CHICAGO.- In celebration of its 40th anniversary this fall, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago, presents Collection Highlights, an exhibition that surveys the extensive and substantive collection that the MCA has built over the past four decades. On view through June 8, 2008, Collection Highlights showcases many of the most outstanding and significant works in the MCA's Collection that have been acquired through gifts and purchases over the years, many from the MCA's own exhibitions.

Collection Highlights celebrates the museum's evolution over its forty-year history revealing how numerous works were acquired from the MCA's own exhibitions which have formed a distinguished and often groundbreaking panorama of contemporary art. The exhibition underscores the MCA's identity as a consistently pioneering institution that presents the leading contemporary art with a freshness, vitality, and currency for the art and culture of the day. Curated by Elizabeth Smith, James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator and Deputy Director for Programs at the MCA, this major reinstallation of the collection demonstrates and reinforces the museum's reputation for artistic excellence, innovation, and originality from its founding in 1967 to today.

As the second in the trilogy of collection exhibitions marking the MCA's 40th anniversary, Collection Highlights has the most traditional presentation, organized roughly chronologically. Collection Highlights will be followed by another large-scale presentation of key works, Artists in Depth: Works from the MCA Collection, opening in the summer of 2008.

The exhibition includes many visitor favorites: Francis Bacon's Study for a Portrait (1949), Christo's Orange Store Front (1964-65), Rene Magritte's Les merveilles de la nature (The Wonders of Nature) (1953), Claes Oldenburg's Green Beans (1964), Robert Rauschenberg's Retroactive II (1963), and Andy Warhol's Jackie Frieze (1964), from the earliest decades of the museum's collection with its emphasis on late Surrealism and Pop Art. The galleries that survey the 1940s to the 70s also include major works by Lee Bontecou, Robert Irwin, Donald Judd, Bruce Nauman, Ed Paschke, Gerhard Richter, Robert Smithson, and H.C. Westermann. The MCA's rich holdings in works from the 1980s of artists Magdalena Abakanowicz, John Baldessari, Joseph Beuys, Chuck Close, Jenny Holzer, Alfredo Jaar, Jeff Koons, Liz Larner, Sigmar Polke, Richard Prince, David Salle, and Cindy Sherman, among others, represent a variety of media and some of the Collection's most important and iconic works.

The most recent period of the MCA's collection, dating from the 1990s to today, includes such notable works as Vito Acconci's Convertible Clam Shelter (1990), Matthew Barney's Cremaster 2: The Drone's Cell (1999), Chris Burden's The Other Vietnam Memorial (1991), Ellen Gallagher's Pomp-Bang (2003), David Hammons' Praying to Safety (1997), Jim Hodges' The end from where you are (1998), Judy Ledgerwood's Driving into Delirium (1995), and Tony Tasset's Cherry Tree (1999). In addition, it also presents works by a number of major artists who have been the subject of recent solo exhibitions, such as Lee Bontecou, Tom Friedman, Andreas Gursky, Sharon Lockhart, Kerry James Marshall, Catherine Opie, Dan Peterman, Paul Pfeiffer, Thomas Struth, and Jeff Wall, whose In front of a nightclub (2006) is one of the newest additions to the collection.

Collection Highlights is presented in two parts: the first ending in February 2008, and the second continuing through June 8, 2008. Companion exhibitions to the collection highlights theme also take place throughout the year including Record Times: 40 Years from the MCA Archives, Alexander Calder in Focus, and Tino Sehgal's Kiss.