December 2026
December closes Lee Miller's photographs at the Art Institute on the 7th and If Emmett Till Lived at the MoCP on the 19th. Tony Lewis's shorthand drawings open at the Renaissance Society on the 12th. In Hyde Park, teamLab's flowers follow Chicago's sunset, which comes around 4:20, so they go dark before the Smart closes.
The Renaissance SocietyOpens 12 December
Gregg shorthand was built to keep pace with speech; Tony Lewis turns its strokes into graphite drawings, some at wall scale. The 28-word title is the museum's hint that this show about language, power and race is also funny.
Smart Museum of ArtFree
Walk toward a glowing sphere in Massless Suns and Dark Suns and it brightens, setting off its neighbours; the dark ones can't be photographed. Nine installations, all digital, all free.
Museum of Contemporary Art ChicagoUntil 31 January
Smooth wooden totems up to nine feet tall, carved by a man of about five foot three who spent 20 years as Marlon Brando's gardener. Hyperallergic's Lori Waxman wished the studio video "were eight hours long".
Richard H. Driehaus MuseumUntil 18 April
A miner and a sailor in 1860 work clothes stand where neoclassical sculpture put gods. Thirteen marbles make the first museum show for the woman behind Central Park's Bethesda Fountain; Artnet called it "a momentous rediscovery".
Chicago Architecture CenterUntil 3 January
A case of birds killed flying into Chicago buildings sits a few steps from the fix: Aqua Tower's patterned glass. Sun-Times critic Lee Bey found it "lively and informative", though it ends with a lobbying pitch.
Museum of Contemporary PhotographyCloses 19 December
In Stephen Marc's 1988 photograph a Chicago father has just thrown his son into the air; the curator asked whether Till was the boy or the father. More than 110 uncaptioned photographs imagine the life he never got.
Art Institute of ChicagoCloses 7 December
Near the end hangs Miller's 1945 telegram to Vogue: "I IMPLORE YOU TO BELIEVE THAT THIS IS TRUE." Nearly 150 photographs lead there, from her modelling and Man Ray solarizations to Buchenwald and Dachau, often shot from ten feet away.
Griffin Museum of Science and IndustryUntil 31 January
A bookcase stands ajar; behind it is a full-scale, furnished copy of the Amsterdam Annex, Hollywood clippings above Anne's cot. Third Coast Review found the Annex "almost unbearable to traverse knowing the eventual outcome".
The Renaissance SocietyFree
Chicago artist Tony Lewis builds large graphite-and-paper drawings out of stenographic shorthand, turning the marks of written language into abstraction and a comment on social power.
Art Institute of Chicago
27 prints placing Japan's sōsaku-hanga (creative print) artists among the global postwar avant-garde, from the museum's Asian art and prints collections.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
A new series by the Chicago-based painter, juxtaposing emotions and introducing a flexible structure to his foldable paintings.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 thematic draw from the Smart's permanent collection exploring art and healing across six strands: health, grief, displacement, trauma, mindfulness and protection.
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.
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.
A short note now and then when something new opens worth your time.
