West Town, Wicker Park, Ukrainian Village, Kinzie Corridor, Humboldt Park

West Town

Wisconsin

IL • MI • IN

West Loop, Fulton Market, East Garfield Park

West Loop and West Side

Evanston, The North Shore, Northern, Western and Southern Suburbs

Suburbs

Old Town, Lincoln Park, Lakeview, Roscoe Village, Bucktown, Wicker Park, Logan Square, Lincoln Square, Ravenswood, Uptown, Edgewater, Andersonville, Rogers Park

North Side

Michigan Avenue, Streeterville, The Gold Coast, The Loop, and South Loop

Michigan Avenue

Pilsen, Bridgeport, Chinatown, plus Hyde Park, Jackson Park/Dorchester, and Bronzeville

South Side

Superior and Franklin streets, West Chicago Ave, and down to Merchandise Mart and the River

River North

Drawn from the distinguished collection of Jeffrey and Carol Horvitz, Chanoyu (pronounced chan-o-you) presents a focused selection of contemporary and modern Japanese tea bowls and water jars that honor and reinvent the traditions of the tea ceremony. Through subtle variations in form, glaze, and texture, these works reveal the enduring influence of chanoyu while embracing the individuality of postwar ceramics studio practices.

Chanoyu: Modern Tea Ceramics from the Horvitz Collection

<a href="https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/dca/supp_info/to_be_remembered.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">DETAILS</a>Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago Rooms, 2nd Floor NorthCurated by: Mya LewisBetween the folds of this world, lingering pieces of one’s own gossamer, narrative threads lay waiting to be unearthed and held.To Be Remembered: Woven Matters of the Heart&nbsp;embraces the reflective ways in which five contemporary textile artists illuminate their rich interior worlds through their unique fiber practices. The artists: ebere agwuncha, Nnaemeka Ekwelum, Hale Ekinci, Josué Esaú, and Thương Hoài Trần each visually intertwine time, memory, and emotion to conjure deeply felt histories across spatial geographies, venerating the cultural traces that connect us to the motherlands.Embedded in their designs and motifs, the artworks’ layered meanings preserve cultural continuity through extensive research that awakens their ancestors’ legacies and gifts. The works create new pathways to becoming closer to one another, communicating how we become and become undone within the ever-changing cycles of life. Skillfully made by hand, the artists guide us in how we learn to weave our own personal mythologies.The magic in life is apparent, and we invite you to find it within. Friday, August 21, 20264-7 p.m.&nbsp;Opening ReceptionChicago Rooms, 2nd Floor North Saturday, September 19, 20262 p.m.&nbsp;Artist TalkChicago Rooms, 2nd Floor North Saturday, October 3, 202612:30-2 p.m.&nbsp;meditation on: sculptural portals, a visual lecture by ebere agwunchaClaudia Cassidy Theater, 2nd Floor NorthThrough exploring familial archives, local collections, and diasporic memories, this presentation will expand the site-specific&nbsp;sculptural portals&nbsp;created by the artist, ebere agwuncha, for the exhibition&nbsp;To Be Remembered: Woven Matters of the Heart.&nbsp;sculptural portals&nbsp;incorporate oral histories from agwuncha’s parents, who immigrated from Nigeria to Chicago in the 1980s, alongside traditional Igbo craft to expand the significance of art-making through an active archiving practice. This event offers a deeper dive into the research and personal history behind agwuncha’s installation, giving the audience an intimate look into an artist’s process. Saturday, October 17, 2026Noon - 2 p.m.&nbsp;Woven Vessel Workshop with ebere agwunchaChicago Rooms, 2nd Floor NorthThe&nbsp;Woven Vessel Workshop&nbsp;invites creatives of all skill levels to learn basket weaving techniques to craft a unique functional object. This workshop is facilitated by ebere agwuncha, a transdisciplinary artist from Chicago. Visitors will have the opportunity to make a woven basket and utilize beads as adornment for their work. Supplies are provided and are limited for the event. Saturday, December 5, 2026Noon - 2 p.m.&nbsp;Weaving Workshop with Thương Hoài TrầnChicago Rooms, 2nd Floor NorthJoin us for an accessible, hands-on weaving workshop that utilizes affordable materials such as cardboard and secondhand yarn. This workshop explores how to approach weaving without a specialized loom, making the process more accessible to beginners and those without access to traditional weaving equipment. Friday, December 11, 2026Noon - 2 p.m.&nbsp;Weaving Workshop with Thương Hoài TrầnLearning Lab, 1st Floor SouthJoin us for an accessible, hands-on weaving workshop that utilizes affordable materials such as cardboard and secondhand yarn. This workshop explores how to approach weaving without a specialized loom, making the process more accessible to beginners and those without access to traditional weaving equipment.&nbsp; Image: Kỷ Niệm Ngày Cưới: Burgundy and Gold, Thương Hoài Trần, 34" x 28", 2021. Photo credit: Thương Hoài Trần;

