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

This program, entitled "Beyond Borders,"&nbsp;traverses&nbsp;six&nbsp;distinct&nbsp;sound&nbsp;worlds&nbsp;with&nbsp;the&nbsp;cello&nbsp;as&nbsp;a&nbsp;guide. Invoking&nbsp;ancient instruments while breathing life into music of our time,&nbsp;the&nbsp;program probes sonic possibilities, both familiar&nbsp;and fantastical. Featured artists include cellist Alexander Hersh, who&nbsp;has emerged as one of his generation’s most compelling artists for his expressive performances and imaginative programming. A Carnegie Hall recitalist and acclaimed soloist, he is Co-Artistic Director of NEXUS Chamber Music in Chicago. Hailed by The Washington Post for his “poised and imaginative playing,” Filipino-American pianist Victor Santiago Asuncion has performed across North and South America, Europe and Asia. A Steinway &amp; Sons Artist, he is also the founder of FilAm Music Foundation, championing Filipino classical musicians.

Third Wednesday: Beyond Borders

Join MoCP, Filter Photo, Latitude Chicago, and other photography organizations for the Photography Guild at Arts in the Dark, Chicago’s annual Halloween parade celebrating the city’s vibrant arts and cultural community. Photographers of all ages and experience levels are welcome to join the festivities. Just bring a camera of any kind and be part of the parade! This event is free and open to all.

Arts in the Dark Parade

Chicago Symphony Orchestra musicians perform an evening of chamber music celebrating Amy Beach and Fanny Mendelssohn, two pioneering composers whose extraordinary works deserve a place at the center of the Romantic repertoire.

CSO Chamber Music: Carving Out History

Our Free Days Are Taking The Night Shift! From March through November, we’re returning to Free First Tuesdays! On the first Tuesday of every month, enjoy extended hours from 5:00 pm to 8:00 pm - admission is free for all, no residency restrictions. Want more chances to visit? Take a look at our full lineup of 2026 Free Days below and mark your calendar! From March through November, we’re returning to Free First Tuesdays! On the first Tuesday of every month, enjoy extended hours from 5:00 pm to 8:00 pm - admission is free for all, no residency restrictions.

Free First Tuesdays

Transition&nbsp;September&nbsp;3, 2026 - November 8, 2026 Transition&nbsp;presents a body of work by Mélanie Denis created over three years, crossing three territories, three inner states, and three defining moments of a life. Through this series, the landscape becomes the reflection of a personal transformation, moving through grief, emancipation, and rebirth. View details <a href="https://www.pistachiosonline.com/collections/transition" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">here</a>&nbsp;

Transition

Brendan Fernandes: In the Round

Lean on your materials and create new ways of thinking inspired by the works of Kenzi Shiokava and Mike Cloud.&nbsp;

Family Day | Knock on Wood

On behalf of Lisa M. Key, Executive Director, and the Board of Directors, the Driehaus Museum invites you to join us for The Gilded Gala, an annual celebration of artistic excellence and Chicago’s cultural legacy. This signature event benefits the Museum’s transformative public programming and mission of expanding access to extraordinary art, architecture, and design. The 2026 Gilded Gala will honor Mansueto Office, Inc. for advancing the well-being of communities through philanthropic support of holistic educational and cultural initiatives, as well as the stewardship of our architecturally significant built environment to ensure long-term social impact. Suzette Bross Bulley, Gala ChairLisa M. Key, Executive DirectorZachary Lazar, Board Chair Tuesday, November 17, 2026&nbsp;5:30pm Reception7:00pm Dinner &amp; Program <a href="https://driehausmuseum.org/gala?mc_cid=ef680d6bbe&amp;mc_eid=d1db3f815c" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Details</a>

Gilded Gala 2026

This one person show follows artist Barbara Tinger through 5 decades! Her body of work includes: figures, still life, cityscape, painting, drawing and mixed media in both representational and abstract executions. If you love art, you will love Barbara. Her move into abstraction occurred later in life, as a rare health condition affected her vision. Come witness the talent &amp; dedication to a practice spanning so long and so varied and always given With Love, Barbara. A portion of sales will be given to The Chicago Lighthouse for the Blind.Image: Self Portrait - oil on board "16 x 24"

