FEATURE: Ionit Behar, on Opening Windows Into Other Worlds

On February 9, 2026, Ionit Behar was appointed as Marilyn and Larry Fields Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA). The feature article below - and recorded in this episode - charts her time prior to the appointment, in what is a fascinating personal history.

https://art.newcity.com/2026/04/07/opening-windows-into-other-worlds-an-interview-with-the-mcas-newest-curator-ionit-behar/

Transcript

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Ionit Behar, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago's newest curator on opening windows into other worlds. This was a piece first written for New City Inn Chicago and was published on april the seventh, twenty twenty-six. The article will be linked to in the notes on the episode. Museums have been central and deeply personal to curator Iinat Behar since she was six years old. I just fell in love with them, she says, in a tone which suggests that museums may just about be the greatest love of her life, bottomless entities of fascination, challenge and reward. It was in their galleries where she found quiet, but also a place full of things. It was an opportunity to be alone and accompanied, to inhabit landscapes across different times and places and makers. How Behar talks of museums and the opportunity of the furtherance and engagement they provide not only stands in stark contrast to the exclusive feel of many institutions, but also conveys the very real sense that a museum is useless when conceived as a repository of information, and only has tangible agency when in service to the highly intangible business of sparking intellectual detonations in the mind. Hearing Behar speak in fact as even a temptation to imagine her brain as physically structured in the shape of a museum, the corridors, the wiring, the ante rooms, the formed memories, all continually rearranged in discourse with the conceptual laboratory possibilities of future gallery presentations. Born in Israel and raised in Uruguay, Behar's relationships with these institutions began thanks to her grandparents who were travelling academics, constantly moving between conferences and research trips, professional journeys in which she was always included, never sidelined. It was alongside these familial mentors that time in museums became at once quotidian and also special. She says, I quote, there were dinners with academics, filmmakers, and critics, and I was always there, my opinion was sought. It was important to them, unquote. The experience was plainly foundational, and it gave Behar the love for thinking and sharing which now serves as the conduit for her curatorial practice. It was a long, faraway beginning and one which has now led on February 9th, 2026, to her taking the post as Marilyn and Larry Fields curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, MCA. Fifteen years earlier, on arriving in the United States, it was a role she could barely imagine, but it didn't stop her aspiring. She says, and I quote, I saw the Doris Salcedo retrospective here in 2015 in which Salcedo presented found furniture converted into super heavy objects, physical and emotional, centered in Colombia and the violence and the war on drugs. And not only was it beautiful, it was also poetic. The furniture was filled with cement and inside there were growing plants. Salcedo's exhibition was yet another Rubicon experience for Behar, in which the gallery demonstrated cathedral possibilities. It was also a seminal moment in her recognizing the Museum of Contemporary Art's clear eyed determination to present work of unique scope and ambition. When Behar landed on American shores in 2011, it had initially been to New York City, where she learned English and applied to art schools to pursue a master's degree in art history, theory, and criticism. Among those to offer her a place was the School of Art Institute in Chicago, and she accepted. On arriving in the Midwest, Behar knew no one. Despite her inevitable outsider status, she describes her experience over time in the city as being akin to that of an embrace. It's a description which not only serves as a welcome reminder of the empathy which Chicago generates across its diverse neighborhoods, but it also underscores the fact that current federal attacks on its people and communities, as well as being a targeting of individual groups, is pointedly driven by the conceptual intent to fragment Chicago's vision of itself. In 2020, Behar was appointed curator at DePaul Art Museum, where she oversaw exhibitions often focused on Latino and Latin American art, regularly engaging with overlooked or sidelined histories, memory, dispossession, in its broader sense, and resistance. It is a position she would hold for five years until early 2026, when her departure from DePaul occurred within touching distance of the university's announcement at the end of february 2026 that its art museum would permanently close on june thirtieth. It was heartbreaking, she says, going on to explain how for a long time there had been budgetary discussions related to the existence of the museum, but ultimately it felt as though we were speaking different languages. News of the closure reverberated across Chicago's cultural community because plainly the existence of the museum was significant not simply as a venue, but also as a symbol. It's a fact made especially clear by one of its final exhibitions, Dengot Lincoln Park and Mi Corazon, Young Lords in Chicago, which explored in situ the young lords' social and political trajectory in the Lincoln Park neighborhood amidst the gentrification and urban renewal which displaced its vibrant Puerto Rican community of the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties. As an aside, I covered that show in this conversation with Jacqueline Lasour earlier on in this in this podcast, and the review of the show is also there. But back to Ionit Pehar, who says it was a contradiction to close after that show, and indeed, alongside the Young Lord's exhibition in a downstairs juxtaposition, Behar had herself curated Inigo Manglanovae's A Want for Nothing, which with its consideration of the usefulness of art in society has now taken on additional retrospective significance in the face of the museum's closure. Nonetheless, Behar's new role at the MCA has her focus on the road ahead, acknowledging that it is a dream position which she is embracing fully. The museum is moving in a slightly different direction now, she says, perhaps more balanced between local and international artists. For Behar this shift presents an opportunity to refocus the dialogue on Chicago's local riches. And she says, I quote, there's not enough of a celebration of local artists. We often feel we have to look elsewhere for talent. I'm excited to be able to stay in Chicago and keep doing the work, but also energized to be getting back to the rhythm of studio visits with artists, to getting to the core of their practice. She stops for a moment, considering how best to sum up her curatorial role. The words when they come a devoid of pomp or finery. It's a form of care, she says, quietly. Behar may now be pacing the hallowed halls of the world renowned Museum of Contemporary Art, but the sense remains at core that for her the MCA is one more place of innate possibility, one more place where she can do the heavy lifting required to enable those galleries to open windows into other worlds. And of course, where her six-year-old self can continue to freely wander, explore, and marvel. In no way do you feel has Behar betrayed the child she once was.