To Be Remembered: Woven Matters of the Heart

Colombian artist Beatriz González (1932–2026) is widely known as&nbsp;la maestra&nbsp;in her home country. Beyond the literal translation of “teacher,” the term is used as a mark of respect for someone who has achieved a remarkable impact in a particular field. In González’s case, it acknowledges her roles as an artist, historian, curator, and mentor, whose importance transcends national boundaries and continues to resonate on a global scale. Beatriz González: In Series and Full Color&nbsp;is the first retrospective dedicated to the drawings and prints of González, whose practice spanned more than six decades until her passing earlier this year. The exhibition explores her use of appropriation and repetition as both formal and conceptual strategies to reflect critically on the circulation of images, notions of taste, and her country’s recent history.&nbsp; The exhibition begins in 1965 with a pivotal moment that reoriented the artist’s approach to mass media imagery. González encountered a photograph in a newspaper of a couple who had died by suicide and was drawn to the image’s printing distortions, caused by the fact that it had itself been reproduced from another newspaper. Fascinated by these effects, González painted her own interpretation of the portrait. With this work,&nbsp;The Suicides of Sisga, González began transgressing the languages and subject matter deemed appropriate within the fine arts context in Colombia. From that moment on, her “deliberately clumsy” compositions both revealed a command of drawing and printmaking techniques and signaled a rebellion against convention. González went on to create a vast art-historical archive, reinterpreting canonical works of art, images from newspaper crime pages, commercial prints, and figures from popular culture. By the mid-1980s, the tone of her work shifted toward questioning presidents and military leaders, while also registering the often anonymous victims of political violence and climate disasters, as well as some of Colombia’s most tragic events. Her work challenges the fleeting cycle of images, opening a space for memory and collective grief. In Series and Full Color&nbsp;brings together more than 80 works from across González’s career, including drawings, prints, sketches, sketchbooks, objects, and a selection of archival materials. The survey also marks the first time some of these works will be presented to the public.The exhibition’s title is inspired by the Spanish expression “¡ahora en serie y a todo color!” (“now in series and full color!”)—originally used to promote the transition of a comic strip into an animated series with the advent of color television. The idiom evokes both the vibrancy of González’s palette and the continued urgency of her themes. Beatriz González: In Series and Full Color&nbsp;is curated by is curated by Mark Pascale, Janet and Craig Duchossois Curator, Prints and Drawings, and Felipe Villada Ruiz, senior research associate, Prints and Drawings. Image: <a href="https://www.artic.edu/artworks/273692/illustrated-news-la-actualidad-ilustrada" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: rgb(181, 9, 56);" target="_blank">Illustrated News (La actualidad ilustrada), 1973</a>Beatriz González

Beatriz González: In Series and Full Color

The triennial program, created by Hyde Park Art Center in the mid-1990s, facilitates a fun and accessible commissioning process that builds lasting relationships between artists and patrons, creates a new base of support for artists, and invests in the vitality of Chicago’s cultural community.&nbsp;Not Just Another Pretty Face&nbsp;cultivates collectors, who are essential to the ecosystem that artists need to thrive, by embracing and encouraging the concept of patronage in contemporary art. Artists need not only collectors but also a community of people who know, support, and value what they do. To date, the Art Center has raised nearly&nbsp;$2,000,000&nbsp;through this program—half of which goes directly to artists, with the other half supporting Art Center programs. Through&nbsp;Not Just Another Pretty Face,&nbsp;375+&nbsp;original works&nbsp;of art have been commissioned by&nbsp;275&nbsp;new and established collectors&nbsp;interested in investing in Chicago’s artists. This exhibition will showcase the nearly&nbsp;100 new artworks&nbsp;made in this year’s iteration of this popular program.

Not Just Another Pretty Face

<h2>Think Again</h2> December 3, 2026 - March 13, 2027 Think Again presents posters created by the Yugoslavian artist collective IRWIN for the 1989-90 Slovenian National Theatre season. In the year 1984 the IRWIN artists joined with other artists to form the Neue Slowenische Kunst (New Slovenian Art) political art collective, or NSK. Aware that the government was co-opting artwork and images to bolster their power, NSK intentionally used only recycled images to challenge the authoritarian establishment. This exhibit examines how the IRWIN Collective artists used their artwork and design to undermine the oppressive communist regime of former Yugoslavia. Think Again is centered around IRWIN Collective posters, held in the College of DuPage Permanent Art Collection, which will be contextualized with historical information and showcased alongside contemporary designs.&nbsp; The title “Think Again” is related to the term “doublethink” introduced by George Orwell in the novel 1984. Orwell presented “Doublethink” as the act of holding two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time, tricking oneself into accepting a false fact while forgetting you ever knew the truth. This concept parallels propaganda attempts by the Yugoslavia regime that the IRWIN Collective worked against.&nbsp;

Think Again

A representational painter inspired by the WPA and Regionalist artists of the 1930s, Dan Brinkmeier’s personal artwork often represents the spiritual connections that rural Midwestern people find within their landscape, and the small ceremonies and rituals performed by Illinois farmers in their everyday lives.The Secret World of Dan Brinkmeier&nbsp;is organized by Rockford Art Museum Chief Curator, Carrie Johnson. The exhibition is sponsored by Women’s Art Board and partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.

The Secret World of Dan Brinkmeier

This exhibition highlights key movements in Chicago’s artistic history, from academic naturalism to impressionism, while celebrating collector M. Christine Schwartz, whose generosity helps preserve our cultural heritage for future generations.

