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<a style="color: rgb(5, 99, 193);" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.21cchicago.com/" target="_blank">21c Museum Hotel Chicago</a>&nbsp;is unveiling a new exhibition with&nbsp;Truth or Dare: A Reality Show. The exhibition opens to the public on March 15, 2025, and remains on view until March 2026 throughout the 21c Chicago gallery spaces. At a hotel where curiosity shapes every experience, the latest exhibition presents a thematic group exhibition of 70 multimedia artworks by 52 artists from across the globe exploring the slippery terrain between fact and fiction.&nbsp;Truth or Dare&nbsp;features works by artists Jorge Méndez Blake, Leandro Erlich, Vibha Galhotra, Jane Hammonds, Ann Hamilton, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Alejandro Almanza Pereda, Pedro Reyes, Federico Solmi, Siebren Versteeg, and many others, including Chicago-based photographer Laura Letinsky.Located in Chicago’s vibrant River North neighborhood,&nbsp;Truth or Dare: A Reality Show&nbsp;opens to the public with a reception on Friday, March 21stfrom 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. An introduction to the exhibition by 21c Museum Hotel’s Chief Curator, Alice Gray Stites, will be followed by a presentation by featured artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer at 7 p.m. The world-class museum is free and open 24/7, 365 days a year.“Highlighting uncertainty and contradiction, the artworks featured in&nbsp;Truth or Dare: A Reality Show&nbsp;emphasize the importance of questioning both knowledge and belief by utilizing illusion to entice, entertain, and explore the contemporary relationship between fact and fiction, presence and absence, reality and imagination,” said Alice Gray Stites, Chief Curator of 21c Museum Hotels.The suspension of disbelief is invoked in works that simulate games, maps, and tricks of the eye and hand, to engage and connect. A ping-pong table altered with a mirror for a game of one-on-one by Trong Gia Nguyen, a gravity-defying black rectangle modeled on the alien monolith in Stanley Kubrick's&nbsp;2001: A Space Odyssey&nbsp;by Josh Azzarella, and Charles Matton's hologram figure projected in a miniature library are at once playful and prescient critiques of how and where we search for knowledge and meaning. Anthony Adcock's steel&nbsp;Column&nbsp;is actually oil paint on wood; Addie Wagenknecht's flower vase is crafted from 3D printed Liberator guns; and Paolo Ventura's detailed photographs of scale models suggest that nothing is as it seems. Alejandro Almanza Pereda's dynamic video reimagines a Caravaggio still life under water, where fruit, glasses, and flatware rise and fall, defying a fixed arrangement.Collapsing the immediate distance between what is seen and what is known, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s&nbsp;Zero Noon&nbsp;is a clock that runs on internet-refreshed statistics, conflating time and data into a screen-based experience of consumption. Drawing on hundreds of sources, the clock tells the local time based on various metrics, such as the average number of daily human breaths, the number of firearms produced in the U.S. per day, the number of cups of tea drunk in the UK, etc. Each day at noon, the clock resets, and the numbers all revert to zero, ever so briefly suspending the exponential onslaught of these indices of activity worldwide.&nbsp;The new exhibition highlights the global contemporary environment available in 21c Chicago’s expansive and art-filled event spaces. The unique spaces offer an opportunity to gather creatively, with the capacity to host gatherings from 10 to 300. Named a Gold Medal Winner in the Best Boutique Hotel and Best Décor categories of Northstar Meetings Group’s annual awards, 21c Museum Hotel Chicago encourages curiosity and collaboration for all events.&nbsp; About the ArtistRafael Lozano-Hemmer is a media artist working at the intersection of architecture and performance art. He creates platforms for public participation using technologies such as robotic lights, digital fountains, computerized surveillance, media walls, and telematic networks. Inspired by phantasmagoria, carnival, and animatronics, his light and shadow works are "antimonuments for alien agency". He was the first artist to represent Mexico at the Venice Biennale with an exhibition at Palazzo Van Axel in 2007. He has also shown at Biennials in Cuenca, Havana, Istanbul, Kochi, Liverpool, Melbourne NGV, Moscow, New Orleans, New York ICP, Seoul, Seville, Shanghai, Singapore, Sydney, and Wuzhen.&nbsp;Collections holding his work include MoMA and Guggenheim in New York, TATE in London, MAC and MBAM in Montreal, Jumex, and MUAC in Mexico City, DAROS in Zurich, MONA in Hobart, 21C Museum in Kanazawa, Borusan Contemporary in Istanbul, CIFO in Miami, MAG in Manchester, SFMOMA in San Francisco, ZKM in Karlsruhe, SAM in Singapore and many others. About 21c Museum Hotels21c Museum is a multi-venue museum located in seven cities. One of the largest contemporary art museums in the U.S., and North America’s only collecting museum dedicated solely to art of the 21st century, each property features exhibition space open free of charge to the public, combined with a boutique hotel and restaurant. It was founded in 2006 by Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson; philanthropists, preservationists, and collectors, committed to expanding access to contemporary art as a means of catalyzing revitalization and civic connection. 21c presents a range of arts programming curated by Museum Director, Chief Curator Alice Gray Stites, including both solo and group exhibitions that reflect the global nature of art today, as well as site-specific, commissioned installations, and a variety of cultural events. The organization collaborates on arts initiatives with artists and organizations worldwide, including Speed Art Museum, North Carolina Museum of Art, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Artadia, Creative Time, For Freedoms, and others. About 21c Museum Hotel Chicago&nbsp;Located steps from the famous Magnificent Mile shopping district in River North, 21c Museum Hotel Chicago offers an art-filled escape in the heart of the city. The 297-room hotel, with 106 suites, boasts extraordinary contemporary art with a multi-venue museum that provides curated exhibitions and cultural programming for both visitors and the local community. For a perfect night out in River North, the hotel’s signature restaurant, Lure Fishbar, provides world-class seafood and sushi, premium steaks, burgers, craft cocktails, and more. Recently awarded the Northstar Meetings Group Gold Medal Award for the Best Boutique Hotel and Best Décor in the Midwest, 21c Museum Hotel Chicago’s art-filled event spaces offer inspiration for creative gatherings for groups ranging from 10 to 300. For more information, visit&nbsp;<a style="color: rgb(70, 120, 134);" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.21cchicago.com/" target="_blank">https://www.21cchicago.com/</a>.&nbsp; Image: Valerie Hegarty, Still Lives with Crows, 2006

