Alex Katz @ Gray Gallery, Chicago - "White Lotus" Exhibition

Alex Katz: White Lotus

Gray Gallery, Chicago

July 11 - September 20, 2025

Though titled after the hit television show about a resort hotel and the psychosocial relations of its guests and employees, White Lotus by Alex Katz bears no – or perhaps a mysterious – relation to HBO’s dark comedy. Opened at GRAY’s Chicago gallery on July 11, 2025, two weeks before the artist turns 98 years old, White Lotus is a testament not only to Katz’s nonstop creative output, but also his status as one of the most groundbreaking American artists of both the 20th and 21st centuries. 

Throughout his many years of relentless production, Alex Katz has propelled American painting through his cool, flat depictions of figures and landscapes, and yet, he has also managed to avoid the pigeonholings of Pop, Realism, and Minimalism. As Calvin Tomkins noted in his 2018 profile of Alex Katz for The New Yorker, “He has always had his own direction, which has not been the direction of mainstream art in any of the last seven decades.” This path has always been guided, in part, by the tools of cinema, through his use of monumental canvas, dramatic lighting, and repeating figures.  

Painted in 2023, the year of the artist’s celebrated Guggenheim retrospective, the paintings in this exhibition do not depict characters or scenes from The White Lotus television show – in fact, Katz has only watched part of a single episode. Known for painting people close to him – most notably his wife Ada, son Vincent, and daughter-in-law Vivien-- the figures painted by Katz in this suite are strangers by comparison. They are based on photographs he took while on a beach in Maine, where Katz has kept a summer home since 1954. Each of the eleven paintings in White Lotus portray two beachgoing figures, a man and a woman, with three different pairs depicted. 

Closely cropped onto the figures’ faces and torsos – a technique partly inspired by Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni – the paintings contain enigmatic atmospheres, alternating between tension and sensuality, delivered in Katz’s signature brushstroke: broad and dispassionate, a seamless marriage of representation and abstraction. As curator and writer Dieter Roelstraete notes in his essay for the forthcoming exhibition catalogue, the figures “aren’t really meant to be ‘people,’ but symbols instead – though symbols of what, exactly, remains eerily, satisfyingly unresolved, frozen in the blinding glare of New England’s summer light.” 

Alex Katz: White Lotus is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Dieter Roelstraete, Curator at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at University of Chicago.

ARTIST ALEX KATZ

Alex Katz (American, b.1927) is one of the most recognized and widely exhibited artists of his generation. Coming of age between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, Katz began exhibiting his work in 1954, and since that time he has produced a celebrated body of work that includes paintings, drawings, sculpture, and prints. His earliest work took inspiration from various aspects of mid-century American culture and society, including television, film, and advertising, and over the past five and a half decades he has established himself as a preeminent painter of modern life, whose distinctive portraits and lyrical landscapes bear a flattened surface and consistent economy of line. Utilizing characteristically wide brushstrokes, large swathes of color, and refined compositions, Katz created what art historian Robert Storr called “a new and distinctive type of realism in American art which combines aspects of both abstraction and representation.”

Since the 1950s, Alex Katz’s work has been the subject of more than 200 solo exhibitions and nearly 500 group exhibitions around the world. His work can be found in nearly 100 public collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Tate Gallery, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others. In 2024, Alex Katz received a National Medal of Arts. 

GRAY CHICAGO

2044 West Carroll Avenue, Chicago, Il 60612

www.richardgraygallery.com

Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me @ MCA Chicago - Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me 

MCA Chicago 

Through October 19, 2025

Installation view, Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me, 

MCA Chicago, February 1–October 19, 2025.

Photo: @bob.mov (Robert Chase Heishman)

Installation view, Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me, 

MCA Chicago, February 1–October 19, 2025.

Photo: @bob.mov (Robert Chase Heishman)

Installation view, Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me, 

MCA Chicago, February 1–October 19, 2025.

Photo: @bob.mov (Robert Chase Heishman)

Installation view, Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me, 

MCA Chicago, February 1–October 19, 2025.

Photo: @bob.mov (Robert Chase Heishman)

Installation view, Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me, 

MCA Chicago, February 1–October 19, 2025.

Photo: @bob.mov (Robert Chase Heishman)

Installation view, Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me, 

MCA Chicago, February 1–October 19, 2025.

Photo: @bob.mov (Robert Chase Heishman)

The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago presents the exhibition Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me. This is a major survey of renowned artist WAFAA BILAL (b. 1966, Najaf, Iraq; lives in New York, NY). Crucially, the exhibition takes a comprehensive look at Bilal’s myriad practice, highlighting the development of his work across decades and placing it in conversation with broader art histories. It also explores cultural cannibalism—that is, how culture (specifically the culture of the other) is used, disassembled, and consumed.

