Circus or Caribbean Orange

In 1975, Matta-Clark made a proposal to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago for a then-unrealized work to be created in the city of Chicago. At that time, he had been harboring a strong interest in the living environs of the people in Chicago, a city renowned for its architecture. Later, when the museum was planning to renovate an adjacent townhouse that had been purchased as an annex to accommodate its growing collection, they commissioned Matta-Clark to work on the project. This work, Circus or Caribbean Orange, first shown in January 1978, was Matta-Clark’s first commission from an American museum. Nobody had foreseen that this would be the last building cutting to be realized by Matta-Clark, who died in the August of the same year.