Celebrating Chicago Artists: Selections from the M. Christine Schwartz Gift

Sylvia Neil and Daniel Fischel GalleriesSlow Dance&nbsp;features a group of artists who use performance to recover forms of slowness that resist contemporary demands to constantly perform. The exhibition approaches performance in two registers: as an artistic medium rooted in the live presence of bodies and as an economic imperative characterized by the pervasive demand for productivity, speed and efficiency. At any given moment, we might feel this pressure differently—it may inspire and motivate us, spur optimism or provoke anxiety and depression, induce fatigue or provide fuel to keep going in spite of it all. Through gestures of suspension, inaction and stillness, the artists in the exhibition investigate the politics of the body’s labor and maintenance.Featuring works by Brendan Fernandes, Gordon Hall, Geumhyung Jeong, Carolyn Lazard, Melanie McLain and Cally Spooner, this multidisciplinary exhibition includes painting, sculpture, video and live performance. Focused on how bodies wear away and how they endure, these artists contend with the near constant obligation to perform in labor markets, the protracted economies of waiting and fatigue’s latent potential as a form of resistance. While exploring conditions of failure, breakdown or exhaustion, artists in the show model new modes of reciprocity, intimacy and connection that challenge the weathering effects of our contemporary imperative to perform.The exhibition will include in-gallery performance activations throughout the run of the show.Slow Dance&nbsp;is organized by Jadine Collingwood, Pamela Alper Associate Curator.

Slow Dance

Life is an Art: The Collection of Jan Petry&nbsp;highlights 30 artworks donated to IAM by the late, long-time board member Jan Petry. Curated by IAM Chief Curator&nbsp;Alison Amick, the exhibition showcases paintings, drawings, and sculptures by major figures in American self-taught art, including Emery Blagdon, James Castle, Ulysses Davis, Charles Dellschau, William Hawkins, and Martín Ramírez, as well as Günther Schützenhöfer, a resident artist at Gugging, a progressive art studio in Austria. Those artworks are complemented by objects that reflect Petry’s passion for folk art, design, furniture, and maritime themes, offering a glimpse into the vision of a dedicated collector.

Life is an Art: The Collection of Jan Petry

Rockford Art Museum’s permanent collection offers a profound meditation on the ways art captures, suspends, and transforms experience. Held in Place draws together still lifes, portraits, and landscapes from the Museum’s focus areas, including Black art from the American South, American Masters, Modern and Contemporary, Regional art, and Photography, revealing the nuanced interplay between form, subject, and context that defines our collection. These pieces exist in a space between presence and memory. A still life captures the fleeting beauty of everyday objects, a portrait reflects both the individuality of its subject and something more universal, and a landscape grounds us in a specific place while opening outward into reflection. In each case, the ordinary becomes something worth lingering with—the familiar made newly visible, the moment extended. In Kuller Gallery, a selection of abstract works from the collection offers a different kind of dialogue, focusing on color, form, and gesture as expressive forces in their own right. Across both spaces, the exhibition reflects the depth and range of the Rockford Art Museum’s holdings. By combining these varied works, Held in Place invites viewers to consider the collection not as a static archive but as an ongoing dialogue. The exhibition underscores Rockford Art Museum’s commitment to cultivating a space where art is both preserved and experienced, inviting you to explore, reflect, and engage with the lasting impact of creativity. Held in Place is organized by Rockford Art Museum Chief Curator, Carrie Johnson. The exhibition is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency. <a href="https://rockfordartmuseum.org/exhibitions/held-in-place/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Details</a>

Held in Place: Selections from the Permanent Collection

Perspective Gallery is pleased to announce LENS 2027, our 17th annual juried international exhibition of fine art photography. Photographers are invited to submit work for possible inclusion in the exhibition. All subject matter and photographic processes, except AI, are welcome.The exhibition will take place from March 4 to March 28, 2027.The juror for this event is Anne Leighton Massoni, Executive Director &amp; Curator of the Houston Center for Photography in Texas.Photographers can submit up to five photographic images in JPEG format created within the past five years.Early Bird Submission ends on Oct. 31 with a fee of $35, using the code EARLYBIRD. After the 31st, the fee is $40 for submitting up to five images.The Prospectus can be found on Perspective Gallery's Website.For questions, email lensexhibition@gmail.com.Perspective Gallery is located at 1310-1/2B Chicago Avenue, Evanston, IL 60201, and is open Thursday through Saturday from 12:00-6:00 pm, and Sunday from 12:00-5:00 PM. Sturchio: Wingspan, LENS 2026 Juror Award