Working in performance, sculpture, and with online and interactive technologies, Bilal’s interdisciplinary practice investigates the dynamic between international and interpersonal politics while highlighting the tension between the United States, which he has deemed the “comfort zone,” and the “conflict zone” of Iraq. Through methods such as using his own body to interrogate notions of power and using innovative technologies to rectify acts of cultural destruction, Wafaa Bilal shows us what it means to consciously engage across cultures while highlighting negative global implications of consumption, exploitation, and profiteering.

The exhibition is organized into five immersive sections, each of which focuses on a major work from Bilal’s practice. Artworks on display include a reconstruction of a room in Chicago’s FLATFILE Gallery that the artist confined himself to for a month-long performance in Domestic Tension (2007). During this performance, Wafaa Bilal invited the audience to shoot at him with a paintball gun that was operated virtually by viewers who could also interact with him via camera feed and live chat. Over the course of thirty days, a total of 60,000 shots were fired by "shooters" from 128 countries. 

Installation view, Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me, 

MCA Chicago, February 1–October 19, 2025.

Photo: @bob.mov (Robert Chase Heishman)

Installation view, Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me, 

MCA Chicago, February 1–October 19, 2025.

Photo: @bob.mov (Robert Chase Heishman)

Installation view, Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me, 

MCA Chicago, February 1–October 19, 2025.

Photo: @bob.mov (Robert Chase Heishman)

Installation view, Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me, 

MCA Chicago, February 1–October 19, 2025.

Photo: @bob.mov (Robert Chase Heishman)

Installation view, Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me, 

MCA Chicago, February 1–October 19, 2025.

Photo: @bob.mov (Robert Chase Heishman)

Installation view, Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me, 

MCA Chicago, February 1–October 19, 2025.

Photo: @bob.mov (Robert Chase Heishman)

Also included in the MCA exhibition is a large-scale, towering video displaying images from Bilal’s year-long performance 3rdi (2010–11), wherein Wafaa Bilal surgically implanted a camera into the back of his head that, every minute on the minute, captured photographs. The photos included in the MCA display correspond to the minute, hour, and day they were taken.

Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me also presents Thumbsat Satellite (2024), which comprises a golden bust of Saddam Hussein fixed to a satellite and launched into Earth’s orbit as part of the exhibition. Developed as a critique of the former Iraqi president’s rumored desire to launch a bust of himself into space, the work will also feature a number of in-gallery components, including a model of the satellite and bust and a way for visitors to track the artwork’s location through live-captured images before it is destroyed upon re-entry into the atmosphere.

Additionally, the exhibition features In a Grain of Wheat: Cultivating Hybrid Futures in Ancient Seed DNA, Bilal’s response to ISIS’s destruction of the Winged Bull of Nineveh sculpture, or Lamassu, in 2015. The piece involves inserting high-resolution 3D scans of the sculpture into the DNA of heirloom Iraqi wheat seeds. A commission by the MCA see the project activated in a new, sculptural form, which considers if it is possible for a wheat seed to transform terrorist violence into restorative agency.

The exhibition is accompanied by a major publication, the first to survey multiple projects by the visionary artist.

Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me is curated by Bana Kattan, Pamela Alper Associate Curator, with Iris Colburn, Curatorial Associate.

WAFAA BILAL

Image courtesy of the artist

WAFAA BILAL (b. 1966, Najaf, Iraq; lives in New York, NY) is known internationally for his online performative and interactive works provoking dialogue about international and interpersonal politics. Bilal's work explores tensions between the cultural spaces he occupies—his home in the “comfort zone” of the US and his consciousness in the “conflict zone” in Iraq. For his 2007 installation, Domestic Tension, Wafaa Bilal spent a month in Chicago's FLATFILE Gallery where people could shoot him via a remote-access paintball gun. The Chicago Tribune called it "one of the sharpest works of political art to be seen in a long time"—naming him 2008 Artist of the Year. That same year, City Lights published Shoot an Iraqi: Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun about Bilal's life and Domestic Tension. His work was part of the Iranian pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale.

Wafaa Bilal's work is in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL; MATHAF: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha,

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART CHICAGO - MCA CHICAGO

220 East Chicago Avenue, Chicago, IL

mcachicago.org

Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me, MCA Chicago, February 1 – October 19, 2025

Cameron Gainer: Temporal Dispersions @ Engage Projects, Chicago

Cameron Gainer

Temporal Dispersions

Engage Projects, Chicago

April 4 - May 10, 2025

CAMERON GAINER

Process photo courtesy of Cameron Gainer

“In many ways, every piece of landscape art is a failure of representation. What is fact are the ingredients—light, space, time. What's not is each artist’s subjective interpretation. These landscapes, entropic cyanotypes, eschew affectation and embrace the turbulent, raw, and chaotic qualities of nature, with the result reflecting the process from which the image is formed.” — Cameron Gainer

ENGAGE Projects presents Cameron Gainer’s solo Chicago debut with the exhibition “Temporal Dispersions.” Using the open desert as his studio space, this new photo-based work elucidates enduring themes in Gainer’s art, addressing the ineffable nature of time and the mysteries of perception—recurrent themes that span his artistic career.