With Love, Barbara

The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago is excited to announce a solo exhibition by Mike Cloud (b. 1974, Chicago; lives in Chicago) for its latest&nbsp;<a href="https://mcachicago.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=c24ba7c5a91cefd699dc985e1&amp;id=b49b61817e&amp;e=4ba592fe2a" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: rgb(0, 124, 137);" target="_blank">Chicago Works</a>&nbsp;presentation, titled&nbsp;Chicago Works | Mike Cloud: Worldless Obstruction.&nbsp;Opening on May 2, 2026, in the MCA’s Turner Gallery and closing on February 7, 2027, the exhibition presents a series of newly commissioned works that continue Cloud’s experimentation with abstraction, symbolic language and the sculptural dimensions of painting.&nbsp;Cloud challenges historical framings of abstract painting as pure and apolitical, approaching his works instead as products of their political contexts and the capitalist systems through which they circulate. Crudely constructed from wooden stretcher bars, thickly layered in painted signs, and protruding into three-dimensional space, Cloud’s sculptural paintings are objects, rather than pristine surfaces, that possess a deliberately improvisational and, in his words, “unschooled” aesthetic. The artist sources his subjects from online news outlets, often alluding to contemporary stories of suffering and tragedy through his enigmatic visual vocabulary, developed over two decades. Forms resembling snowflakes, rainbows, four-leaf clovers, hearts and hands densely cluster across his canvases, which are stapled to configurations of stretcher bars that hover between abstract structures and recognizable shapes.The new paintings made specifically for this exhibition extend these strategies while foregrounding three recent developments in Cloud’s practice: emojis, an “X”-shaped painting, and the protrusion of his works off the wall and on to the floor of the gallery. Through the use of hinges, the paintings become modular, endowed with the capacity to be folded, installed upright, and exhibited in multiple configurations. Cloud’s work embodies the slipperiness of symbols, the malleability of meaning, and the potential for freedom within ambiguity.&nbsp;Cloud will be in conversation with exhibition curator Nolan Jimbo on May 2, 2026, in the Edlis Neeson Theater.&nbsp;Mike Cloud is the 27th artist to participate in&nbsp;<a href="https://mcachicago.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=c24ba7c5a91cefd699dc985e1&amp;id=dd5f8f7c3d&amp;e=4ba592fe2a" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: rgb(0, 124, 137);" target="_blank">Chicago Works</a>, a solo exhibition series at the MCA that features artists who are shaping contemporary art in the city and beyond.&nbsp;Chicago Works | Mike Cloud: Worldless Obstruction&nbsp;is organized by Nolan Jimbo, Assistant Curator. ABOUT THE ARTISTMike Cloud was born and raised in Chicago. He earned a BFA from the University of Illinois Chicago (2001) and an MFA from Yale University (2003). He is currently Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Art, Theory, and Practice at Northwestern University.&nbsp;Cloud’s solo exhibitions include&nbsp;Circle Chat, Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago (2025);&nbsp;Called Ahead, Fahrenheit Madrid (2024);&nbsp;The Myth of Education, Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago (2018);&nbsp;Bad Faith and Universal Technique, Thomas Erben Gallery, New York (2014);&nbsp;Systems, Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska, Lincoln (2006); and&nbsp;Special Project: Mike Cloud, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2005). He has also participated in group exhibitions at Artists Space, New York; Xavier Hufkens, Brussels; Good Weather, Chicago; White Columns, New York; and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. Cloud received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2024, the Richard Pousette-Dart Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts’ in 2023, and the Jules Guerin Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome in 2023.At the MCA, Cloud previously participated in the group exhibition,&nbsp;The Long Dream&nbsp;(2020), and his work,&nbsp;Cycle and Stable&nbsp;(2015), resides in the museum’s collection. His work is also held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.&nbsp; SUPPORTGenerous support for&nbsp;Chicago Works | Mike Cloud: Worldless Obstruction&nbsp;is provided by the Sandra and Jack Guthman Chicago Works Exhibition Fund. Mike Cloud (b. 1974, Chicago, IL; lives in Chicago),&nbsp;Poison Arrows South Africa, 2026. Acrylic on canvas, hinges, pegs, rope, and watercolor tape; 48 × 47 × 75 in. (121.9 × 119.4 × 190.5 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Thomas Erben Gallery, New York. Photo: Colleen Keihm.

