The Ren isn’t shy about artistic risk-taking

The 111-year-old Renaissance Society can’t claim to be the biggest or best-known organization committed to visual arts in Chicago. But this nonprofit, fiercely independent exhibition space on the University of Chicago campus is arguably the most daring and adventurous.

After taking over as director of the Renaissance Society in 1974, Susanne Ghez put its focus solidly on the art of the present and made it her mission to suss out once new, underrecognized talents such as Isa Genzken and Albert Oehlen. Between 1990 and 2000 alone, 22 artists had their first institutional solo shows in the United States at the Ren.

Today, Myriam Ben Salah, who took over the top post in 2020, continues that tradition of taking risks and championing artists she and her staff believe in. “Of course, risk looks different now than it did in 1975 or 1995,” she said. “The art world is different. Chicago is different. Artists are working differently. But that basic commitment to be early, to be curious and to give artists real authorship – that is something I feel very protective of.”

Among the many changes in the art world since the 1970s is the proliferation of museums and other spaces that promote contemporary art. But the Ren continues to hold a distinctive place in the Chicago scene and beyond.

“The Renaissance Society is one of the most important contemporary art institutions in the United States. It’s really a mighty force,” said Ann Goldstein, interim director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and former deputy director of the Art Institute of Chicago.

The Ren’s accomplishments are all the more impressive considering that it has just one gallery — a 40-by-80-foot former lecture hall — and operates with a staff of only nine full- and part-time staff members and a comparatively miniscule annual budget of $2 million with financial support coming mainly from individual and foundation donations and an annual benefit. (Though it functions independently of the university, it does receive space and utilities at no cost.)

“It has this completely disproportionate reputation relative to its actual physical size,” Ben Salah said.

The art space’s next presentation, which opens Sept. 12 and runs through Nov. 1, is the American debut of Karimah Ashadu’s “MUSCLE,” a moving-image installation centered on bodybuilders training in the slums of Lagos, Nigeria. In the work, co-commissioned by Ren, the British-born Nigerian artist situates bodybuilding within larger socio-political concerns.

Ben Salah, 41, grew up in the former French colony of Tunisia speaking Arabic and French and didn’t give any thought to curating, which she didn’t even realize could be a possible career. After high school in Tunis, she moved to France for college, studying theater and humanities. “Then I went to business school, which was a bit of an accident, which I have to say is useful in what I do today,” she said.

Contemporary art came a little “sideways” into her life in 2009 when she was 24 and started as an intern at the Palais de Tokyo, a prominent contemporary art center in Paris. Her seven-year stint there served as a kind of post-graduate education in contemporary art and curation, which she learned could be an “incredible bridge” between theory and something more tangible and social.

Like most curators in the field, she had heard of the Ren but had never given any thought to working there. When the position of director and chief curator came open, she was splitting her time between Paris and Los Angeles, where she was working on an exhibition at the Hammer Museum.

“I never imagined myself running an institution in Chicago,” she said. “First of all, the idea of committing to one institution after a few years of independent curating was a big shift, but the board called and asked me to apply, and it became quite a seductive prospect for me.”

She was attracted in part by what she called the Ren’s “artistic purity” — no collection, no giant building, no massive bureaucracy. Instead, it simply invites artists to exhibit, gives them a room, provides intellectual and material support and gets out of the way. “It’s incredibly rare,” she said. “I don’t many know institutions that still work that way.”

The director has maintained the Ren’s typical schedule of three exhibitions a year, but she has shaped her own vision for them and not tried to simply replicate the space’s previous successes. In addition, she has revamped its annual fundraiser, inviting artists to completely conceive of evenings like Piero Golia’s 2022 extravaganza with a marching band and servers on stilts. This year’s event — a silent party for 400 people overseen by star artist Maurizio Cattelan — drew considerable attention on social media and even an article in “Vanity Fair.”

“The fundraising mechanism itself becomes an artistic commission — and ideally an unforgettable experience,” she said.

Ben Salah believes her tenure has been defined in part by making the Ren more “porous” and diversifying the places that its artists come from. As a native of north Africa, she has seen how the art world can ignore certain parts of the world and pigeonhole artists from such places. In spring 2025, the space, for example, presented “If Uganda Was America,” a commissioned film by Wakaliga Uganda, a collective that often produces action movies for as little as $200. This was the group’s first showcase in the United States.

And in 2022, the Ren presented the final chapter of a film trilogy by Meriem Bennani, who had similar upbringing to that of Ben Salah, growing up in Morocco and later moving to Paris. The two became friends and regular collaborators in 2014 when the curator introduced Bennani’s work in a brief group show at the Palais de Tokyo. “There’s something about a place that has such a history and is rooted in a university context,” Bennani said of the Ren.

Paulina Pobocha, who became chair and curator of modern and contemporary art at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2024, has been acquainted with Ben Salah for more than five years and knew of her before that. “She was always a curator that I felt was tapped into an art world that extended the beyond geographic boundaries of North America and Europe,” she said, “and that is very much something she has continued to do in her role at the Renaissance Society.”

Exemplifying Ben Salah’s reach and standing in the art world, she served as curator for the French Pavilion at this year’s edition of the famed Venice Biennale, an international art fair that runs through Nov. 22. The French Ministry of Culture chose Franco-Moroccan artist Yto Barrada for the showcase, and the artist, who serves on the board of the Ren, in turn tapped Ben Salah.

This year’s Biennale generated an uproar over the inclusion of Russian and Israeli national pavilions, with the entire awards jury resigning before the opening. “A lot of things are controversial these days,” said Ben Salah, who is returning to the Biennale in October with a group of Ren board members. “The world is in shambles, and art exists within that world, so obviously it is affected by everything that goes on around it. The Biennale is no exception.”