LENS2027 International Juried Photography Exhibition

<a href="https://imss.org/the-artistry-of-plastic-surgery/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Register Here</a> The devastation of the two world wars played a pivotal role in shaping the field of modern plastic surgery. In the early twentieth century, surgeons became artisans—suturing torn flesh like tailors mending fabric, reinforcing facial structures like carpenters restoring damaged frames. These groundbreaking reconstructive techniques laid the foundation for a discipline that would evolve beyond necessity into the realm of aesthetics.Simultaneously, artists—painters, sculptors, and draftsmen documenting the wars—engaged in parallel work. They studied the human form, deconstructing and reimagining faces and bodies through drawings, sculpture, and canvas. Anatomical study, once central to classical realism, became a bridge between art and medicine, guiding surgeons in their quest to restore symmetry, balance, and expression. The artist’s eye informed the surgeon’s hand, just as surgical reconstructions inspired new artistic interpretations of the human body.By the latter half of the twentieth century, plastic surgery had moved beyond reconstruction to self-reinvention. Like artists shaping raw material into beauty, surgeons refined and reshaped faces and bodies to align with personal desires and cultural ideals. The line between restoration and enhancement blurred, and the human body itself became a canvas for transformation.With the dawn of the new millennium came once-unimaginable feats—most notably, full-face transplantation. Surgeons, like sculptors working in living clay, not only rebuilt faces but gave patients entirely new ones. These innovations merged medicine, aesthetics, and identity in unprecedented ways.Today, the relationship between plastic surgery and art continues to evolve. Surgeons and artists share a common pursuit: to shape, refine, and redefine the human form. Whether working with marble or muscle, canvas or cartilage, both seek to capture the essence of beauty, resilience, and identity in constant flux.The International Museum of Surgical Science is proud to present these coinciding exhibitions as&nbsp;"A Year of Plastic Surgery"—a yearlong exploration of this remarkable field. Through monthly programs, we celebrate the masters of both flesh and form, bridging the worlds of surgical innovation and figurative art. Header Image: A soldier of Company K, 110th Regt. Infantry (formerly 3rd and 10th Inf., Pennsylvania National Guard), just wounded, receiving first-aid treatment from a comrade. Varennes-en-Argonne, France, on September 26, 1918. U.S. Army / U.S. National Archives <h1 class="ql-align-center"> </h1>

The Artistry of Plastic Surgery

This exhibition takes a groundbreaking look at the little-known history of printing on fabric from the fifteenth century to the present. These stunning artworks, books, broadsides, and maps were initially prized as unique luxury editions of works normally printed on paper. Fabrics were substituted for paper at great cost, often using imported materials.&nbsp;Printing on Fabric&nbsp;also investigates the intentional choices of the printers and commissioners, some of whom were female, and shows how the origins of these lavish materials reflected the global world of the early modern textile economy.Though the sheen of foreign silks enhanced the beauty of these objects for specific recipients, the techniques used to make them soon served wider audiences and cheaper fabrics equally well. Indeed, while surviving early examples are kept in museum and library collections, they inspired more recent printed wearables such as memorial imagery on t-shirts. From the ethereally unfamiliar to the everyday, exhibition audiences will find these fabric printings dazzling, intriguing, and thought-provoking.The accompanying exhibition catalog will be available in Fall 2026.<a href="https://www.newberry.org/calendar/printing-on-fabric" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Details</a>

Printing on Fabric

﻿Oct 19–Apr 11, 2027Garden <a href="https://www.artsclubchicago.org/exhibit/caitlyn-au/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Details</a> <h2>About the Exhibition</h2> There are two horses in the house. One has blocky toffee hair and one has creamy hair. Upstairs is where heaven is, and a giant orange butterfly as long as a bathtub. The upstairs balcony looks over the horses, and a little blue pig next to a neon yellow towel, and a seal with every hair pointing in the same direction.At the end of the long hallway there is a small room with deep, spongy carpet. Watching TV and a plate with the picture of an old woman on it. Why would you turn someone into a plate.-Caitlyn Au Drawing from memories rich in the details of place, Caitlyn Au builds environments that constrict and direct the audience’s view. A massive framework of building materials conceals surprising objects nestled within. In one of her largest works to date, Au brings to the garden of The Arts Club of Chicago secret relics of her past, visible from various vantage points, including a mirror at the garden’s fence. As if experienced through a stereoscope, the disorienting yet inviting scene places the viewer in a nostalgic mindscape of the artist’s invention. <h2>About the Artist</h2> Caitlyn Min-ji Au&nbsp;is a sculptor based in Chicago. She earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the University of Chicago.&nbsp;Au has made solo exhibitions at the Broodthaers Society of America (New York) and Shanghai Seminary (Chicago). She will be included in the&nbsp;Lagos Biennial 2026 (Nigeria) and&nbsp;will open a solo show at Tureen Gallery (Dallas) in the spring.

Caitlyn Min-ji Au Horse Shrimp Car

The Evanston Art Center (EAC) is excited to welcome the public to our upcoming exhibition, Contemporary Reflections on Tiffany Glass: Light, Color &amp; Form. The exhibition will be on display from January 10 - April 15, 2027, and will be free and open to the public. The Evanston Art Center and Richard H. Driehaus Art Exhibition Lending Foundation (AELF) are celebrating a collaboration between our institutions with a special loan exhibition creating a dialogue between historic Tiffany stained glass windows and contemporary artists. Contemporary Reflections on Tiffany Glass: Light, Color &amp; Form will be on view at the EAC from January 10 to April 15, 2027.