Mike Cloud: Worldless Obstruction

Shop local this holiday season with over 25 vendors in our historic Murphy Auditorium. Browse vintage jewelry, handcrafted goods, and unique gifts for everyone on your list.

Drie-cember Market

“It was a matter of getting out on a damn limb and sawing it off behind you.” This memorable phrase is how Lee Miller—by turns a fashion model, magazine photographer, studio operator, Surrealist innovator, international adventurer, and battlefield correspondent—summed up her approach to life and creativity.&nbsp;Lee Miller: Fearless&nbsp;is the first comprehensive survey of her photographs in more than 25 years and gathers together the major episodes of her singular career. Miller was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1907. Intrepid from the first, she moved to Paris at barely 20 years old, simultaneously seeking work in front of and behind the camera. She pioneered Surrealist techniques and broached daring sexual subjects with a readiness that magnetized experimental artists and fashion editors alike. Miller excelled at portraiture as well and pictured a range of cultural figures in the 1930s, most of them personal friends, from Charlie Chaplin to Pablo Picasso.&nbsp; By age 30 Miller had run commercial studios on both sides of the Atlantic; taken a star turn in art cinema and become an haute couture icon; and moving on from Paris to Cairo, influenced Egyptian modern art while reinvigorating her own work through travels in Egypt’s deserts.&nbsp; Yet she undertook a challenge of an entirely different order during World War II, especially as a correspondent for&nbsp;Vogue&nbsp;accredited with the United States Army in 1944–45. The inhumanities Lee Miller witnessed in Europe, especially at the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps, brought out her courage and deeply contradictory emotions; the experience, which she chronicled in extensive written and photographic dispatches from the German front, also left her traumatized for a number of years. Following the war, Miller remade herself once more, gaining renown in England as a chef and gardener, while quietly continuing to lead an artistic life through her final years. Lee Miller died in 1977 on the East Sussex farm she owned with her husband, artist Roland Penrose.Lee Miller: Fearless&nbsp;is organized by the Art Institute of Chicago in collaboration with Tate Britain and Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris.&nbsp; The exhibition is curated by Matthew S.&nbsp;Witkovsky, Richard and Ellen Sandor Chair and Curator, Photography and Media,&nbsp;and vice president for strategic art initiatives,&nbsp;the&nbsp;Art Institute of Chicago,&nbsp;and Hilary Floe, senior curator, Modern and Contemporary British Art, Tate Britain,&nbsp;with Saskia Flower, assistant curator, Modern and Contemporary British Art, Tate Britain, and Michal Goldschmidt, former assistant curator, Modern British Art, Tate Britain. SPONSORSLead support is provided by the Harris Family Foundation in memory of Bette and Neison Harris.&nbsp;Major support is provided by Barbara Bluhm-Kaul and Don Kaul, Suzette and Ally Bulley, Tara Hirshberg, and The Opatrny Family Foundation.&nbsp;Additional support is contributed by Anne L. Kaplan.&nbsp; Image: Self-Portrait with Headband&nbsp;(detail), about 1932Lee MillerLee Miller Archives. © 2026 Lee Miller Archives, England. All rights reserved.&nbsp;<a href="http://www.leemiller.co.uk/" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: rgb(181, 9, 56);" target="_blank">www.leemiller.co.uk</a>

Lee Miller: Fearless

As the December skies darken, join Ghostlight Ensemble by our majestic fireplace(s) as we revive the Victorian tradition of telling ghost stories at Yuletide with a multi-story (and multi-storied) immersive twist. Performances last 90 minutes with time slots beginning at 5:30 pm each night.

Holiday Spirits: Victorian Yuletide Ghost Stories

The Italian Cultural Institute in Chicago presents A Palm of Victory, the first Chicago exhibition by Italian contemporary artist Emilia Faro, curated by Maria Chiara Di Trapani. The exhibition creates an evocative palm grove where color, form, and diverse artistic languages—including watercolor, video, and sculpture—come together around the image of the palm tree, a symbol of beauty, resilience, transformation, and rebirth. Visits: Monday-Friday, 10am-4:30pm, by appointment only. Admission is free and open to the public. Registration is required for all visits. To register, please email iicchicago@esteri.it with your preferred date and time of visit.

