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

“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

Family Day | Hibernate, Meditate Dec 12, 2026 | 11 am–3 pmThe Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago Embrace the cold and let it influence your thinking. This month we think deeply like Rashid Johnson.

Family Day | Hibernate, Meditate

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

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

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

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.

Collecting Stories: New Acquisitions at the Newberry

Member previews:&nbsp;Sep 4–5, 2026 Sep 6, 2026–Jan 3, 2027 Uncompromising and fearless, Mary Cassatt (1844–1926) traversed a breathtaking artistic path.&nbsp; After training in Philadelphia in the early 1860s, Cassatt traveled to Europe largely on her own to study with noted teachers and experience the continent’s traditional and modern art firsthand. In 1877 she made the daring decision to join the French Impressionists—the only American to exhibit with them. It was in the years following the eighth and final Impressionist group show in 1886 that Cassatt produced some of her most innovative—and now celebrated—compositions.&nbsp;

Mary Cassatt: After Impressionism

Frank Buffalo HydeCourtney M. LeonardNeepa Hyde

Pocket Full of Shells

Fireworks in the Rain explores the coexistence of apparent opposites: fragility and&nbsp;strength, luminosity and weight, monumentality and delicacy. The exhibition seeks to reveal the poetry of contradiction and the beauty found in&nbsp;nuance. Image: Eunseok Han,&nbsp;Necklace, recycled aluminum, sterling silver, copper, agate, 2026.

Fireworks in the Rain

Sep 19, 2026–Jan 18, 2027 Jill Mulleady paints by breathing new life into unseen histories.&nbsp; Drawing from art-historical, cinematic, and literary sources, her memorable images can haunt the viewer long after encountering them. This exhibition—Mulleady’s first solo show at a major museum—brings together approximately 20 paintings by the artist. Mulleady uses various methods including staining, and at times incorporating materials such as copper, to achieve fragile, luminous surfaces that feel impossibly thin yet visually deep, holding tension between flatness and depth. Not limited to canvas or linen, she employs a range of supports, including glass and velvet. The resultant works balance different degrees of transparency and opacity and can be looked at and, sometimes, seen through. Mulleady’s paintings often depict scenes that are enigmatic and dangerous, showing figures at risk or under threat—from appetite, predation, or compulsion. While these ambiguous scenes may imply narratives, they likewise refuse tidy resolutions. Her imagery draws actively on painting lineages—allegory and the Baroque, Symbolist unease, the grotesque—recasting genres and canonical images for the present. In contrast to the purity and rationality of 20th-century modernism, Mulleady prioritizes a tradition in which chaos, instinct, and history drive art making. As Mulleady has said, she works with existing languages in order to invent a new one, and her staged tableaux are particularly resonant within the Art Institute galleries, as they&nbsp;rhyme with many works in the collection that have informed the artist.&nbsp; Jill Mulleady: The Passenger&nbsp;is curated by Giampaolo Bianconi, Dittmer Associate Curator, Modern and Contemporary Art. Image: Maldoror,&nbsp;2025Jill MulleadyCourtesy of the artist and Gladstone. Photography by Nicolas Brasseur

Jill Mulleady: The Passenger

Bergman Family GalleriesKenzi Shiokava&nbsp;is the first museum solo exhibition dedicated to artist Kenzi Shiokava (b. 1938, Santa Cruz do Rio Pardo, Brazil; d. 2021, Los Angeles), gathering over fifty sculptures made across five decades, from the 1970s to the 2010s. A second-generation Japanese Brazilian, Shiokava departed São Paulo in 1964—narrowly evading the military coup d’état—and relocated to Los Angeles just months prior to the 1965 Watts Riots. After earning a BFA from the Chouinard Art Institute (now California Institute of the Arts) and an MFA from the Otis Art Institute (now Otis College of Art and Design), he spent the next fifty years working with found materials in Los Angeles while serving as a longtime artist-in-residence at the storied Watts Towers Arts Center, where his peers included assemblage artists John Outerbridge, Noah Purifoy and Betye Saar.Through intuitive acts of carving and arranging, Shiokava unearthed what he described as the “inner movement” of discarded objects, revealing their spiritual vitality and reinvigorating them with life. Deeply attuned to his materials, which ranged from telephone poles to plastic toys, Shiokava allowed them to guide his sculptural process, which he compared to archeology—both patient practices of excavation, recovery and revelation. Reflecting the artist’s career-long embrace of wood carving and assemblage, the exhibition is anchored by two core bodies of work: abstract totems meticulously sculpted from wood and enigmatic box installations animated by miniature figurines, dried plants and stones. The exhibition also underscores the transcultural nature of Shiokava’s practice, which melds the aesthetic sensibilities of wood carving in Japan, assemblage in South Los Angeles and multiple belief systems, including Candomblé, Catholicism and Zen Buddhism.Kenzi Shiokava&nbsp;is organized by Nolan Jimbo, Assistant Curator.