Contemporary Reflections on Tiffany Glass: Light, Color & Form

The Driehaus Museum announces dates for Emma Stebbins: Carving Out History, a touring exhibition that examines the full scope of Stebbins’s history‑making career as one of the most significant American sculptors of the nineteenth century. From 1857 to 1870, Stebbins created innovative marble and bronze sculptures while living in Rome and studying within the circles of historic sculptors. Her work models inventive and incisive interpretations of literary and biblical subjects, as well as unprecedented allegories of American industry. With the Bethesda Fountain in 1863, Stebbins became the first woman to earn a commission for a public sculpture from the City of New York. Organized by the Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington, New York, earlier this year, Emma Stebbins: Carving Out History is curated by Karli Wurzelbacher, Chief Curator of the Heckscher Museum, and is the first museum exhibition devoted to the late artist’s work. Emma Stebbins: Carving Out History takes place at the Driehaus Museum, 50 E. Erie Street, from October 8, 2026 to April 18, 2027.&nbsp;&nbsp;The exhibition reunites Stebbins’s oeuvre of neoclassical works, including 13 marble sculptures from across the US and Europe, in addition to paintings and a wealth of archival materials contextualizing her practice, her network, and her popularity on both sides of the pond. Stebbins was married to renowned Shakespearean actress Charlotte Cushman and one section of the exhibition prominently displays Stebbins’s bust of Cushman along with photographs, rare works on paper, and first editions of Stebbins’s posthumous biography of her partner. As a professional sculptor in a female marriage in the nineteenth century, Stebbins reimagined what a woman’s life could be in the mid‑nineteenth century, embedding layers of meaning into her work that upend traditional understandings of gender, sexuality, and agency.“In her lifetime, Stebbins was widely celebrated, yet even by the time of her death she was beginning to slip from view, her contributions gradually left out of the history books. This exhibition seeks to correct that quiet erasure and restore her rightful place as a significant artist of her era. We are deeply grateful to Art Bridges for their partnership in bringing renewed attention to her work and ensuring her story is once again seen and valued,” says Driehaus Museum Executive DirectorLisa M. Key. “Stebbins’s life and art reflect enduring questions about recognition, memory, and identity. By revisiting her legacy, we hope to illuminate how easily even celebrated artists can be forgotten, and how vital it is to bring their voices back into focus to inspire future generations.”Generous support for Emma Stebbins: Carving Out History is provided by Art Bridges Foundation.Major Support is provided by the Driehaus Trust Company, LLC. and Clare Blessen Ayer and Laura Mandel.&nbsp;&nbsp;ABOUT THE DRIEHAUS MUSEUMThe Driehaus Museum engages and inspires the global community through exploration and ongoing conversations in art, architecture, and design of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its permanent collection and temporary exhibitions are presented in an immersive experience within the restored 1883 Nickerson Mansion, and the 1926 Murphy Auditorium. The Museum’s collection reflects and is inspired by the collecting interests, vision, and focus of its founder, the late Richard H. Driehaus. For more information, visit <a href="http://www.driehausmuseum.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: rgb(17, 85, 204);" target="_blank">driehausmuseum.org</a> and connect with the Museum on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/Driehaus-Museum/362867207176025" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: rgb(17, 85, 204);" target="_blank">Facebook</a>, TikTok, and <a href="https://www.instagram.com/driehausmuseum/" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: rgb(17, 85, 204);" target="_blank">Instagram</a>.

Emma Stebbins: Carving Out History

Dr. Charles Smith served as a U.S. Marine in Vietnam, an experience that left lasting wounds and shaped his artistic vision. In the 1980s, he began transforming his Aurora, Ill., home into the African-American Heritage Museum and Black Veterans Archive—a monumental environment of nearly 600 sculptures and 150 monuments honoring African-American history and civil rights. Using found materials, Smith created life-sized figures and symbolic structures referencing slavery, the Middle Passage, the Underground Railroad, African American cultural and political figures, and everyday life. Through the concept of&nbsp;anti-monumentalism, Smith critiques traditional monuments and holds space for histories often excluded from civic memory.Curated by IAM Assistant Curator Christina Stavros,&nbsp;Monumental: The Work of Dr. Charles Smith&nbsp;features pieces from the Museum’s collection alongside select loans, including several recently conserved works now on view for the first time in years.

Monumental: The Work of Dr. Charles Smith

Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers&nbsp;is a major survey that covers nearly thirty years of Rashid Johnson’s (b, 1977, Chicago, IL; lives in New York) practice. Presented in the Griffin Galleries, the exhibition examines Johnson’s work from his perspective as a student of art history; a consumer and translator of Black popular, literary, and intellectual culture; and a cultural participant in the age of globalization and its aftereffects. With works including photographs, videos, large-scale installations, immersive paintings and multimedia assemblages,&nbsp;A Poem for Deep Thinkers&nbsp;asks fundamental questions about the fragile human psyche in the face of ineffable historic forces. Johnson often says that “the subject of my work is freedom,” and throughout the exhibition visitors will encounter pieces inspired by radical artistic and political movements from the 1960s to the 1990s that modeled how individuals and communities can resist established orders to carve new paths through history.&nbsp; A Poem for Deep Thinkers&nbsp;features over seventy-five artworks that span the full breadth of Johnson’s career, including works from his seminal&nbsp;The New Negro Escapist Social&nbsp;and&nbsp;Athletic Club&nbsp;series, the&nbsp;Cosmic Slops&nbsp;and other black-soap shelf paintings, spray-painted text works and the&nbsp;Anxious Menand&nbsp;Broken Men&nbsp;series. Additionally, Johnson’s film and video projects will be placed intermittently throughout the galleries. Johnson’s latest film,&nbsp;Sanguine (2024)&nbsp;explores familial dynamics through the lens of the artist’s relationships with his father, brother, and son, and features a poem by the poet and activist Amiri Baraka. The subtitle of the exhibition also refers to Baraka and his poem of the same name from 1977. A Poem for Deep Thinkers&nbsp;is Johnson’s third solo exhibition at the MCA, following his first institutional exhibition in 2002 as part of the museum's 12 x 12 series and his mid-career survey,&nbsp;A Message to Our Folks, as part of the Ascendant Artist series in 2012. Accompanying the exhibition is a catalogue that feature essays from exhibition curators Naomi Beckwith and Andrea Karnes, along with contributions by Nana Adusei-Poku, Hendrik Folkerts, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Kevin Quashie, and Odili Donald Odita. Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers&nbsp;was organized by Naomi Beckwith, Deputy Director and Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Andrea Karnes, Chief Curator, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. The MCA presentation is curated by Jack Schneider, Assistant Curator.

Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers

The Elmhurst Art Museum is proud to present a solo exhibition of contemporary Chicago artist and educator&nbsp;Matthew Girson&nbsp;in the Elmhurst Art Museum’s Mies van der Roe-designed McCormick House. Titled&nbsp;Still Lives at 4:00 AM&nbsp;and curated by&nbsp;Liz Chilsen, Manager of Exhibitions and Collections, the exhibition features a series of still life paintings of empty vessels and floral prints, captured in restrained color and diminished light, as a way of reflecting on loss, absence, and lack. Using “4:00 AM colors” that dissolve into grey, visitors’ eyes struggle to discern detail and form, as brushstrokes and subtle shifts in color slowly reveal themselves upon longer looking. For Girson, the subjects he paints are not as important as the things Girson chooses not to include: absent are the flowers themselves, as well as their color--but their beauty is gleaned in the duration of time taken with them. Matthew Girson&nbsp;makes paintings that explore the depth and range of the discipline as a physical medium, historical subject, and poetic opportunity. Specific themes in his paintings over the past 30 years include the relationship between abstraction and representation and how they operate within modern democracies. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, and will be an Artist In Residence at the Lost and Found Lab in Connecticut in March 2027. His work is held in numerous public and private collections including the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center. He is a Professor in the Art School at DePaul University where he teaches painting, drawing, and seminars on contemporary art. The exhibition will be on view at the Elmhurst Art Museum, 150 South Cottage Hill Avenue in Elmhurst, from&nbsp;January 23 to April 25, 2027.

Still Lives: Matthrew Girson

The Elmhurst Art Museum is proud to present the first major museum exhibition of celebrated artist Pooja Pittie this winter. Titled Undercurrent and curated by Allison Peters Quinn, Executive Director and Chief Curator, the exhibition highlights a decade of the Mumbai-born, Chicago-based artist’s practice. Featuring over 40 paintings, drawings, and fiber works, the survey explores Pittie’s creative evolution and determination to articulate the body-mind experience through material experimentation, searching for balance while living with a progressive muscular disability. Praised for her large-scale, seductive abstract paintings since 2015, Pittie has had to shift her mark-making gestures in recent years to accommodate her body’s altered state. The result is a masterful exploration of hand-crocheted objects informed by painting, inviting visitors to enter a tactile, meditative space to reflect on the relationship between the body and its material surroundings. The Museum is proud to present a solo exhibition of contemporary Chicago artist and educator Matthew Girson in the Elmhurst Art Museum’s Mies van der Roe-designed McCormick House. Titled Still Lives at 4:00 AM and curated by Liz Chilsen, Manager of Exhibitions and Collections, the exhibition features a series of still life paintings of empty vessels and floral prints, captured in restrained color and diminished light, as a way of reflecting on loss, absence, and lack. Using “4:00 AM colors” that dissolve into grey, visitors’ eyes struggle to discern detail and form, as brushstrokes and subtle shifts in color slowly reveal themselves upon longer looking. For Girson, the subjects he paints are not as important as the things Girson chooses not to include: absent are the flowers themselves, as well as their color--but their beauty is gleaned in the duration of time taken with them.Peters Quinn says, “We are thrilled to present two concurrent solo exhibitions featuring the extraordinary work of Chicago-based painters Matthew Girson and Pooja Pittie. Through focused engagement with color, dynamic patterning, and nuanced texture, both artists invite viewers to slow down and enter into a quiet dialogue with the traditional medium. Their contributions to contemporary painting represent the high standard of artistic practice coming out of the Midwest, and we are honored to bring their significant work to the Museum&nbsp; to be seen and celebrated.”The exhibitions will be on view at the Elmhurst Art Museum, 150 South Cottage Hill Avenue in Elmhurst, from January 23 to April 25, 2027.ABOUT POOJA PITTIEPooja Pittie is a visual artist based in Chicago, whose work explores the complex interplay between body and mind, movement and stillness. Raised in Mumbai, India, Pittie trained as an accountant and earned an MBA in Finance from the University of Chicago before transitioning to a full-time art practice in 2016. Living with a progressive form of muscular dystrophy, Pittie’s work draws on the dynamics between a slowing body and an active, curious mind. Through painting and fiber art, she weaves together personal memories, cultural heritage, motherhood, and her experiences of disability, creating intricate compositions that speak to resilience and identity. Pittie has completed the Center Program at Hyde Park Art Center, the HATCH residency at Chicago Artists' Coalition, and the 3Arts Bodies of Work Fellowship at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She was the recipient of the 2022 3Arts Next Level/Spare Room Award. Her work is part of the permanent collections at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; University of Chicago; University of Illinois at Chicago; University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; and The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (Delhi, India). She is represented by McCormick Gallery in Chicago.ABOUT MATTHEW GIRSONMatthew Girson makes paintings that explore the depth and range of the discipline as a physical medium, historical subject, and poetic opportunity. Specific themes in his paintings over the past 30 years include the relationship between abstraction and representation and how they operate within modern democracies. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, and will be an Artist In Residence at the Lost and Found Lab in Connecticut in March 2027. His work is held in numerous public and private collections including the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center. He is a Professor in the Art School at DePaul University where he teaches painting, drawing, and seminars on contemporary art. ABOUT THE ELMHURST ART MUSEUMThe Elmhurst Art Museum is located at 150 South Cottage Hill Avenue in Elmhurst (IL), 25 minutes from downtown Chicago by car or public transportation (Metra). On the museum’s campus is the McCormick House, a single-family home designed in 1952 by Mies van der Rohe, one of the great architects of the 20th Century. The McCormick House is one of only three residences designed and built by Mies in the United States – and one of only two open to the public.The Museum is open Wednesday and Thursday from 12:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m., Friday through Sunday, 11:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. Regular admission prices are $18 for adults (ages 18+), $15 for seniors, $10 for students, and $5 for children. For more information, please call 630.834.0202 or visit<a href="https://www.elmhurstartmuseum.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: rgb(17, 85, 204);" target="_blank">elmhurstartmuseum.org</a>.

