A few highlights from CGN's fall calendar include several not-to-be-missed gallery openings, performances, talks and more filling this season's calendar. There is plenty to enjoy, see and support this fall. We have prepared a list of a few happening this September in galleries throughout the city and into the suburbs and near midwest.

The schedule of gallery and museum openings changes frequently, so please check CGN's online calendar for weekly updates and consider subscribing to CGN in print here and follow @ChiGalleryNews on Instagram.

– CGN

Witness to Bedlam with Olivia Petrides and Lynn Basa

Oliva Gallery

Sept. 4–Oct. 3

Bringing Petrides’s fractured works on paper into proximity with Basa’s ceramic forms, the exhibition examines disorder through its physical traces. 

Through ruptured structures, obscured language, unstable surfaces, cavities, and accretions, Witness to Bedlam considers what remains after coherence has broken down. Rather than treating disorder as spectacle, Petrides and Basa work across paper and clay with rupture, compression, and residue, creating forms that are unsettled but deliberate, marked by seams, collisions, fissures, and the suggestion of an unnamed aftermath.

Bruno Surdo: Honoring Resilience

Gallery VICTOR

Sept. 11–Oct. 25

Gallery VICTOR presents Honoring Resilience, commemorating the 25th anniversary of 9/11 through Chicago artist Bruno Surdo’s monumental Tragedy, Memory and Honor. The exhibition pairs the five-panel painting with Ground Zero artifacts, preparatory drawings, photography, testimonials, historical materials, and video, creating a powerful meditation on loss, courage, remembrance, and resilience. 

The exhibition will premiere during the 10th Annual River North Design District Fall Gallery Walk on Friday, September 11, 2026, from 5 to 8 PM. This special evening will offer the public its first opportunity to experience Surdo’s monumental work at Gallery VICTOR on the 25th anniversary of 9/11.

Pope.L, Well (Redistribution Version), 2019, 9 drinking glasses, water, dimensions variable, installation

Pope.L: No Thing Skin Sets

Corbett vs. Dempsey

Sept. 15–Oct. 31

In the first gallery exhibition since Pope.L's untimely death in 2023, No Thing Skin Sets presents a precisely gathered selection of recent work, including the major installation I Machine (2014–2020), on which the artist worked during most of the time he was based in Chicago. In the McPhee, CvsD presents a tribute to Pope.L's little known post-punk band Jon Waine, with historical artifacts and the release of a double CD of previously unheard music, 1975–1983.

Clotilde Jiménez: Éramos Silencios

Mariane Ibrahim

Sept. 15–Oct. 31

Marking his fifth presentation with the gallery and his second solo exhibition in Chicago, Jiménez (b. 1990 in Hawaii; lives and works in Mexico City, Mexico) turns to a personal narrative rooted in Puerto Rico, tracing the histories, memories, and inherited silences that have shaped his understanding of family and identity.

Through painting, collage, drawing, and sculpture, the orange emerges as a recurring motif and metaphor. It evokes the sweetness and abundance of family histories, but also the omissions, secrets, and unresolved tensions that pass from one generation to the next. Like the fruit itself, lineage carries both nourishment and decay. Beneath its vibrant skin lies stories that shape a family's character and flavor, revealing how memory—and the spaces where memories falter—becomes embedded within the narratives we inherit.

Jaume Plensa: Beyond Silence

GRAY

Sept. 17–Dec. 19

Jaume Plensa: Beyond Silence, opening at GRAY Chicago September 17, marks the artist’s tenth solo exhibition with the gallery. Bringing together monumental carved-wood reliefs, vertical sculptures in cast iron and granite, and intimate bronze works, the exhibition explores scale and material through representations of the human figure. At its center are two 28-foot carved-wood reliefs, Beyond Silence (Julia) and Beyond Silence (Maria), which transform the figure into an architectural presence. Works from Plensa’s new Clouds series and smaller bronzes from the Twilight series offer contrasting encounters with material and scale.

Brendan Fernandes: The Noise Will Sound

Monique Meloche

Sept. 19–Oct. 31

Brendan Fernandes is an internationally recognized, multidisciplinary artist who examines issues of cultural displacement, migration, labor, and queer subjectivity through installation, video, sculpture, and dance. He is invested in confronting the complexities of transitional and transnational identities, with a particular interest in incorporating elements of cultural performance into contemporary art, arising from his unique cultural background as a Queer, Kenyan Indian Canadian. Fernandes’ projects address issues of race, queer culture, migration, protest, and other forms of collective movement. Always looking to create new spaces and new forms of agency, his projects take on hybrid forms: part Ballet, part queer dance party, part political protest... always rooted in collaboration and fostering solidarity.  

Inner Worlds: Visions from the Hirshhorn Collection

Sep 25, 2026 - Dec 19, 2026

Wrightwood 659

Inner Worlds: Visions from the Hirshhorn Collection features the work of three trailblazing women artists who rose to international acclaim for their distinct approaches to perception and embodiment: Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929), Niki de Saint Phalle (1930–2002), and Mary Bauermeister (1934–2023). Born in Japan, France, and Germany, respectively, within five years from 1929 to 1934, all three artists rejected cultural archetypes traditionally imposed on women and made their way to New York by the early 1960s. These artists came of age in a period defined by economic instability and the rise of fascism. They lived through the devastation of the Second World War in their respective countries, leading them to engage with the fragments of buildings, culture and spirit left behind. Amid the destruction they constructed something new.

The focused exhibition presents two of Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms—her first and one of her more recent—and the large sculpture Pumpkin (2016); three of Bauermeister’s intricate optical and stone-laden assemblages; and a large-scale mixed-media collage and works on paper by Saint Phalle. Together, these artworks illustrate how ways of artmaking can overlap and converge by exploring the possibilities of pattern and tapping into the latent expressiveness of repetition.

#

View CGN's full calendar here.