Over the last two decades, Cameron Gainer has combined scientific and artistic inquiry in his expansive practice. His past works include using the world’s most light-sensitive camera to capture bioluminescence, casting time out of 4-billion-year-old meteorites, and painting photo-realistic canvases based on satellite images of impact craters named for notable artists, scientists, and thinkers.

A conceptual landscape artist at heart, this recent work, the Temporal Dispersions, pushes the limits of photography in what Cameron Gainer calls “an interrogation of the photographic process and the representation of landscape at the edge of form.”

Working in the arroyos (seasonal riverbeds) of the Sonoran desert, Cameron Gainer begins creating these works by marking a section of land the size of the photographic material. He carefully removes the desert topsoil, which consists of insects, bones, plant material, scat, and primarily silica—the raw material from which photographic lenses are made. He then places this material in a temporary container and lays the photographic substrate onto the prepared ground.

The artist then acts as a human hourglass, letting time pass as he methodically pours the removed soil onto the surface of the paper or fabric. This durational element allows the light-sensitive material underneath to slowly record the time it takes for the displaced landscape to settle and be “exposed” by the elements of gravity, wind, time, and light. The earth acts as the camera, the raw silica the lens, and the desert functions as the focal point.

For the work’s final stages, Cameron Gainer removes the photographic material from the soil and returns the land to its original condition, removing any trace of a human presence. The resultant images are vibrant blue materially direct abstractions, the color of the sky and the ocean—the earth’s counterparts. Simultaneously evoking the most advanced imagery of deep space and a birds-eye view of the melting arctic ice, these meditations resonate with our contemporary ecological condition. For Gainer, the process remains a point of emphasis: he establishes the photographic conditions for an image to be formed, but the results are created by the elements and the landscape itself.

CAMERON GAINER is the founder of The Third Rail, an internationally distributed publication devoted to a discussion of modern and contemporary art, politics, philosophy, and culture. He has had solo museum exhibitions at The New Temporary Contemporary at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, and the Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Group exhibitions include “Spectators, Rendered and Regulated” at Koenig and Clinton Gallery New York, New York; “Midnight Party” at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; “The Paranoia of Time” at Carter & Citizen Gallery, Los Angeles; “The Moon is a Lantern” at Lisa Sette Gallery, Phoenix; and “Portal” at McClain Gallery, Houston. Awards and fellowships include a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, Pollock-Krasner grant, James L. McKnight Fellowship, and a Jerome Foundation grant for research.

ENGAGE PROJECTS

864 North Ashland Avenue, Chicago, IL 60622

www.engage-projects.com

Expo Chicago 2025 Hightlights

EXPO CHICAGO 2025 

Navy Pier’s Festival Hall

April 24 – 27, 2025

Featuring over 170 leading galleries from 36 countries and 93 cities, this year’s fair debuts CONTRAST, a new section curated by Lauren Haynes, and showcases a special collaboration with the Galleries Association of Korea (GaoK), alongside standout presentations across the core Galleries section, EXPOSURE and PROFILE. 

“It is a privilege to welcome such a remarkable lineup of artists and galleries to EXPO CHICAGO 2025,” said Tony Karman, President and Director of EXPO CHICAGO. “As part of the Frieze network of fairs, EXPO CHICAGO showcases dynamic presentations that amplify Chicago’s standing as a premier cultural destination. Our sincere gratitude goes to Northern Trust, whose support allows us to continue our commitment to fostering meaningful dialogue through both contemporary and modern art.”

EXPO CHICAGO 2025: CONTRAST

Curated by Lauren Haynes, Head Curator, Governors Island Arts and Vice President for Arts and Culture at the Trust for Governors Island, CONTRAST brings together eight contemporary galleries each presenting artists whose work explores contrasts in culture, identity, and experience.

“CONTRAST will include a vibrant selection of galleries featuring work by artists, including Devan Shimoyama, Esther Mahlangu, Wangari Mathenge, Fahamu Pecou and Chico da Silva, whose work highlights diverse perspectives through visual storytelling” said Lauren Haynes. “This special section seeks to explore contrasts in culture, identity, and experience, with each artist contributing their unique voice to the dialogue. CONTRAST is designed to spark conversation around the artists and artworks on view.”

The full lineup of presentations includes:

- A special presentation by Gray titled So Be It! Asé! Photographic Echoes of FESTAC '77 featuring photographs by members of Chicago’s Black Arts Movement Roy Lewis, Bob Crawford, and K. Kofi Moyo. The presentation is curated by Chicago-based art historian Romi Crawford and unveils documentation of the U.S. delegation to FESTAC '77, the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, held in Lagos, Nigeria.

- A presentation by Jenkins Johnson Gallery of paintings & painted sculptural objects by multidisciplinary artist and cultural ambassador Dr. Esther Mahlangu, who draws from the abstract geometric mural tradition of the Ndebele people of South Africa; pseudoabstract, organic fibers sculptures by Nnenna Okore; expressionistic representational paintings by Enrico Riley; gestural abstract paintings by Patrick Alston; and poetic, traditional black and white photographs by Andre D. Wagner.

