CGN Art Preview: June 2025
CGN adds to its calendar of art events daily, and there is no shortage of new exhibitions, openings, art fairs, talks and family art events to explore. We have put together a preview of what is coming up the rest of this month as an art-filled summer ramps up.
Events happen throughout the city as well as in the suburbs and within a day's drive. Whether you have an hour after work or you are looking for a weekend road trip, take a look and do a little planning in order to take a step into the world of art. Everyone is welcome!
Highlights are organized by event type. Dates vary and are subject to change.
– Ginny
CGN Publisher
• Film Screening / Talks
The First Homosexuals Film Series
Beginning Wednesday, Jun 4, at 7:30 PM
Wrightwood 659 and FACETS Chicago
The First Homosexuals Film Series is an upcoming event starting next week, featuring a series of film screenings. The opening night is on Wednesday, June 4th, at FACETS 1517 W. Fullerton Ave., Chicago, IL, with a special reception, a curated selection of shorts, and an introduction from the program's curator, Laura Horak.
The event includes a program titled 'THROUGH THE KEYHOLE: SHORTS PROGRAM' with a reception at 7:30 pm and the shorts program at 8:00 pm. The series will showcase 14 short films, highlighting characters from the 20th century who contribute to queer history and discourse.
The event requires advance registration, with general admission priced at $15 and student admission at $5 with ID.
Artist Roundtable Discussion
Saturday, June 7, 3:00 PM
Join us for an afternoon of conversation, reflection, and insight as artists from the acclaimed exhibition Master Class: Inside the Last American Museum School with SAIC Painting Alumni gather to discuss the enduring power of the museum, the legacy of modernism, and painting as a medium of freedom and innovation. Moderated by curator and professor Lisa Wainwright, ideas about the canonical giants who stimulated these artists—Turner, Monet, Gauguin, O’Keefe, Pollock—as well as more far-ranging influences of Navajo textiles, Roman sculpture, and video art from the Art Institute of Chicago, will underscore the museum as a living archive and a potent source of knowledge, complexity, and creative friction.
• Auctions
Contemporary, Fine, Folk, and Outsider Art Auction
Thursday, June 5
Potter & Potter Auctions, Inc.
The first 70 lots are related to a collection of Charles and Ray Eames design material. A few drawings by Eames, blueprints and presentation fabric samples by Alexander Girard for Herman Miller, a Noguchi table shipped to Charles Eames and two matching Sofa Compacts with Girard fabric. Within the collection that came with this group are also 11 prints by Harry Bertoia, a major work on panel and another on paper by Hans Hofmann.
Design
Thursday, June 5
Wright / Chicago
Offered three times a year and dedicated to the most influential and important designs of the 20th century, Design celebrates visionary creators from across the globe. From iconic standards to one-of-a-kind works, this highly vetted sale brings together the quality craftsmanship and ambitious vision that defined the past 100 years and continues to shape the way we live today.
• Exhibitions
Stinkfish: Prickly portraits of a fragmented world
Jun 6–28
Opening: Friday, Jun 6, 5:00 PM – 8:00 PM
Vertical Gallery
Born in Mexico, but raised in Colombia, Stinkfish has been honing his skills on the streets of his hometown of Bogota since an early age. He first experimented with stencils in 2003 and has since perfected his own, unique style. His murals always have a stenciled portrait at their center. These portraits are taken from photos that the artist shoots during his travels around the world. They are faces that catch his eye, but not people he approaches and talks to. Another source is found photographs; either discovered lying on the streets or bought at flea markets. He fashions large format stencils based on these photographs, which on the street are then amended by impromptu, colorful halos.
Thus masked, the world has a language
Jun 6-Aug 23
Mariane Ibrahim
Thus masked, the world has a language is a group exhibition exploring the masquerade and mask traditions across the African diasporas in Mexico, the Caribbean, and the United States. Across the exhibition, masks are activated forms—a vessel through which truths can be expressed, history can be questioned, and memory can be reactivated. The exhibition will feature works by gallery artists Raphaël Barontini and Lorraine O’Grady, alongside invited artists Nick Cave, Ebony G. Patterson, Darryl Richardson, and Tavares Strachan.
Space Travelers: The Dreamworlds of Julia Thecla
Opening: Wednesday, Jun 11, 5:30 PM – 7:30 PM
Mongerson Gallery - exhibition and opening takes place at Expansive Superior, 405 W Superior
Once described as “the mystery girl of Chicago art,” Thecla was known for her dreamlike compositions featuring a world of fairies, dancers, animals, and sprites rendered in her signature jewel-toned blues. Space Travelers invites viewers into Thecla’s radiant inner cosmos — an imaginative, escapist world that feels both fantastical and uncannily intimate.
This one-night exhibition and reception will take place on June 11, 5:30-7:30 p.m., with remarks at 6:15pm, at Expansive Superior, 405 W. Superior St., on the 7th floor.
Yvette Mayorga: Pu$h Thru
Jun 14–Jul 26
Opening: Saturday, Jun 14, 4:00 PM – 7:00 PM
moniquemeloche
Yvette Mayorga is a multidisciplinary artist based in Chicago renowned for her confection-inspired artworks that intertwine themes of immigration, identity, and feminized labor through a maximalist lens. Utilizing materials like acrylic piping applied with bakery tools—a nod to her mother's labor as a baker—Mayorga crafts opulent, Rococo-influenced pieces dominated by shades of pink to critically examine the American Dream and the Latinx experience, often borrowing compositions from personal and family photos and art history.
Pu$h Thru is Mayorga’s first solo show in Chicago since 2018 and reflects on the last decade of the artist’s life in the city.
Gustave Caillebotte: Painting His World
Jun 29–Oct 5
The Art Institute of Chicago
Impressionist artist Gustave Caillebotte (1848–1894)—known and beloved by many Art Institute visitors for his monumental painting Paris Street; Rainy Day—takes center stage in this major exhibition exploring the very personal interests and relationships that shaped his world.
Caillebotte was unique among his Impressionist peers. At a time when modernity was synonymous with fashionable young women and new forms of entertainment, he focused instead on a more intimate and individualized sphere: his family and friends, his fellow sportsmen, the bourgeois pedestrians strolling in his neighborhood, and the workers who came to his house or whom he observed in the street.