A Palm of Victory

<a href="https://driehausmuseum.org/programs/detail/santa-saturday-2026" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">TICKETS</a> Drie-cember is here with Santa’s annual visit to the Museum! Join him in our Front Parlor to share your Christmas wish list and have your picture taken with jolly old St. Nick. This magical, family-friendly event will fill up fast—be sure to book early!

Santa Saturday

Embrace the cold and let it influence your thinking. This month we think deeply like Rashid Johnson.

Family Day | Hibernate, Meditate

Drie-cember is here with Santa’s annual visit to the Museum! Join him in our Front Parlor to share your Christmas wish list and have your picture taken with jolly old St. Nick. This magical, family-friendly event will fill up fast—be sure to book early! <a href="https://driehausmuseum.org/programs/detail/santa-sunday-2026" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">TICKETS</a>

Santa Sunday

Put on your favorite holiday sweater, grab a cozy cup of cocoa, and get in the holiday spirit with the St. James Cathedral Choristers!

Carols & Cocoa

Join Quintet Attacca for an interactive concert touring the sounds of December from the Gilded Age to today.

Third Wednesday: December Lights

For more than six decades, Mernet Larsen has been painting. Her representational, yet idiosyncratic, compositions exist largely outside mainstream trends, drawing from 15th-century Italian painting, wide-ranging arts of Asia, media, art theories, and her own memories and photos. Larsen’s subjects range from cafes and cafeterias to bedrooms and meeting rooms, and they capture a sense of the mundane as they nod to pictorial antecedents. By merging various perspectival systems, Larsen generates figures that appear as geometric solids in disorienting contexts. The scenes lack horizons and they refuse to center a viewer.&nbsp;As the artist has written,&nbsp;“I want nonspecific viewpoints, a sense of vertigo, so that you are holding each situation in your mind almost as if you are wearing it.”&nbsp;As a result, her figures can be disproportionately large or small, flattened, or even upside down, allowing them to exist believably in space.Larsen’s personages undertake the activities of life. They have meals, pursue hobbies, gather in malls, homes, or outdoors–but they simultaneously imply a passivity or lack of affect that is unsettling, while still familiar. The bored expressions—or at least poker faces—on many of the figures suggest an underlying critique of society, yet the paintings can also make one laugh out loud. This affect contributes to a stillness that elevates each figural gesture to something more monumental than the mundane activity it represents.Larsen frequently uses abstract images as springboards for her compositions. Treating found motifs as Rorschachs (the famous psychological “inkblot test”), she draws out spatial structures and unconscious attitudes toward subject matter that would not have occurred to her otherwise. The zig- zag angles of the seamstress and client in&nbsp;Getting Measured, 1999, for example, derive from an architectural element in a 13th-century Japanese scroll that she inverted and reimagined. Larsen clarifies that her appropriation of such forms does not pretend to be an interpretation or alliance with the original. Instead, this is a kind of “reverse abstraction” in that Larsen gives recognizable meaning to a detail she has incorporated as pure shape. In more recent works like&nbsp;Cézanne’s House, 2023, she does make explicit reference to an earlier artist, but subverts his frameworks at the same time. Such works honor her fascination with Cézanne, for example, but remain deeply original. Across these various strategies, Larsen has invented constructs that reconsider the way daily life is perceived and depicted. Her desire is at once to defamiliarize and honor the ordinary.Larsen has been the subject of more than 30 solo gallery and museum exhibitions. The current focused retrospective highlights many of her greatest works, emphasizing Larsen’s subjects from everyday life. It includes about 20 paintings made from 1986 to the present belonging to private and public collections, as well as a number of recent works that have yet to be exhibited. The exhibition is scheduled to run from September through December 2026. It will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with text by award-winning novelist Lauren Groff.The exhibition is curated by Janine Mileaf, Executive Director &amp; Chief Curator of The Arts Club of Chicago. About the ArtistMernet Larsen (b. 1940, Houghton, Michigan) has exhibited extensively since the late 1970s and has been the subject of over thirty solo exhibitions, including&nbsp;Mernet Larsen: The Ordinary, Reoriented,&nbsp;Akron Art Museum, 2019, and&nbsp;Mernet Larsen: Getting Measured,&nbsp;1957-2017,&nbsp;Tampa Museum of Art, 2017. Her work is in numerous collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; the Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art, Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel; and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, the X Museum, Beijing, China, among others. Larsen received her BFA from the University of Florida, and her MFA from Indiana University. She lives and works between Tampa, Florida and Jackson Heights, New York.