- A solo presentation of new paintings by Chicago-based, Kenyan artist Wangari Mathenge presented by Pippy Houldsworth Gallery. The new body of work titled ReMembering delves into an expansive study of Kenyan, specifically Kikuyu, culture, history and language within a social and political context impacted by the legacy of colonialism.

- Work by Brazilian Indigenous artist Chico da Silva, known for his vibrant portrayals of Amazonian creatures, mythological figures, and personal visions, presented by Galeria MaPa.

- A dual-artist presentation featuring Mexican sculptor Paula Cortazar and French textile artist Isabelle D presented by Gallery Nosco.

- A presentation by De Buck Gallery of several newer works from Devan Shimoyama’s Barbershop and Tarot Series as well as a selection of brand new works by Gommaar Gilliams.

- A group presentation featuring artists Fahamu Pecou, Cosmo Whyte, and Thornton Dial presented by Johnson Lowe.

- A group presentation by Melrose Gallery featuring Pascal Konan, Papytsho Mafolo, Mederic Turay and Clint Strydom.

EXPO CHICAGO 2025: EXPOSURE

Curated for the second year by Rosario Güiraldes, Curator of Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, EXPOSURE spotlights solo and two-artist presentations from galleries ten years and younger. This year’s focus includes galleries from Latin America, particularly Argentina and Brazil, alongside emerging Chicago-based galleries.

Highlights include:

- New paintings by abstract contemporary artist Richard Tinkler, presented by 56 Henry.

- A dual-artist booth featuring Los Angeles based sculptors Maddy Inez and Josh Cloud that engages with elemental materials sourced from the earth in Southern California, presented by Megan Mulrooney.

- A dual-artist presentation of Jimmy Beauquesne and Tyler Christopher Brown presented by Fragment.

- A solo presentation with Chicago-based artist Soo Shin featuring a large-scale installation alongside sculptures and canvases, presented by PATRON.

- A dual-artist exhibition of Kwaku Osei Owusu Achim and Tariq Oliver, two emerging artists with a shared reflection on language, meaning, and memory, presented by Omenai Gallery.

- A solo-booth of Gabriel Martinez. who had an exhibition at the Leather Archives & Museum in Chicago this year, presented by Bill Arning.

- A solo presentation of renowned Brazilian artist Denise Milan, by Zielinsky.

- A solo booth of Jamaican artist Simon Benjamin presented by Swivel Gallery exploring the ocean as a framework for investigating trade, ocean travel, importdominant consumerism, among other neo-colonial relationships.

- A dual-artist presentation by Rivalry Projects of midwestern artists Jen Everett and Ryan Patrick Krueger considering knowledge in queer and Black communities.

EXPO CHICAGO 2025: ACROSS THE FAIR

Notable solo and dual-artist presentations include:

- A selection of iconic early photographs by Rashid Johnson alongside works by Ebony G. Patterson, presented by moniquemeloche.

- A selection of works by Sergio Sister and Thiago Barbalho presented by Nara Roesler. The booth features works produced by Sergio Sister between 1967 and 1971, created during his confinement as a political prisoner during Brazil's military dictatorship.

- An installation by acclaimed interdisciplinary artist Deborah Oropallo presented by Catharine Clark Gallery.

- A solo presentation by ACA Galleries of multimedia Afro-Caribbean American portrait artist, Kandy G Lopez, in her first exhibition in Chicago.

- A solo presentation of renowned artist Juanita Guccione by Weinstein Gallery.

- A solo booth of new sculptures and prints by Vietnam born artist Vy Trinh who lives and works in Philadelphia, presented by Galerie Quynh.

Highlights of group or thematic presentations from notable galleries include: 

- A thematic presentation of artists Melanie Flood, Amanda Ross-Ho, and Evan La Londe by ILY2 considering the prop as a tool of destabilization.

- Michael Rosenfeld Gallery will present the work of Romare Bearden, Bob Thompson, Betye Saar, and Beauford Delaney.

- A presentation by Rhona Hoffman of politically engaged artists centered around three themes: Nature & the Environment with Spencer Finch, Julia Fish, Jacob Hashimoto, Judy Ledgerwood, and Martha Tuttle; Mass Media & Identity with Derrick Adams and Amanda Williams; and War, Violence & Inequality with Gordon Parks, Bassim AlShaker, and Brian Maguire.

- Prints by esteemed contemporary artists Katherine Bernhardt, Elizabeth Peyton, Tschabalala Self, Cecily Brown, and Mel Bochner, presented by Two Palms.

- Works by color-field artists Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and Kenneth Noland presented by Yares Art.

- A presentation of work by historic 20th century artists Agnes Pelton, Louise Nevelson, and Raymond Johnson, focusing on desert transcendentalism, presented by Addison Rowe Gallery.

