What's on in Chicago

Art Institute of Chicago

The first exhibition of Colombian artist Beatriz González's works on paper: more than 80 works from six decades, many shown publicly for the first time.

Art Institute of Chicago

The museum's 18th-century Neapolitan nativity scene, with more than 200 painted terracotta figures, returns to Gallery 203 for the holidays.

Art Institute of Chicago

Photography, drawing and sculpture by 14 self-made artists, most working outside the gallery and museum system, from the Sandor family collection.

Richard H. Driehaus Museum

The museum's first artist-in-residence turns the 1926 Murphy Auditorium into a site for sculptural installation, sound and dance, unfolding as episodic performances through 2026.

Art Institute of Chicago

Nine rare Saint-Porchaire ceramics of the French Renaissance from a private collection, most on public view for the first time since the late 1800s.

National Museum of Mexican ArtFree

The museum's 40th annual Día de Muertos exhibition looks back through the permanent collection at how the holiday and the museum itself have evolved, with ofrendas, installations and a community memory space.

Art Institute of Chicago

The first comprehensive survey of Lee Miller's photographs in more than 25 years, gathering the major episodes of her singular career from Surrealist portraiture to wartime reportage.

Museum of Contemporary PhotographyFree

Over 110 artists from the MoCP collection imagine the years Emmett Till never had, developed with his cousin Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr.: a creative monument to an unlived life.

Art Institute of Chicago

More than 40 of the ukiyo-e master Kitagawa Utamaro's most celebrated woodblock designs, all drawn from the Art Institute's own Japanese print collection.

Art Institute of Chicago

The first Art Institute show devoted to Cassatt in over 25 years brings together 70 paintings and works on paper from the late 1880s to the early 1900s, her most ambitious and experimental period.

Field Museum

What happened once the dinosaurs were gone: plants and animals reshaped Earth into a lush tropical world of new giants and tiny survivors, told through fossils, touchable casts and immersive media.

Griffin Museum of Science and Industry

The museum's long-running winter display: more than 50 trees decorated by Chicago community volunteers, plus Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and Diwali traditions under the rotunda.

Griffin Museum of Science and Industry

An immersive projection of the Great Green Room from Margaret Wise Brown's bedtime classic, with the science of sleep and dreams and a room you paint digitally.

Chicago Architecture Center

Designed and co-curated by Studio Gang, this show confronts the billion bird collisions with glass each year in the US and presents scalable bird-friendly design for cities.

Chicago History Museum

Dorian Sylvain's immersive installation "We Weave Our Future" answers the Thirteenth Amendment with patterns drawn from quilts made by enslaved people. Final part of US at 250.

Chicago Architecture Center

Co-curated with Openlands in the Usher Lambe Gallery, tracing the regional landscapes that sustain life around Chicago and the decisions that protected, lost or restored them.

Art Institute of Chicago

Jill Mulleady's first solo show at a major museum: about 20 paintings in Gallery 289.

Art Institute of Chicago

An immersive installation of new sculptural objects in which the Haitian American artist explores how iron connects us to histories, the material world, and each other.

Art Institute of Chicago

The museum's first exhibition devoted to the artistic traditions of the SWANA region, with more than 70 embroidered works from the 18th through the 20th century.

Griffin Museum of Science and Industry

A full-scale, fully furnished recreation of the Amsterdam Annex where Anne Frank hid, with more than 100 original objects lent by the Anne Frank House.

Art Institute of Chicago

Karimah Ashadu's 2024 video on the okada motorcycle taxi riders of Lagos and the informal economy around them.

Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

The artist's first solo museum exhibition gathers over 50 sculptures from five decades: abstract totems carved from wood, and box assemblages of toys, dried plants and stones.

National Museum of Mexican ArtFree

More than forty works acquired over sixteen years (photography, painting, sculpture and video) exploring land as a site of belonging, labour and memory, from 19th-century landscapes to contemporary Pilsen.

Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

A new series by the Chicago-based painter, juxtaposing emotions and introducing a flexible structure to his foldable paintings.

Smart Museum of ArtFree

Midwest debut of the Tokyo collective teamLab, tracing 25 years of immersive digital work plus a new commission that dissolves the boundary between viewer and artwork.

National Museum of Mexican ArtFree

Prints, objects and archive from Chicago's Latinx printmaking collective Instituto Gráfico de Chicago, shown with Mexican and Chicago print history from the museum's collection.

Chicago Architecture Center

Six decades of the CAC, from fighting to save historic buildings during urban renewal to shaping design education and advocacy across Chicago. In the Orientation Space.

Art Institute of Chicago

Cokes's first outdoor presentation in Chicago fills the Bluhm Family Terrace with a two-part installation: a billboard viewable from Millennium Park and a freestanding sign, both set to music.

Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

Six artists reclaim forms of slowness that resist the contemporary demand to constantly perform, across painting, sculpture, video and live performance.

Richard H. Driehaus Museum

Paintings from collector M. Christine Schwartz's gift trace Chicago's fine arts from academic naturalism to impressionism across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Field Museum

Fossil Pokémon such as Tyrantrum and Archeops are set side by side with the real fossils that inspired them, including SUE the T. rex. North American debut of the touring Japanese exhibition.

Chicago Architecture Center

Off-site at the 1927 First Presbyterian Church in Woodlawn (6400 S Kimbark Ave): three artists' installations across its grounds and sanctuary, with Arts at First.

Richard H. Driehaus Museum

Thirteen marbles, paintings and archives chart the career of Emma Stebbins, the first woman awarded a public sculpture commission by New York City for Central Park's Bethesda Fountain.

Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

More than 70 works span the Chicago-born artist's career, from his New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club photographs to the Anxious Men and Broken Men series.

Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

The Chicago painter's large-scale Sideline (After Ben Shahn) fills the two-storey entrance atrium: four languid women, limbs entwined, waiting for something that never comes.

Smart Museum of ArtFree

A large-scale site-specific mural for the Smart's Threshold series, using the flat visual language of diagrams and educational charts to map power, labour, housing and inequality as one system.

Smart Museum of ArtFree

A thematic draw from the Smart's permanent collection exploring art and healing across six strands: health, grief, displacement, trauma, mindfulness and protection.

Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

Spanning three floors, this exhibition explores the far-reaching impact of art historian, critic and curator Lucy Lippard through themes found in her work.

Chicago History Museum

Garments and accessories worn by George and Martha Washington, John Adams and Abraham and Mary Lincoln, shown alongside the conservation work that keeps them intact.

Art Institute of Chicago

A 21-panel painting over 100 feet wide carries viewers from the nocturnal solitude of the artist's Kashmiri childhood through the frenzy of the Western art world to a fragile, renewed dawn.

Art Institute of Chicago

More than 50 objects from the Arts of Africa collection show beliefs and values surrounding the body shared across the continent, and the distinct cultural forms those ideas take.