Truth or Dare: A Reality Show

<h4>EXPO CHICAGO</h4><h3>Contemporary Art Fair</h3><h3>April 9–12, 2026</h3>

EXPO CHICAGO 2026

The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago is excited to announce the Chicago presentation of Firelei Báez, the first North American survey exhibition of the artist, running from November 15, 2025, to May 31, 2026. This landmark exhibition spans two decades of Báez’s spirited practice, showcasing her vibrant and captivating paintings and installations. Through a bold visual language that blends folklore, fantasy, mythology, and science fiction, Báez constructs layered worlds that challenge dominant historical narratives and unsettle the often-fixed categories of race, gender, and nationality. The exhibition emphasizes resilience and creative agency, especially among marginalized communities who have always found ways to create refuge and power in defiance of systems of repression. Known for her richly pigmented, multidisciplinary approach, Báez combines saturated colors, intricate patterns, and expressive figuration with abstract gestures, architectural plans, colonial-era maps, and culturally resonant symbols. Her work draws deeply from Afro-Caribbean traditions and acts as a cultural and historical crossroads for the enduring legacies of colonialism across the Americas, the African Diaspora, and the cultural nexus of the Caribbean. This major exhibition reaffirms Báez’s place as one of the most compelling and visionary artists of her generation. In addition to her dynamic paintings, the exhibition will feature one of her more immersive pieces, A Drexcyen chronocommons (To win the war you fought it sideways) (2019), which will occupy an entire gallery at the MCA. This large-scale work consists of paintings, mesh, papier-mâché, cutout tarp, and plants that transport visitors into one of Báez’s created worlds. Chicago is also highlighted in the exhibition: The trace, whether we are attending to it or not (a space for each other’s breathing) (2019) features a ciguapa (a feminine, trickster creature from Dominican folklore) bending over an architectural plan of the Illinois Central Railroad, uniting both sides of the tracks, which run between New Orleans and Chicago, to restore the divisions left by colonial trade. Firelei Báez is organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston and curated by Eva Respini, Deputy Director and Director of Curatorial Programs, Vancouver Art Gallery (former Barbara Lee Chief Curator, ICA/Boston), with Tessa Bachi Haas, Assistant Curator, ICA/Boston. The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago presentation is organized by Carla Acevedo-Yates, former Marilyn and Larry Fields Curator and Director of Curatorial Initiatives, with Cecilia González Godino, former Marjorie Susman Curatorial Fellow, and Iris Colburn, Curatorial Associate.

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