When Staci Boris was a teen in Fox Point, she was very active in Jewish youth activities. She rose to become Wisconsin region president of B’nai B’rith Girls and a substitute teacher of bar/bat mitzvah celebrants at Congregation Shalom.
But her real “home away from home” was the Milwaukee Art Museum. There, she took classes and generally furthered her long-standing interest in art; and this was the field she decided to pursue as a career.
Since last October, Boris has combined both of these interests through her work as the senior curator at the Spertus Museum, part of the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies in Chicago.
And the focus of her work, she told The Chronicle in a recent telephone interview, is to develop a contemporary art program for the new building that Spertus is planning to build and is scheduled to open in 2007.
“I’m interested in modern Jewish identity and how people like me are Jewish and how our Jewishness influences our identity and experiences in a broader global culture,”
she said. “We don’t live in a vacuum; there’s a constant give-and-take between Jewish culture and the larger culture, and that’s what I’m interested in exploring.”
And this is something she has “started thinking about more” because she is married — to Michael Balustein, a product manager in the educational toy industry — and because they have a four-year-old daughter who has been attending pre-school at Chicago’s Temple Sholom.
“Judaism has become a larger part of my life since she’s been going to school there,” Boris said.
‘What’s happening now’
Boris — whose parents, Leanne and Fred Boris, still live in Fox Point — became interested in art as a child. Her art classes in school and the museum were her favorites, and she still remembers the time in third grade when one of her drawings was exhibited at a local bank.
But by high school, “I realized I didn’t have what it took” to become an artist. “I didn’t have a great desire to create a vision through artistic means. I was more interested in looking and analyzing and thinking about it and studying it versus making it myself,” she said.
She majored in art history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, then moved to London, England, and worked in an art gallery. “That made me realize I wanted to work in a museum, not an art gallery. I wanted to contemplate art, not sell it.”
She obtained a master’s degree in art history and museum studies at Boston University and had an internship at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, which deepened her love of that area of the field. “Contemporary art is about what is happening now,” she said.
After a few post-graduate months of living with her parents, Boris landed in 1992 what was supposed to have been a one-year research position at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.
However, it happened that the MCA was about to expand and erect a new building, which opened in 1996. So she stayed there for 12 years and rose to associate curator.
In the course of her stint at MCA, Boris met Rhoda Rosen, who is now director of the Spertus Museum. “I knew [Rosen] was interested in contemporary art and ideas” and that the Spertus Museum staff members “were developing new concepts as they started to think about moving.”
One day, Rosen mentioned to Boris that the museum was thinking about hiring new staff, and Boris jumped at the chance to work for Spertus. “I thought it would be an incredible opportunity for me to shape a new contemporary art program in Chicago in the new context,” said Boris.
Boris is now working hard on developing exhibition ideas and proposals, not just on contemporary Jewish art as such, but also on such related areas as architecture, design and fashion. “I already have way too many ideas” for her time, she said.
“I feel extraordinarily blessed to be able to work as a curator,” Boris said. “Every day the work is different. I’m constantly faced with new ideas and ways of thinking and ways of visual expression.”
Moreover, “I’m looking at things through the lens of Jewishness, and what that is, which is an open and complex question,” she continued. “That gives me enough to be involved with for quite some time to come.”
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