Art Institute of ChicagoGrant Park / Loop

Jill Mulleady: The Passenger

Now showing19 September 2026 – 18 January 2027$32

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

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On now All of November 2026

In The Dead Cat, a scrawny corpse slumps over a half-drawn desk the way Marat does in David's painting, and it's painted on the back of a pane of glass. From the window side, daylight washes it out, so you walk round the back to find the cat.

This is Jill Mulleady's first solo show at the Art Institute: 16 paintings around the walls of the Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman Gallery, on the Modern Wing's second floor, with two glass works standing mid-room. Most are oil on velvet, which Newcity's Michelle Grabner says makes the colour glow like a velvet Elvis. W Magazine traces the loungers in Venice or Las Vegas to Seurat's Grande Jatte, which hangs in this museum.

Critics split. Femme Art Review called her "an artist certain in her choices"; the Harper Review headlined its take "Pass up on The Passenger". Grabner found the few linen paintings "comparatively labored", so give the velvet ones your time. The show is included in museum admission.

Look for

The Dead Cat
Walk behind the pane of glass to see a scrawny dead cat, head and leg slumped over a desk shape borrowed from David's Death of Marat.
Venice or Las Vegas
Young people lounge by dark water, lit by a burning stack of books, while a glittering city shines across it with no boat or bridge to reach it.
Love Streams
Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes clinch on a red, neon-lit boulevard among cars and pedestrians, in a painting named after their 1984 film.
The Passenger
The wall-filling title triptych: a woman and a man help an old man along a moonlit walkway, past a heap of grimacing faces and red streetlights.
Maldoror
A figure in blue lies on the floor giving off psychedelic fire, small skeletons dance on him, and a crowd of white-faced clowns stands over him.