Mernet Larsen: Situational Awareness

What if Emmett Till lived? What if&nbsp;he had returned home still a child, alive and free?&nbsp;If Emmett Till Lived…&nbsp;is an exhibition and a civic invitation. The very statement invites a range of questions, a reckoning with the past, and a probing investigation of the current state of American life.&nbsp;This exhibition, and the invitation it offers to viewers, creates a collective arena to consider how freedom has been secured on American ground. In 1955, Emmett Till, then fourteen years old, had traveled from Chicago to the Mississippi Delta region to visit his family during the summer, bought candy at Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market, and was accused of whistling at a shopkeeper, a white woman working in the store. The accusation violated the racial caste system of Jim Crow rule that kept the economic, civic, and social subordination of black Americans the law of the land. Days later, the woman’s husband, Roy Bryant, his brother-in-law John William (J.W.) Milam, and one other man kidnapped Till from the home of his uncle Moses Wright near Money, Mississippi, and took him to a barn where they brutally tortured, mutilated, and killed him with the force of a mob lynching. Till’s body was thrown in the Tallahatchie River weighed down by a 75- pound cotton gin fan wrapped around his neck with barbed wire. The next month, Bryant and Milam were acquitted by a jury in Sumner, Mississippi. In&nbsp;January&nbsp;1956,&nbsp;they confessed to the murder in&nbsp;Look&nbsp;magazine with pride. Till’s lynching was a warning: in Mississippi, Jim Crow rule would remain. In 2017, the Till case was reopened by the Justice Department when new information emerged that the woman who had accused him of whistling at her had recanted. While her statement did not lead to any persecution after the FBI investigation—the statute of limitations had run out and perjury in a state court is not a federal crime—it did result in the Justice Department’s statement that “the government does not take the position that the state court testimony the woman gave in 1955 was truthful or accurate.”&nbsp; There were many Tills, yet his murder was the one made visible to all. “Let the world see what I’ve seen,” his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley said. Till-Mobley asked for an open casket funeral for her son in Chicago and 100,000 attended—the largest civil rights event and the most impactful for mass mobilization to date in the United States.&nbsp; Racism had been clear; Till’s death gave many new resolve coming as it did a year after the 1954&nbsp;Brown v. Board of Education&nbsp;Supreme Court case that legally outlawed segregation. Till’s murder became the event that shook the consciousness of the nation enough to enforce it.&nbsp; “We were the Till generation,” Congressman John Lewis said, echoing the sentiments of many. When Rosa Parks explained why she refused to give up her seat in the front of the bus to a white customer, launching the Montgomery Bus Boycott, she said, “I thought of Emmett Till and I couldn’t go back.” Picture it. What would it have required for Till to live?&nbsp;If Emmett Till Lived…&nbsp;honors Till and the history born of his sacrifice. The show—drawn entirely on work in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago—imagines what could have come in his life: photographs of different restaurants pay homage to the last meal Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, packed for him before he left Chicago, others show his favorite pastimes, meditate on the love he might have experienced, on days spent enjoying life in Chicago, on the playground, at the beach, attending prom, living free. There are images of railway lines that mark his one-way trip from Illinois to Mississippi and the travels that might have one day taken him around the world. There are photographs of the&nbsp;full range of&nbsp;life events Till missed: from the Chicago Bulls as a cultural phenomenon to the love we imagine he might have known as he grew into a man, to the election of Barack Obama and the extended Civil Rights protest and movement today.