Each year, the Art Institute of Chicago hosts University PartnerFest, an open day of programming and networking opportunities for university students interested in museum careers. As part of PartnerFest programming, students are invited to give gallery talks about chosen works of art on view at the Art Institute. On February 15, 2025, Block Student Associates Roy Zhu and Tori Montinola represented Northwestern with their gallery talks.

Roy Zhu (Environmental Science and Creative Writing, 2026) took a moment to reflect on discussing Renée Green’s Mise-en-scène: Commemorative Toile with visitors at the Art Institute.

When I was invited to present a work at the Art Institute for PartnerFest, I knew I wanted to do something outside of my comfort zone. Our public art talks at the Block Museum usually involve clustering around a singular work, often a two-dimensional work on paper. The Art Institute’s more expansive capacity to collect large-scale installations, including film, sculptures, and mixed-media works, gave me the opportunity to talk about an artistic medium I had never given a talk on before. Walking through the museum with my BMSA colleague Ann on a cold December day just before winter break, I was drawn in by sensory works that played with bright colors and bold uses of space. Ann and I explored the contemporary wing extensively. My experience at the Block, a more intimate teaching institution, made me eager to present a work with clear pedagogical linkages to history or social issues. Then I found it: tucked away in the farthest corner of the contemporary wing was a piece that captivated me. At first drawn in by an almost unsettling baroque orchestral serenade, I walked into Renée Green’s Mise-en-scène: Commemorative Toile with a feeling that I had stepped foot into a museum-within-a-museum, a different space altogether nested within the larger body of the Art Institute.

 Renée Green, Mise-en-scène, 1992-93. Image courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago.

The “scene” of Mise-en-scène is the entire room, the whole of Gallery 295. The walls of the gallery, normally white, are draped top to bottom in scarlet toile, a French fabric traditionally adorned with pastoral vignettes of lounging nobles and idyllic peasants. Upon closer inspection, however, Green’s toile is marked by scenes of colonial violence, with Black figures posed amid situations ranging from enslavement to revolution. At the center of the installation is a triangle of three card file boxes connected by three metal buckets in which motorized toy boats circle ceaselessly. The card file boxes, scaled to the size of the human body, are meant to evoke the triangular geography of the trans-Atlantic slave trade: each card file box chronicles the names of French slave ships, languages spoken by enslaved Africans, and the years of the French slave trade, respectively. In the middle of this triangle formation is a large black box labeled “Treasure Chest” in French. Skirting the north wall is a nondescript table, on which is perched two manicured trees labeled “A” and “B.” The other items on the table evoke investigation and archival taxonomy (a pair of white gloves, a magnifying glass, and a binder of black-and-white archival ephemera labeled “clues”). Beneath the table is a box labeled “Ambiance,” the non-stop source of the music that initially drew me into the gallery. Walking through this space, what struck me was how well-integrated it was into the gallery, and how effectively it throws a wrench in my experience of the museum as one continuous space. Another fascinating part of this work is its use of anachronism and cliché: the crisp edges of each individual object and the standardized labels (“clues,” “Treasure Chest,” “A”) evoked for me the meticulous palette of Wes Anderson films and their clean structural ambiance. At the same time, the anachronistic elements are baked into almost everything in the room, from the scenes of violence hidden in plain sight upon the toile to the flat, spinning toy boats sailing stationary in waterless buckets. This surreal combination of cliché and subversive entangled me forcefully within the piece’s criticism of capitalist commodification, identity performance, and past-as-present social violence.

Mise-en-scène belongs to a tradition of conceptual art, loosely defined as artwork in which the thought processes or production methods of the work take precedence over the material assembly of the art piece itself (think Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 piece Fountain, made by upturning a readymade urinal). When conceptual art rose to prominence in the 60s and 70s, it was criticized for being too diffuse or didactic. At the same time, it was praised for its commitment to challenging binaries between artist/audience, performer/witness, object/meaning, etc. Renée Green’s approach to conceptual art is to lay bare the subtle components from which we draw out intuitive associations, such as how the baroque music playing throughout the installation might make the realization of the toile’s violent imagery all the more jarring. In my art talk, I knew I wanted to go beyond the object description and focus more on the artist’s own experience of creating this piece. Green is a Black American artist who has been called a “one-woman diaspora.” Her artworks have examined place, identity, and names in a critical way, often rooted in extensive transnational historical and artistic research. The inspiration behind this piece came when Green was invited to a fellowship in Nantes, France, and discovered a hidden history of the city’s past as France’s primary slave-trading port. Embedded within highly structured cultural institutions during her time in France (Green took photos of zoos, botanical gardens, museums, and historical homes), Green became acutely aware of the colonial narratives lurking beneath the mundane taxonomy of archives and sites of culture. She considers her installations a “critical stage” or set in which her audience is simultaneously performing and witnessing the artwork, blending our collective social narratives and individual associations.

Left: Roy Zhu speaks to visitors and fellow BMSAs. Image courtesy Vicente Robinson, Art Institute of Chicago.

On the morning of PartnerFest, I stationed myself right outside the gallery, hoping to draw visitors into an oft-overlooked corner of the contemporary wing. I expected I would have to be a bit proactive in confronting visitors and inviting them in, but I was pleasantly surprised at the slow but steady trickle of people who came to drop in to the gallery. Initially, I had planned to use a 3-minute video that the artist created as a primary introduction to the work, but I soon discovered that the volume of people and the unpredictable, intermittent nature of how long different folks would stay necessitated a change in tactics. I was able to test out a more innovative approach, asking strangers to hold a conversation together and giving individual people targeted but accessible questions (for one participant, I asked them to notice what was happening on the walls of the gallery, while I asked another to consider how they move through the space and experience the gallery as a stage). I thought this was a nice way to bring strangers together, combining a few minutes of independent observation with a brief group discussion at the end. The drop-in format took some time for me to adjust to, but I found it very rewarding to invite folks into different points in alternating periods of observation and discussion.

One visitor highlighted to me how difficult it is to see the labels within the card file boxes, connecting this with the lived experience of many people of color (the challenge of “digging through” layers of history to find masked evidence of violence). Another visitor was very curious about the dissonance between the instructions posted inside the gallery (“Do Not Touch”) and the tactile invitations posed by the objects on display (the gloves and magnifying glass, portions of the toile labelled “Lift”). I was overjoyed when one visitor told me that they would never have gotten so much out of walking through this gallery if it wasn’t for my discussion questions that helped them question specific elements of the piece. I was glad, too, when visitors were honest (and even blunt) with me: one visitor proclaimed, “I just don’t like it.” And of course, the experience wouldn’t have been complete without my cohort of BMSAs there to support me by visiting my talk. Overall, the experience of giving a talk in such a new way and in such a revolutionary spatial configuration made me feel more like a participant in the piece itself rather than merely a guide or interpreter. This experience helped me feel level with my visitors and gave me a sense of mutual exploration that helps in broaching difficult topics with strangers and challenging artistic assumptions.