Pooja Pittie and Matthew Girson 

The&nbsp;Elmhurst Art Museum&nbsp;is proud to present the first major museum exhibition of celebrated artist&nbsp;Pooja Pittie&nbsp;this winter. Titled&nbsp;Undercurrent&nbsp;and curated by&nbsp;Allison Peters Quinn, Executive Director and Chief Curator, the exhibition highlights a decade of the Mumbai-born, Chicago-based artist’s practice. Featuring over 40 paintings, drawings, and fiber works, the survey explores Pittie’s creative evolution and determination to articulate the body-mind experience through material experimentation,&nbsp;searching for balance while living with a progressive muscular disability. Praised for her large-scale, seductive abstract paintings since 2015, Pittie has had to shift her mark-making gestures in recent years to accommodate her body’s altered state. The result is a masterful exploration of hand-crocheted objects informed by painting, inviting visitors to enter a tactile, meditative space to reflect on the relationship between the body and its material surroundings. Pooja Pittie is a visual artist based in Chicago, whose work explores the complex interplay between body and mind, movement and stillness. Raised in Mumbai, India, Pittie trained as an accountant and earned an MBA in Finance from the University of Chicago before transitioning to a full-time art practice in 2016. Living with a progressive form of muscular dystrophy, Pittie’s work draws on the dynamics between a slowing body and an active, curious mind. Through painting and fiber art, she weaves together personal memories, cultural heritage, motherhood, and her experiences of disability, creating intricate compositions that speak to resilience and identity. Pittie has completed the Center Program at Hyde Park Art Center, the HATCH residency at Chicago Artists' Coalition, and the 3Arts Bodies of Work Fellowship at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She was the recipient of the 2022 3Arts Next Level/Spare Room Award. Her work is part of the permanent collections at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; University of Chicago; University of Illinois at Chicago; University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; and The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (Delhi, India). She is represented by McCormick Gallery in Chicago.

Pooja Pittie: Undercurrent

Feb 5Gallery <a href="https://www.artsclubchicago.org/exhibit/sarah-oppenheimer/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">N-06</a> N-06&nbsp;is a tool, an object, and a process that explores how time shapes our perception of spatial agency. Our environment contains us, and its machines maintain us, forming an entwined ecosystem of context and habitation.&nbsp;N-06&nbsp;asks how our presence within these systems might remake their hierarchies and interdependencies – and how time might be stretched or contracted, synchronized or offset – to amplify our sense of interconnection.Slender, floor-to-ceiling lines form the primary interface. Stretched across the exhibition space, each line functions as both mechanical actuator and electromagnetic antenna. The interface is linked to three suspended projection units housed within cylindrical glass enclosures. A gentle pull of a line activates a calibrated exchange, incrementally altering the tilt and rotation of linked projectors in real time. Simultaneously, the line’s conductive core registers changes in electric capacitance generated by proximity and touch, modifying luminosity and brightness. Through contact, participants reorient the exhibition environment itself. Cones of light expand and contract, overlap and dissolve. Beams split as projections traverse edges of exhibition walls. A wedge of shadow becomes a luminous band. Thresholds shift, emerge, and disappear, forming alternative passages within the space. Blind spots operate as negotiated fields, destabilizing and reconstituting existing boundaries. Spatial transformation unfolds at different time scales. Mechanical feedback is immediate, heightening the perceived responsiveness of the networked system. Digital feedback is delayed, creating a temporal counterpoint and stretching the cadence of observation. The periodicity of change is layered, creating simultaneous engagement and defamiliarization. Phased timing complicates causality and invites sustained attention. N-06&nbsp;asks how the redistribution of spatial control alters perceptions of agency and how temporal structures shape collective behavior. What forms of reciprocity emerge when control is shared by multiple bodies over extended timescales? About the artist Sarah Oppenheimer&nbsp;is an architectural manipulator whose work explores the interplay between human and non-human systems. Rhythms and timescales of living systems flow from body to building and back again. The viewer is transformed into an agent of spatial change. Oppenheimer lives and works in Rotterdam (NL) and New York (US) and is a Professor in the Practice at Yale School of Art.

