Chicago is one of the best places in the world to spend the summer. Our city overflows with bodies in motion-and the MCA is no exception. If you've visited the museum in past summers, you've witnessed this fantastic profusion: suddenly, everywhere you look, people are seeking out new experiences and opportunities to engage, interact, and contribute. In these lively summer months, the MCA becomes a center of communal action: on our plaza, we host a weekly Farmers' Market accompanied by art-making Creation Stations for all ages. Our Tuesdays on the Terrace jazz series brings together the best music and art in Chicago, and our galleries are alive with tours and talks. Contemporary art enhances our sense of physical and cognitive activity. It reflects movement, contemplation, and progress.

One of our main aims as a vibrant part of the community is to highlight the immediacy of contemporary art. We invite you to experience art of the here and now, and use it as a means of moving forward-of gaining a new understanding or integrating a new experience into your perspective of the world. But we also start conversations about the heritage of con- temporary art, how the ideas and approaches of the past are always at work within the present. We endeavor to articulate that heritage and reinforce current creativity as critical to its evolution.

This summer, we present the work of an artist famous for movement: Alexander Calder. Calder's influence on artists working today is ongoing and profound. Alexander Calder and Contemporary Art: Form, Balance, Joy, on view from June 26 through October 17, explores the artist's ideas and legacy through his iconic mobiles and stabiles, presented alongside recent works by artists who advance his explorations in their own work toward new discoveries and forms of representation.

Summers at the MCA are also a time of experimentation and exchange. For the past three summers, the museum has dedicated the month of July to the exploration of live performance-an ever-burgeoning practice that has received increasing attention over the past few years. In this summer's Here/Not There series, the viewers become the focus and are invited to invest in the works by collaborating with the artists.

Contemporary art does not exist outside of history. On the contrary, contemporary art is one of the best testaments we have to the coexistence of permanence and transformation. I hope you'll visit the MCA again and again this summer as you enjoy one of the most stimulating cities in the world, and participate in art moving forward.

Madeleine Grynsztejn
Pritzker Director