January 2027
Rashid Johnson's hidden piano plays on at the MCA while January brings two openings: Testaments to the Beautyful Ones at the Museum of Contemporary Photography and the Black Creativity juried show at the Griffin. In Hyde Park, teamLab's flowers at the Smart go dark with Chicago's early sunsets. Eight picks, three of them free.
Museum of Contemporary Art ChicagoUntil 25 April
Antoine's Organ, a steel grid of plants, books and video screens, hides a piano that musicians play from inside. Around it hang 70-plus works from the Chicago-born artist's career. ARTnews called the larger Guggenheim version "revelatory".
Art Institute of ChicagoUntil 1 March
It starts with a badly printed newspaper photo González copied in 1965, distortions and all. More than 80 drawings and prints follow her from crime pages to presidents and the victims of Colombia's political violence. Expect hard subjects.
Smart Museum of ArtUntil 21 February
Walk toward a glowing sphere in Massless Suns and Dark Suns and it brightens, setting off its neighbours. Nine digital installations, free, and one floral piece tracks Chicago's real sunrise and sunset. Skip it if you want objects over projections.
Museum of Contemporary PhotographyOpens 21 January
The title nods to Ayi Kwei Armah's 1968 novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Eight photographers and six writers turn to communities across Africa, through gender, spirituality, displacement and self-representation. Entry is free.
Griffin Museum of Science and IndustryOpens 18 January
The longest-running exhibition of Black art in the United States, juried from work by Black artists across the country. An open juried show, so expect range rather than one curator's argument.
National Museum of Mexican ArtFree
Xiuhcóatl de Resistencia, a linocut cut by collective members, packs the Mexica fire serpent with migrant mothers and protest scenes. More than 50 prints sit beside older ones by José Guadalupe Posada. Printmaking as organising, and free.
Richard H. Driehaus MuseumUntil 18 April
A marble miner and sailor in the work clothes of their day: Artnet calls them the first known sculptures of American workers. Stebbins made Central Park's Bethesda Fountain, then vanished from the record. Artnet called the show "a momentous rediscovery".
Chicago History MuseumCloses 31 January
Look for "Sisterhood Is Blooming", an orange and purple poster stamped only CWGC, for the Chicago Women's Graphic Collective. More than 100 posters, buttons and fliers cover fair housing, Black Power, the anti-war movement, and women's and gay liberation.
Griffin Museum of Science and Industry
The longest-running exhibition of Black art in the United States, presenting juried work by Black artists from across the country as part of the museum's Black Creativity programme.
Museum of Contemporary PhotographyFree
Eight photographers and six writers document resilient communities across Africa, bridging postcolonial critique with contemporary hope through gender, spirituality, displacement and self-representation.
Art Institute of Chicago
A yearlong photography and media show on seasonal change, with some works rotating in and out as the year turns and others on view throughout.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
