled. With relatives living in Santa Barbara and Santa Ynez, Michael and his family spent a lot of time in the Santa Barbara area even before he came to grad school at UCSB. He and his parents and two younger brothers enjoyed water-based activities of all kinds, including boating, surfing, and water skiing and Michael competed on his high school’s water polo and swim teams. Michael was artistically inclined but “never very talented from a technical standpoint,” he said, and his “true epiphany” came in middle school when he came across Picasso and Kandinsky in a textbook. “Snagging the blockbuster” Bowie retrospective, the magazine said, is “a testament to this curator’s international reputation.” Darling shared the Power 100 list with luminaries such as Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and filmmaker/philanthropist George Lucas.įar from the Windy City and his future rock star persona, Darling grew up in the Los Angeles County coastal city of Long Beach. 93 on “The Power 100,” its list of Chicagoans who have the most clout. Chicago magazine followed up in 2015, placing Darling at No. ![]() The Chicago Tribune listed him among “Chicagoans of the Year 2014,” calling Darling a “rock star” for taking a gamble and securing the highly successful “David Bowie Is” exhibition for its only U.S. Alsdorf Chief Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Chicago, a role he has held since July 2010. (1997) alumnus of UC Santa Barbara has adhered to this philosophy, doing what he could to make himself stand out.Īnd stand out he has. Michael Darling believes that graduate students should take control of their destinies and “make things happen rather than waiting for an opportunity to fall into their lap.” Throughout his life, this Art and Architectural History M.A. ![]()
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