- A presentation of historic Afro-Brazilian artists Agnaldo Manuel dos Santos, Mestre Didi, Heitor dos Prazeres, and Rubem Valentim alongside contemporary artists Lídia Lisboa, Maxwell Alexandre, No Martins, and Sidney Amaral, considering ancestral power of the Black community in Brazil, presented by Millan and Almeida & Dale.

- A selection of works by prominent Australian First Nations artists Emily Kam Kngwarray, Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri, Rover Thomas Joolama, Barbara Weir and Naata Nungurrayi paired with legendary Dutch artists Karel Appel and Marcel Pinas, presented by SmithDavidson.

- A reimagination of the 1946 art brut installation at Galerie Rene Drouin, inspecting Jean Dubuffet’s relationship to Chicago and Chicago’s relationship to ‘outsider’ art, presented by The Gallery of Everything.

EXPO CHICAGO 2025: HIGHLIGHTS FROM KOREA

In a significant new partnership, EXPO CHICAGO introduces a collaboration with the Galleries Association of Korea (GaoK), to present a selection of 20 leading Korean galleries within the fair’s core Galleries section. This initiative, supported by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and Korea Arts Management Service, builds on the successful synergy between Kiaf SEOUL and Frieze. 

A selection of highlights includes:

- Digital prints by YOON Hyangro that transform pop culture imagery into abstraction by erasing characters and text presented by ONE & J. Gallery.

- PYO Gallery will present The Stillness of Water: Tschang-Yeul Kim’s Final Reflections on the Flow of Life, prominently featuring the artist’s images of water droplets and the contemplations on the concept of water itself.

- A group exhibition From Blindness to Awareness presented by Lee & Bae featuring mixed media works by atelierJAK, Hyojin Park, Lee Sangmin, Jinwook Yeom, and Janghee Jang that explore transformation and perception, including Yeom’s laborintensive embroidery-like paintings.

- Works by Korean artists Jimok Choi, Suzanne Song, and Lee Jaeseok, Kim Doki, Belgian artist Koen Van Den Broek, and Japanese artist Yuichi Hirako, presented by Gallery Baton.

- Abstract paintings by Kwak Hoon and Lee Jung-ji that explore human affairs through layered textures and expressive forms presented by Sun Gallery.

- Masterpieces of six Korean masters Park Seobo, Lee Ufan, and Yun Hyongkeun, presented by WELLSIDE Gallery.

- The works of Yoo Geun-young, a mid-career artist from Daejeon who captures Korea's turbulent history through unfamiliar shapes, vivid colors, and contrasting textures, presented by Gana Art.

- Oil and mixed media impasto paintings by Lee Jaehyun that use thick layers of matiere to evoke personal memories and emotional landscapes presented by GalleryJoeun.

- Hyper-realistic oil and sand paintings on board by Kangyong Kim that simulate photographic realism while questioning perception and illusion presented by The Columns Gallery.

EXPO CHICAGO 2025: PROFILE

PROFILE presents solo booths and focused projects by established international galleries. Showcasing ambitious installations and tightly focused thematic exhibitions, this section features major projects by a single artist or collective.

Presentation highlights include:

- Corbett vs. Dempsey will present a solo booth featuring a selection of historical prints by Diane Simpson. Created over a period from the mid 1970s to the early 1980s, most of these extraordinary works on paper have never been exhibited. Deploying various techniques including collagraphy and collage, the works' images consist of some of the same types of forms Simpson would explore over the subsequent five decades: architectural shapes and ideas drawn from women's clothing. The earliest prints are uncommonly vivid, later ones more subdued, in browns, blue, and grey tones. Made in tiny editions, some in fact unique, these printworks allude directly to the artist's work in three dimensions; one of them was designed to be cut out and folded into a kind of origami sculpture. Diane Simpson (b. 1935) is one of the great artists to emerge from the Imagist period of Chicago art, however, although she studied with Ray Yoshida and was dear friends with Barbara Rossi and Christina Ramberg, she was not herself an Imagist. Her earliest shows were at the legendary Phyllis Kind Gallery, and she has continued to make all her work in her studio in Wilmette. Simpson will be the subject of a major retrospective starting in 2026 at the Sara Hildén Museum in Tempere, Finland, traveling to Mumok in Vienna, Austria in 2027. In October of this year, on its Bluhm Terrace, the Art Institute of Chicago will present Simpson's first ever exhibition of outdoor sculpture.

- A solo presentation of new paintings by Sam Jablon presented by The Pit loosely rooted in themes of lightness and frivolity with mantras such as “No Bad Days” and “Don’t Panic” adding both humor and levity to the work.

- A solo presentation by Charlie James of new paintings and drawings by Manuel López informedf elements found around his environment: from his home, his neighborhood, and studio.

- New work by Los Angeles-based artist Ben Crase presented by PIERMARQ*. Born in the midwest, Crase invents whimsical scenes inspired by his hometown of Butte, Montana and his subjects are living testaments to the eccentricities of the isolated area.

- A solo-booth of Chicago-born Caitlin Cherry by The Hole.

