Fall is always a busy season in Chicago’s art world, with new exhibitions across galleries and museums opening every week. Right after Labor Day many new exhibition will be open, often through October and beyond. Listed here are a few highlights we are looking forward to seeing through the city, the suburbs and an hour or two away in Michigan and Wisconsin.

Our fall magazine covers events taking place from September-December, and it also includes interviews with many area artists, collectors and other members of the art community.

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– CGN

Yoko Ono with Glass Hammer, 1967, from Half-A-Wind Show, Lisson Gallery, London, UK, 1967. Artwork © Yoko Ono. Photo © Clay Perry.

Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind –

Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago will become the exclusive U.S. venue for Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind, a comprehensive solo exhibition dedicated to the artist, musician, and activist Yoko Ono.

Traveling from Tate Modern in London, where it achieved record-breaking attendance, and developed in close collaboration with Ono’s studio, this groundbreaking retrospective spans 70 years of Ono’s innovative career. The exhibition features over 200 works, including participatory instruction pieces and scores, installations, a curated music room, films, music, photography, and archival materials.

The exhibition highlights significant works from throughout Ono’s decades-long career, including the landmark performance work Cut Piece (1964); her collaborations with prominent musicians such as John Cage, Ornette Coleman, and her late husband, John Lennon; artwork activations, films, public artworks and more. 

Oct 18, 2025–Feb 22, 2026

220 E. Chicago (60611) • mcachicago.org

Bob Faust,* heavy wait* (detail), 2025, wallwork on paper, dimensions variable, courtesy of the artist.

Shakkei: Work by Mayumi Lake and Bob Faust– 

Elmhurst Art Museum

Shakkei: Work by Mayumi Lake and Bob Faust is the first major museum exhibition for Chicago-based artists Mayumi Lake and Bob Faust, who are mutually inspired by the Japanese principle of Shakkei (“borrowed scenery”), a design philosophy that incorporates organic features and architectural designs. The artists’ kaleidoscopic works use color and pattern to create immersive optical experiences, interpreting the Eastern concept broadly as a metaphor for empathy, adaptability, and the ability to hold multiple viewpoints simultaneously. The exhibition will feature recent large-scale artworks by Lake and Faust in separate galleries, as well as a collaborative new work combining their design languages.

For this exhibition, each artist will bring their own perspective to the concept of Shakkei, reflecting their unique experiences and history. While Lake’s imagery is based on the symbolic floral motifs found in antique Japanese girls’ kimonos, Faust often incorporates the surroundings of the project or exhibition venue into his “wallworks,” creating site-specific perspectives manipulated from digital photographs.

Sept 6–Jan 5, 2026

150 Cottage Hill Ave., Elmhurst (60126) 

elmhurstartmuseum.org

CAB 6–

Chicago Architecture Biennial

Over the past decade, the Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB) has sustained an international forum on architecture and urbanism centered in Chicago and has continued to produce the largest exhibition of contemporary architecture in North America every two years. This year marks CAB’s tenth anniversary with CAB 6 and it will be led by Artistic Director Florencia Rodriguez.

Titled SHIFT: Architecture in Times of Radical Change, CAB 6 will present an expansive and multi-faceted exploration of the field of architecture and the built environment globally, specifically as they respond to and are remade by a rapidly changing world.

September 12, 2025–February 28, 2026 • Chicago Cultural Center and city-wide locations

chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org

Temitayo Ogunbiyi, You will feel out of many one people, 2019. Varnished Japanese ink and acrylic on found fabric, 54 x 36”

Temitayo Ogunbiyi: You will have revelations along felled branches and longer roots/routes – 

The Arts Club of Chicago

Lagos-based artist Temitayo Ogunbiyi draws attention to the medicinal capacities and visual complexities of local flora, showing drawings, paintings, and sculpture that respond to Chicago’s social and natural environments. The exhibition considers exchanges of friendship and translations of language by referencing places the artist has visited. Various community programming is planned, including bespoke ice cream! 

Sept 17–Dec 19, 2025 • 201 E. Ontario (60611) • artsclubchicago.org

Helen Frankenthaler, Altitudes, 1978. Lithograph on paper, 22 × 31 in. Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, gift of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation. 22 1/4 x 30 5/8 inches (56.5 x 77.8 cm) © 2024 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE), West Islip, New York Photograph by Thomas Barratt, courtesy Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, New York

Pouring, Spilling, Bleeding: Helen Frankenthaler 

and Artists’ Experiments on Paper – 

The Block Museum of Art

Helen Frankenthaler (American, 1928–2011) began printmaking in 1961, working across lithography, woodcut, and etching for the next 50 years. Frankenthaler is known for her abstract paintings and especially her signature “soak-stain” technique—allowing paint to sit, spread, and pool on untreated canvas. She brought this same sensibility, what she described as a “pouring, flooding, spilling, bleeding one,” to works on paper.  

While printmaking is often characterized by precision and control, Frankenthaler’s prints allow for chance encounters between pigment and surface—unintentional effects that emphasize the agency and alchemy of materials. The exhibition will focus on her print practice and call attention to the unpredictability, chance, and accident in Frankenthaler’s work.

The exhibition will include works by other artists in The Block’s collection who similarly have embraced chance, accident, or aesthetic surprise in their artworks–Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan, and Robert Motherwell—and many others.

In 2023, The Block Museum was one of ten university museums to receive artwork as part of the Frankenthaler Print Initiative. The exhibition will feature this extraordinary gift and bring it into conversation with prints in the collection.

Sept 17–Dec 14 • Northwestern University, Evanston, IL

blockmuseum.northwestern.edu