Kenzi Shiokava

<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

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

<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

<a href="https://www.expochicago.com" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">EXPO CHICAGO</a> Contemporary Art Fair showcases leading contemporary and modern art galleries each April at Navy Pier’s Festival Hall, alongside a diverse and inventive program of talks, on-site installations, and public art initiatives. Inaugurated in 2012, EXPO CHICAGO draws upon the city’s robust history as a vibrant international cultural destination, while highlighting the region’s contemporary arts community. In 2023, EXPO CHICAGO was acquired by Frieze, the world’s leading platform for modern and contemporary art. The 14th edition of EXPO CHICAGO takes place on April 8–11, 2027 at Navy Pier's Festival Hall.&nbsp;

EXPO CHICAGO

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

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

Stairwell GalleriesOccupying the three-story stairwell galleries in the MCA,&nbsp;From the Center: Looking at Lucy Lippard&nbsp;examines the wider impact of the research, writings, activism and exhibitions of renowned art historian, critic and curator Lucy Lippard (b. 1937, New York; lives in Galisteo, NM), who pushed the field of art history toward further inclusivity, through the lens of the MCA’s permanent collection. Over the past six decades, Lippard’s multidisciplinary career has been foundational to the histories of Conceptual, Feminist, Minimalist and Land Art practices of the 1960s and 1970s; the representation of artists of color in the Western canon; the intersection of art and activism; and placemaking for and by artists. Lippard’s work is widely appreciated due to its reach beyond the confines of art history to grapple with real world social issues through the lens of visual art and art criticism.&nbsp;From the Center: Looking at Lucy Lippard&nbsp;is split into three sections: “Form &amp; Feminism,” “The Art Worker as Activist” and “Site, Land, Place,” and will include works from the MCA Collection alongside archival materials, interviews, recordings and texts documenting Lippard’s career and work. “Form &amp; Feminism” will highlight Lippard’s efforts to incorporate women artists and issues in the art historical canon—including the publishing of feminist journal&nbsp;Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics, which ran from 1977 to 1993; her activism on behalf of women artists; and her own writing and curated exhibitions, including&nbsp;Twenty-Six Contemporary Women Artists&nbsp;(1971) and&nbsp;From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art&nbsp;(1976). The section “The Art Worker as Activist” will consider how artists are mobilized as activists alongside and as part of their artistic practices, as inspired by Lippard’s work within various activist groups such as the Art Workers Coalition and Ad Hoc Women’s Artist Committee. Lastly, “Site, Land, Place” relates to the politics of space—real, imagined or contested; the land and environment; and the power of placemaking. Lippard wrote several books concerned with these ideas, such as&nbsp;The Lure of the Local&nbsp;(1997);&nbsp;On the Beaten Track: Tourism, Art, and Place&nbsp;(1999);&nbsp;Undermining: A Wild Ride through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West&nbsp;(2014); and two of her storied “Numbers” exhibitions,&nbsp;557,087&nbsp;(1969) and&nbsp;955,000&nbsp;(1970), which included several notable Land artists. Cumulatively, these presentations will provide a concise overview of select overriding themes that have driven Lippard’s practice throughout the arc of her prolific and singular career.Highlighted in the exhibition are over forty artists who have been featured in her scholarly or curatorial work, or are aligned with or inspired by her practice. Participating artists include Lynda Benglis, Andrea Bowers, Judy Chicago, Robert Colescott, Group Material, Fred Lonidier, Howardena Pindell, Robert Smithson, Michelle Stuart and Amanda Williams, among others. The exhibition will be supplemented by public programs, including a symposium, charting Lippard’s influence over several generations of artists, art historians and curators.&nbsp;From the Center: Looking at Lucy Lippard&nbsp;is organized by Jamillah James, Manilow Senior Curator, with Korina Hernandez, Curatorial Assistant.

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