Chicago Tribune | May 18, 2021 at 5:00 AM To be fair to the Chicago art world, Nick Cave has never been the easiest artist to contain within a single show.He’s not quite fashion, or dance, or sculpture.He’s not quite an installation artist, though his work includes all of these mediums and more.His Old Irving Park studio is not really even a studio but a kind of next-generation Warhol-ish Factory.He’s never fit that idea of the artist toiling away inside a warehouse space.In fact, though he’s been a staple of contemporary art collections for decades, his last major solo show in Chicago was about 15 years ago, for the Chicago Cultural Center.

Which is why his first full-blown career retrospective, opening next spring at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, promises to be such a spectacle.Advertisement “Nick Cave: Forothermore” — curated by former MCA senior curator/superstar Naomi Beckwith (now deputy director/chief curator of the Guggenheim in New York) — will begin with an installation named “Spinner Forest” (thousands of spinners hanging from the museum’s two-story atrium), then include, deep breath , a large-scale multimedia performance inspired by the musical film “The Wiz,” a room-filling video installation of eyes and creatures, Cave’s found-object works, carved and bronzed sculptures, a vast “Beaded Cliff Wall” composed with millions of beads.And of course, there’s Cave’s signature, his remarkable “Soundsuits,” full-body collages that shimmer, rattle and jangle with each move, made of twigs, metal, doilies, sweaters, stuffed animals, flea market tchotchkes.“Forothermore” sounds, frankly, like a lot — the history of a singular, sprawling vision.Advertisement Again, we’re talking about an artist who once led a parade of inflatable toys through Boston, an artist who staged a disco in New York’s Park Avenue Armory, an artist who created a crystal cloudscape only fully accessible by ladder (at the top you discovered a field of lawn jockeys) — an artist who, last summer, began a public art project in Chicago (“Amends”) seeking no less than to keep the country’s racial reckoning at the front of mind, through public exhibitions of confession, accountability, solidarity and vulnerability.”Soundsuit” by Chicago artist Nick Cave.

The exhibition “Forothermore” will open at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in May 2022.(Provided by MCA) We’re talking about an artist whose career began with window design for Macy’s and dance with Alvin Ailey, and recently, stood at the center of a Trump-era controversy in New York State after he installed a 160-foot long, 25-foot tall sculpture that read “TRUTH BE TOLD.” (A long zoning skirmish ensued, but Cave prevailed in February.) How can any retrospective top all of that? “I don’t know if I can, but then I don’t see it as a retrospective,” he said Monday morning.“I see it as a survey — sort of looking at a body of work that has expanded across three decades, and at the pivotal shifts within the work.

It’s always been triggered by current affairs, and so in a way, (the show) is also looking at current events — police brutality, injustice — through broad strokes.

It’s a survey of a practice and really how my work has shifted mediums.It’s a big project, it’s not an exhibition.That’s how I see this.” He’s been planning the show with Beckwith for a couple of years.Their goal was not to fit everything he’s made or accomplished under an extra large tent, but rather, in a way, to mark moments in time, changes in perspective.

“I really think of myself as messenger, delivering deeds, moving on to the next assignment.By the end (of the show) it’s hopefully a look into the future, not a static history.It should provoke in ways.” Since coming to Chicago in the late 1980s and teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (he’s chair of the fashion design department), the latest Nick Cave wonder has been more likely experienced elsewhere — Austin, Sydney, Times Square, Harvard Business School.Yet Cave, a Missouri native, is firmly based in Chicago.

Facility, his 20,000-square-foot art lab on Milwaukee Avenue, opened in 2019, is commitment itself.

[Most read] Mayor Lori Lightfoot chooses only reporters of color for interviews ahead of 2-year-anniversary, sparking debate over media diversity and access » “I have no idea why it took so long to do a big Chicago show,” he said.“I’m really not sure.I’ve been working all over the world.

I can’t be home waiting for something to happen, so it happens when it happens, and now that the opportunity is here, I’m all in.” The MCA, however, is an interesting place for it to happen now.For a year, the institution has been beset by layoffs and leadership shake-ups and accusations of ingrained racial inequities; in March, a group of artists protested the MCA’s alleged failures by pulling their works out of a show intended to spotlight equity and inclusion.

(Cave’s work was among those included in the exhibit but he wasn’t one of the artists who withdrew.) Cave’s art has long been driven by injustice, lending a light touch to weighty questions.Those lawn jockeys were conceived out of the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson.(“I had been wondering if there was racism in heaven,” Cave said.) His first “Soundsuits,” created initially at SAIC, were made in the wake of the 1991 beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles.“Forothermore” will showcase a new series of “Soundsuits” that Cave made partly in response to recent examples of police killing Black men.Asked if the show would address the MCA’s problems, he said that part was still being planned: “I think I am going to do my social work and use the exhibition as a catalyst for outreach — I am going to use it as a sort of a public service act.

It’s not that they don’t have issues, but my role as an artist will be to help facilitate some of the concerns.” He said a “big shift” has happened in his work lately.Advertisement “I always put social and political issues in the forefront, and post-George Floyd, I have shifted again, to a narrative where Black excellence is first and foremost.I have never done that before.Right now, I’m on a whole other — I can’t even say the word — level .” “Nick Cave: Forothermore” will be May 14 to Oct.2, 2022, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E.Chicago Ave.; 312-280-2660 and mcachicago.org .