- A large scale installative booth of work by Sami Tsang featuring a free-standing ceramic work and wall drawing by Claire Oliver Gallery.

- New sculptures made with hair-bonding glue by Trinidadian-American artist Allana Clarke, presented by Library Street Collective.

- A solo display of geometric works by Italian artist Esther Stocker presented by Alberta Pane.

EXPO CHICAGO 2025

expochicago.com

Yoko Ono @ MCA Chicago - Museum of Contemporary Art - "Music of the Mind" - Exhibition Overview + Biography

Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind

Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

October 18, 2025 – February 22, 2026

Yoko Ono

Cut Piece, 1964 

Performance view,

New Works by Yoko Ono, 

Carnegie Recital Hall, New York, NY, March 21, 1965

Photo © Minoru Niizuma

Yoko Ono with Glass Hammer, 1967, 

from Half-A-Wind Show, 

Lisson Gallery, London, UK, 1967.

Artwork © Yoko Ono. Photo © Clay Perry

Yoko Ono

FLY (still), 1970–71

16mm film (color, mono sound)

© Yoko Ono

The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago announced Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind, opening October 2025. The MCA is the exclusive US venue for this comprehensive solo exhibition dedicated to artist, musician, and activist YOKO ONO (b. 1933, Tokyo, Japan; lives in New York, NY). Traveling from Tate Modern in London, where it enjoyed record attendance, and in close collaboration with Ono’s studio, this groundbreaking retrospective covers seventy years of Ono’s trailblazing career, with over 200 works including participatory instruction pieces and scores, installations, a curated music room, films, music and photography, and archival materials. The exhibition reveals Ono’s innovative approach to language, art and participation that continues to speak to the present moment.

Participation is an important feature of Yoko Ono’s vision as an artist, which is why visitors will be able to partake in several interactive, instruction-based artworks throughout Music of the Mind. This exhibition underscores Ono’s legacy of radical performance and her significant and influential contributions to visual art, including Fluxus and Conceptualism; music; film, and activism. The MCA is proud to welcome this timely exhibition, spotlighting Ono’s revelatory art from the last seven decades.

“We are thrilled to present Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind here at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago—a celebration of Ono’s expansive practice which continues to challenge the boundaries of artist and audience,” Pritzker Director Madeleine Grynsztejn said. “This exhibition underscores the avant-garde and interdisciplinary roots that made the MCA what it is today—our first performance in 1967 featured Fluxus artists. We’re overjoyed to bring Ono’s work to the MCA, a museum that so truly aligns with her practice and overlaps with her history.”

Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind documents the artist’s career starting with the mid-1950s, exploring her pivotal role in avant-garde circles in New York, Tokyo, and London, including the development of her ‘instruction pieces’, and the active role she played in the formation of Fluxus, the loose art collective and movement founded in New York in the early 1960s. The exhibition highlights key works from across her decades-long career, including her performance Cut Piece (1964), considered a landmark in performance and feminist art; her collaborations with notable musicians such as John Cage, Ornette Coleman, and her late husband, John Lennon; selected activations of instruction-based art from her influential book Grapefruit (1964); her innovative films of the 1960s and 70s including FLY (1970–71) and her banned Film No.4 (Bottoms) (1966–67) which she created as a ‘petition for peace’; recent works such as her ongoing Wish Tree installation, (1996-present); and public artworks that are emblematic of Ono’s commitment to peace activism.

The exhibition features several participatory artworks, such as Painting to Hammer a Nail (1961/1966), Bag Piece (1964), and White Chess Set (1966), among others. Later works like Add Color (Refugee Boat) (1960/2016) encourage guests to write their hopes and beliefs on a white boat and its surroundings, while the installation My Mommy Is Beautiful (2004) gives the public an opportunity to share thoughts about their relationship to their mothers and motherhood and attach photographs of their mother. Additionally, there will be public activations of Ono’s peace-driven artworks on billboards throughout the city of Chicago and on the MCA’s premises.

“Yoko Ono is a wildly influential and significant figure in performance, conceptualism, music, and activism. She has inspired generations of audiences to think differently about the everyday and seeing art,” said Manilow Senior Curator Jamillah James. “It is an honor to host this wide-ranging exhibition, which is a critical opportunity that invites the public to deeply engage with Ono’s many important contributions to visual art in new and exciting ways."

Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind is organized by Tate Modern, London in collaboration with Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf and Gropius Bau, Berlin and curated by Juliet Bingham, Curator, International Art, Tate Modern with Andrew de Brún, Assistant Curator, International Art, Tate Modern. The MCA presentation is organized (curated) by Jamillah James, Manilow Senior Curator with Korina Hernandez, Curatorial Assistant.

YOKO ONO: ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

Yoko Ono is an artist, musician, and activist.

Born in Tokyo, 1933, Ono grew up in Japan, with periods spent abroad in San Francisco and New York. She was the first woman admitted to the philosophy program at Gakushuin University in Tokyo, where she studied before moving to New York in 1953 to attend Sarah Lawrence College.