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The show deliberately draws upon the work of a vast array of photographers who emblematize the full range of American life including: Hanif Adbur-Rahim, Tom Arndt, Laylah Amatullah Barrayn, Uta Barth, Endia Beal, Dawoud Bey, Christian Boltanski, Keith Carter, Teju Cole, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Peter Cochrane, Barbara Crane, Paul D’Amato, Bruce Davidson, Paul Dahlquist, Erica Deeman, Jack Delano, Jess T. Dugan, Jim Dine, Elliott Erwitt, Terry Evans, Walker Evans, Adama Delphine Fawundu, Rachel Feirman, Scott Fortino, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Leonard Freed, Kris Graves, Guillaume Simoneau, Todd Hido, Earlier Hudnall, Jr., Janna Ireland, Dorothea Lange, An-My Lê, Danny Lyon, Sally Mann, Stephen Marc, Diana Matar, Robert Mapplethorpe, Martin Hyers + William Mebane, Julie Moos, Kurt Markus, Natasha Moustache, Zora J Murff, Laurel Nakadate, Arteh Odjidja, Gordon Parks, Alexis Peskine, David Plowden, Marc PoKempner, Sheila Pree Bright, Walker Rosenblum, Anastasia Samoylova, Jon Saudek, W. Stephen Saunders, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Arthur Shay, Sara Shamsavari, Aaron Siskind, Victor Skrehneski, Joel Sternfeld, Alfred Stieglitz, Bob Thall, Ruth Thorne-Thomsen, Charles Traub, Jerry Uelsmann, Todd Webb, Carrie Mae Weems, and Garry Winogrand.&nbsp; If Emmett Till Lived…&nbsp;is an exhibition that mounts a civic invitation through an online component of the show that allows&nbsp;viewers in Chicago and beyond to craft their own displays in response to three prompts:&nbsp;<ul><li>How would you have hoped Till&nbsp;could&nbsp;have lived after 1955?</li><li>What do you wish Till, and the many Tills, might have never had to experience?&nbsp;</li><li>What would that life have required of us all? How have we challenged the force of Jim Crow rule and its legacy today?</li></ul>These&nbsp;invitations are crafted to consider the sacrifice of his life, and what it wrought, and what work remains.-Sarah Lewis ﻿About the curatorSarah Lewis is the founder of Vision &amp; Justice and the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She has authored and edited over 60 publications including&nbsp;<a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674238343" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America</a>,&nbsp;which won the American Book Award; the bestseller,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Rise/Sarah-Lewis/9781451629248" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery</a>; and the award-winning volumes,&nbsp;<a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/carrie-mae-weems" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Carrie Mae Weems</a>&nbsp;and “Vision &amp; Justice.” As founder of Vision &amp; Justice, Lewis has organized landmark convenings and founded a Vision &amp; Justice Book Series, launched in partnership with Aperture. Her writing has been published in the&nbsp;New Yorker,&nbsp;The New York Times,&nbsp;Artforum, and the&nbsp;New York Review of Books, and her work has been the subject of profiles from&nbsp;Vogue&nbsp;to&nbsp;The Boston Globe&nbsp;to&nbsp;The New York Times. Lewis’s influence resonates widely: a chapter on her life is included in Laura Lynne Jackson’s&nbsp;New York Times&nbsp;bestseller,&nbsp;Guided: The Secret Path to an Illuminated Life&nbsp;(2025) and her work has been highlighted in Brené Brown’s&nbsp;Strong Ground: The Lessons of Daring Leadership, the Tenacity of Paradox, and the Wisdom of the Human Spirit&nbsp;(2025).

If Emmett Till Lived: Freedom on American Ground

The Museum’s four floors are filled with extraordinary artifacts, as well as paintings, illustrations, and sculptures that interpret the pre-modern&nbsp;and modern healing practices of human civilization. From early practices to today’s revolutionary techniques, the Museum’s collections and exhibits&nbsp;portray the mysteries, breakthroughs, failures, and milestones that have shaped modern surgical science.

