June 2026
June 2026 at a glance: 9 exhibitions opened, 0 closed, and 12 more were on view across the city.

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 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 ChicagoPast
More than 200 works from around the world make up the first exhibition to examine the Abstract Expressionist's drawing practice across his seven-decade career.

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.

Museum of Contemporary PhotographyFreePast
Video, audio and photography by Dammeyer Fellow Lali Khalid, made with CAIR Chicago, exploring belonging and resilience in Muslim life. Shown at Columbia College's Glass Curtain Gallery.

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.

Art Institute of ChicagoPast
Sixty-five artists from more than 23 countries trace how abstraction emerged as a powerful visual language between 1940 and 1970, a period of global upheaval and transformation.

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
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.

Museum of Contemporary Art ChicagoPast
Dance as protest, rhythm as power: the exhibition traces the global impact of Caribbean sound and movement, from Jamaican dancehall to reggaetón.

National Museum of Mexican ArtFreePast
Draws a line between the Mexica chinampas of Xochimilco and the floating gardens now installed in the Chicago River, weighing ecological restoration against pollution and commercialisation.

Field MuseumPast
A rotating Comer Gallery series profiling Field Museum scientists (currently Lesley de Souza and Sara Ruane) following their research journeys, passions and personalities.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.
A short note now and then when something new opens worth your time.