In 1956, she settled in Manhattan with her then husband, composer Toshi Ichiyanagi. Immersed in a community of artists and composers, Ono began to develop her own art practice, often in the form of instructions that invited the viewer’s participation. In 1960, she rented a loft on Chambers Street in Lower Manhattan and began organizing performances and events in the space with La Monte Young, becoming a vital part of the New York art and music scene.

In 1961, Ono’s first solo exhibition was held at George Maciunas’ AG Gallery in New York. Painting to Be Stepped On, a work of canvas placed on the floor with a card inviting the viewer to step on it, was one of several Instruction Paintings exhibited. Later that year, she gave a performance at Carnegie Recital Hall that included works involving movement, sound, and voice, such as, AOS – To David Tudor, and A Grapefruit in the World of Park.

In March 1962, Ono returned to Tokyo, where she debuted new performances at the Sogetsu Art Center, including The Pulse, and exhibited her Instructions for Paintings, a progression from works shown at AG Gallery. These works, comprised only of written instructions, marked a key moment in the history of conceptual art. Later that year, she performed with John Cage and David Tudor on a concert tour throughout Japan. In 1964, Ono performed Cut Piece and Bag Piece in Kyoto and Tokyo, and self-published Grapefruit, her foundational book of instructions.

In the fall of 1964, Ono returned to New York, continuing to perform and stage events, and pioneering new ways of disseminating her art through advertising and postcard events. She also began making her own films, including Film No. 4, Match and Eyeblink.

In September 1966, Ono was invited to London to perform and lecture in the Destruction in Art Symposium. Remaining in London, she had a solo exhibition at Indica Gallery and Lisson Gallery the following year, showing new conceptual object-based works such as White Chess Set, Apple, and Half-A-Room. During this period, she continued to make films, including a new version of Film No. 4 (Bottoms), and presented a series of performances on her concert tour Music of the Mind.

At her Indica Gallery exhibition, Ono met John Lennon, beginning a personal and artistic relationship in art, music, and activism. By 1969 their conceptual events to promote peace had become world-wide news, including the WAR IS OVER! If you want it campaign, and Bed-In for Peace, held in an Amsterdam hotel room during their honeymoon in 1969 and later in Montreal.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s Ono and Lennon’s activities centered primarily on music, film, and activism. Ono released four solo albums and four collaborative albums with Lennon over just five years, while also making multiple films, including FLY, Freedom, “RAPE”, Apotheosis, and Imagine.

In 1971 Ono had her first retrospective exhibition, This Is Not Here, at the Everson Art Museum. Later that year, her unofficial conceptual exhibition, Museum of Modern [F]art at the Museum of Modern Art was advertised in the Village Voice and documented as a new film.

In 1973, Ono and Lennon announced the birth of a new conceptual country, Nutopia, with “no land, no boundaries, no passports, only people.” In 1975 the birth of their son, Sean Ono Lennon, influenced the couple’s decision to take a break from public life.

In August 1980, Ono and Lennon returned to the studio to record their first album together since 1972. Double Fantasy was released in November and went on to win the 1981 Grammy Award for Album of the Year. Less than a month after its release, Lennon was shot and killed by an assassin outside their home in New York.

Emerging from the tragedy of Lennon’s death, Ono immersed herself in making music, releasing several albums during the decade. “It was the music that made me survive,” Ono said. After a long absence from exhibiting her art in museums and galleries, her 1989 solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Yoko Ono: Objects, Film, signaled a renewed interest in her art. She continued to exhibit extensively around the world.

In 2000 Yes Yoko Ono, a retrospective exhibition originating at the Japan Society Gallery in New York toured to thirteen international venues over four years. In 2007, Ono unveiled the IMAGINE PEACE TOWER on Videy, an island off the coast of Reykjavik, Iceland, giving a permanent home to her and Lennon’s long-standing commitment to world peace. In 2009, she was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 53rd Venice Biennale. That same year, Ono released Between My Head and the Sky, her first studio album as Plastic Ono Band since 1973. In 2018, Ono released her thirteenth solo studio album, Warzone.

Ono’s work has continued to be honored with numerous exhibitions at some of the world’s most prestigious venues, including The Museum of Modern Art in New York (2015) and Tate Modern in London (2024).

In a career spanning more than seventy years, Ono’s work as an artist and activist remains singularly relevant and continues to challenge the boundaries of artist and audience.

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART - MCA - CHICAGO

220 East Chicago Avenue, Chicago, IL 60611

mcachicago.org

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9 mars – 10 juillet 2016 

Yoko Ono: Grapefruit (in English)

Moderna Museet, Stockholm 

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Yoko Ono: Between the Sky and My Head (in English)

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Artist Mike Cloud @ Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago - "Circle Chat" Exhibition

Mike Cloud: Circle Chat

Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago

March 7 - April 26, 2025

Corbett vs. Dempsey presents Circle Chat, an exhibition of new paintings by MIKE CLOUD. This is the gallery's first show with the artist.