Health in Space: Daring to Explore

Exhibition Tour and Discussion with Curator Janine Mileaf and Artist Ann Toebbe: September 14, 6:00–7:00 pm. For more than six decades, Mernet Larsen has been painting. Her representational, yet idiosyncratic, compositions exist largely outside mainstream trends, drawing from 15th-century Italian painting, wide-ranging arts of Asia, media, art theories, and her own memories and photos. Larsen’s subjects range from cafes and cafeterias to bedrooms and meeting rooms, and they capture a sense of the mundane as they nod to pictorial antecedents. By merging various perspectival systems, Larsen generates figures that appear as geometric solids in disorienting contexts. The scenes lack horizons and they refuse to center a viewer. As the artist has written, “I want nonspecific viewpoints, a sense of vertigo, so that you are holding each situation in your mind almost as if you are wearing it.” As a result, her figures can be disproportionately large or small, flattened, or even upside down, allowing them to exist believably in space. Larsen has been the subject of more than 30 solo gallery and museum exhibitions. The current focused retrospective highlights many of her greatest works, emphasizing Larsen’s subjects from everyday life. It includes about 20 paintings made from 1986 to the present belonging to private and public collections, as well as a number of recent works that have yet to be exhibited. The exhibition is scheduled to run from September through December 2026. The exhibition is curated by Janine Mileaf, Executive Director and Chief Curator at The Arts Club of Chicago. Publication: To accompany the exhibition, a fully illustrated catalogue will be published with prose poems by award-winning novelist Lauren Groff and a scholarly essay by New York Times contributor Blake Gopnik.

Exhibition Tour and Discussion with Curator Janine Mileaf and Artist Ann Toebbe

Free and open to all Sep 10, 2026–Jan 02, 2027 At the Newberry – Hanson Gallery <a href="https://www.newberry.org/calendar/collecting-stories" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Collecting Stories</a>&nbsp;provides a glimpse into the Newberry's collection by exploring how our collection is built. This exhibition will pair&nbsp;recent acquisitions alongside pre-existing items from the collection to&nbsp;show&nbsp;how collecting at the library both enhances our collection and allows us to expand the scope of stories the Newberry&nbsp;can tell.&nbsp;The pairings create their own dynamic that speaks to how this increasingly&nbsp;diverse collection continues to evolve, generating new stories over time. Explore how the new acquisitions add dimension to the Newberry's major collecting areas: American History and CultureAmerican Indian and Indigenous StudiesChicago and the MidwestGenealogy and Local HistoryHistory of the BookMaps, Travel, and ExplorationMedieval, Renaissance, and Early Modern StudiesModern Manuscripts and ArchivesPerformance ArtsPostcardsReligion <h3>CURATORS</h3> Jill Austin, former Vice President of Public Engagement, The Newberry Library.Jo Ellen McKillop Dickie, Reference Services Librarian and Selector for Reference.Jill Gage, Custodian of the John M. Wing Foundation on the History of Printing and Bibliographer for British Literature and History.Will Hansen, Roger and Julie Baskes Vice President for Collection and Library Services, and Curator of Americana.Alison Hinderliter, Lloyd Lewis Curator of Modern Manuscripts and Selector for Modern Music.Analú López,&nbsp;Ayer Librarian and Assistant Curator of American Indian and Indigenous Studies.Matthew Rutherford, Curator of Genealogy and Local History.Suzanne Karr Schmidt, George Amos Poole III Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts.David Weimer, Robert A. Holland Curator of Maps and Director of the Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography. <h3>MORE ABOUT THE SPACE</h3> The Hanson Gallery is a small, intimate space. Exhibitions mounted there typically include 12-24 items, allowing visitors a glimpse of what the Newberry’s vast collections have to offer. Hanson exhibitions are often modest thematic presentations that draw from a range of the library's collections or interpretive explorations that are built around single items. Examples of past exhibitions include:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.newberry.org/calendar/wheels" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: rgb(91, 92, 87);" target="_blank">Wheels</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.newberry.org/calendar/indigenous-unbound" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: rgb(91, 92, 87);" target="_blank">Indigenous Portraits Unbound</a>. Click&nbsp;<a href="https://www.newberry.org/uploads/files/Wheels_002-1.JPG" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: rgb(91, 92, 87);" target="_blank">here</a>&nbsp;to view a photo of the gallery.

Calendar

Chicago Gallery News