Sarah Oppenheimer N-O6

Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago (MoCP) is pleased to announce Testaments to the Beautyful Ones, an exhibition that brings together eight photographers, two multimedia artists, and six writers to bear witness and pay tribute to the unflinching insistences on life on the African continent. The exhibition opens January 21 and runs through May 16, 2027. The exhibition takes as its point of departure the tensions animating an intergenerational dialogue about the promises of African self-determination between Ayi Kwei Armah’s 1968 novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and a series of photographic transfer-based paintings by Njideka Akunyili Crosby (b. 1983, Nigeria) titled The Beautyful Ones. Anchored by a colored inks-and-watercolor drawing of the cover of Armah’s novel by Cauleen Smith (b. 1967, United States) and three works by Akunyili Crosby, the exhibition foregrounds how communities continue to hold spaces of quiet possibility for themselves within the constraints of everyday living. Photographs by Tatenda Chidora (b. 1988, Zimbabwe), Fatoumata Diabaté (b. 1980, Mali), Yagazie Emezi (b. 1989, Nigeria), Zana Masombuka (b. 1995, South Africa), Hashim Nasr (b. 1990, Sudan), Jean-Louis N’cho (b. 1994, Côte d’Ivoire), Sackitey Tesa (b. 1995, Ghana), and Sarah Waiswa (b. 1980, Uganda) are presented in clusters, staging conversations about pressing concerns such as gender and sexuality; spirituality; war and displacement; self-representation; and people’s relationships to the natural world, to museum spaces, to the Covid pandemic, to waste and found objects, and to dreams. Newly commissioned texts in response to the clusters by Kweku Abimbola (b. 1997, The Gambia), TJ Benson (b. 1991, Nigeria), Safia Elhillo (b. 1990, United States), Tsitsi Jaji (b. 1976, Zimbabwe), Cheswayo Mphanza (b. 1993, Zambia), and Ladan Osman (b. Somalia) further testify to these renewed manifestations of the “beautyful ones,” which Armah explains, as a misspelling of the praise name for the ancient Egyptian god Osiris that he saw painted on a minibus taxi to Accra, is paradoxically “a sorrowful reminder of our human vulnerability to division, fragmentation, and degeneration, and at the same time a symbol of our equally human capacity for unity, cooperative action, and creative regeneration.” “Intended neither as a gesture of flattening explication of African realities nor as a claim to representativeness, Testaments to the Beautyful Ones honors the complexities of the rich textures of making life on the continent,” said curator Yuan-Chih (Sreddy) Yen. “The artists and writers gathered in [this exhibition] all ask us to dwell in this paradox.” Taken together then, the visual and written works in Testaments to the Beautyful Ones index the reverberations of social life and living in Africa today, on their own terms, in spite of it all. EXHIBITION PROGRAMSPrograms are free and open to students, faculty, and the general public. Opening ReceptionThu, Jan 28, 2027, 5–7 PMMoCP, 600 S Michigan Avenue Short Film ScreeningThu, Feb 11, 2027, 6–8 PMFerguson Auditorium, 600 S Michigan Avenue TJ Benson presents Hemba, a poetry performanceFri, Mar 19, 2027, 1–2 PMMoCP, 600 S Michigan Avenue Lecture in Photography: Yagazie EmezieThu, Apr 1, 2027, 6–7 PMFerguson Auditorium, 600 S Michigan Avenue ABOUT YUAN-CHIH (SREDDY) YENBorn in Taipei, educated between Pretoria and Johannesburg, and now based in Chicago, Yuan-Chih (Sreddy) Yen is a cultural worker committed to the study of African literary and photographic practices. Their PhD dissertation-in-progress considers how contemporary African writers and photographers draw on animism as a strategy to pose diﬀerent questions about what it means to be human. Always thinking at the intersections of postcolonial, queer, and black studies, their work more broadly is driven by questions about what it means to relate ethically across identity categories. ABOUT MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHY (MoCP)Founded in 1976, Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago (MoCP) is a premier college art museum dedicated to photography. As an accredited art museum with the American Alliance of Museums, MoCP is a renowned photography-specific institution whose mission is to generate ideas and provoke dialogue through groundbreaking exhibitions, innovative programs, and experiential events to cultivate a deeper understanding of the artistic, cultural, and political roles of photography in our world today. Image: Tatenda Chidora, Zulu Mother and Child, 2023

Testaments to the Beautyful Ones

In 2027, The Block will present&nbsp;Pasados Presentes: Cultural Memory in the Americas, an original, bilingual exhibition that places colonial paintings from the Carl &amp; Marilynn Thoma Foundation’s Art of the Spanish Americas collection in dialogue with contemporary sculpture, textiles, photography, painting, and mixed-media installations by artists from across the Americas and the Philippines.Together, these works reveal how artists have used and adapted materials and artistic forms to transmit cultural memory, reinterpret inherited histories, and shape understandings of identity and place. By approaching materials and media as inseparable from a work's meaning,&nbsp;Pasados Presentes&nbsp;asks how art participates in shaping the history of the Americas and whose stories are preserved, obscured, or reimagined within those narratives.Pasados Presentes: Cultural Memory in the Americas&nbsp;is curated by Jesús Escobar, Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor in the Humanities, and Kyle Stephan, Steven and Lisa Munster Tananbaum Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University. Lead support for the exhibition is provided by the Carl &amp; Marilynn Thoma Foundation. Additional generous support is provided by the Illinois Arts Council and The Alumnae of Northwestern University.&nbsp;&nbsp;

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