Mike Cloud (b. 1974) is a Chicago-based artist whose complex and vibrant paintings often utilize conventional support materials organized in unconventional ways. Stretcher bars, normally brought together at perpendicular angles, are instead conjoined into star or diamond shapes, one sometimes crossing in front of another like a highway offramp; canvas may be affixed to the front of the bar, rather than stretched around it, and thin strips of canvas might cross the field like streamers or banners. Are Cloud's paintings abstract? This is a complicated question to address. Are they representational? Yes, they represent specific and concrete things in the world – people, places, objects. Do they represent these things through visual likeness? Not so much. Instead, Mike Cloud invokes other forms of semiosis, producing meanings through a variety of means – written language, linguistic permutations, website urls, hieroglyphs, pictograms, and other symbolic imagery such as hand-birds. Again, are they abstract? Yes, Cloud's paintings are abstract in the sense that they condense vast amounts of information into a limited space. In the new works presented in Circle Chat, Mike Cloud has included two canvases that utilize hinges to fold into floor sculptures, one hinged horizontally like a construction site sign ("Oyster Oil"), the other hinged vertically, sitting on the floor like a scrim ("Kingdom of Luang Phrabang"). Highly specific, yet mysterious and spring-loaded, these virtuosic, operatic works are ultimately meditations on the fundaments of painting – color, facture, form, speed – and the relationship between the act of interpretation and being in the world.  

Mike Cloud's solo exhibitions include: Thomas Erben Gallery, NY (2014, 2019, 2024); The Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, Chicago, IL (2017); Max Protetch Gallery, NY (2008); MoMA PS1, NY (2005). His work has been included in group exhibitions such as Good Weather, Chicago, IL; the American Academy of Arts in Letters, NYC, NY; the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Danubiana Meulensteen Art Museum, Slovak Republic; White Columns, NYC, NY; Honor Fraser Gallery, CA; Ceysson & Bénétière, NYC, NY; Green Gallery, Milwaukee, WI; Good Children Gallery, LA; Marianne Boesky Gallery, NY; White Columns, NY; Max Protetch, NY; Apexart, NYC.    

CORBETT VS. DEMPSEY

2156 West Fulton Street, Chicago, IL 60612

www.corbettvsdempsey.com

Arch Connelly @ Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago - "Arch Connelly: The Future Reflected, Wallworks 1981–1991" Exhibition

Arch Connelly

The Future Reflected, 

Wallworks 1981–1991

Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago

March 7 - April 26, 2025

Corbett vs. Dempsey presents Arch Connelly: The Future Reflected, Wallworks 1981–1991. This is the first solo exhibition of Connelly's work in Chicago and his first gallery show since his death.

Born in Chicago, ARCH CONNELLY (1950-1993) attended graduate school at Southern Illinois University (SIU), in Carbondale, Illinois, where he majored in ceramics. In the mid 1970s, Arch Connelly lived in San Francisco, where he was associated with the gay performance troupe Angels of Light, together with fellow artist Martin Wong, and designed sets for the Cockettes. Settling in New York in 1980, Arch Connelly quickly became an important new figure on the East Village art scene, starting with a solo exhibition at Artists Space and continuing with four solo shows at the legendary Fun Gallery, among other venues including White Columns, Holly Solomon Gallery, and Castelli Graphics. 

Arch Connelly charted a very personal terrain in his work, using faux pearls, silk, sequins, glitter, and shattered eggshells to create what Rene Ricard called "space age surrealism," a sort of alchemical admixture of materials and images, embracing kitschy opulence by raising it to a new altitude and forcing it into a complex new identity.  "Connelly pushes this decadence just one step further," wrote artist Jeff Perrone. "Where formal rigor turns dark, into an area where the bubbly takes an ominous tinge, into the arena of fin-du-siecle stage setting, blatantly theatrical, paintings like heavy velvet curtains ready to part, waiting for action to begin." 

Decades ahead of his time, exploring an explicitly queer aesthetic in a manner that could easily be mistaken for something brand new, Connelly made oval and circular smiley-face canvases as well as gay porn collages, all constructed out of fabulously shimmering and cheaply obtained materials. With a career on the rise, one of Connelly's porn collages graced the cover of the November 1991 issue of Artforum. 

Tragically, he died of AIDS less than two years later, at age 43. 

Although he has been seen in recent group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as being the subject of an in-depth survey at SIU last year, this is the first solo exhibition of Arch Connelly's work in the city of his birth and the first commercial gallery presentation to showcase his artwork since his untimely passing, spotlighting rare collages and major works on canvas, focused specifically on his wall-hanging compositions.  

CORBETT VS. DEMPSEY

2156 West Fulton Street, Chicago, IL 60612

www.corbettvsdempsey.com

Albert Oehlen & Kim Gordon @ Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago

Albert Oehlen & Kim Gordon

Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago

January 24 - March 1, 2025

Corbett vs. Dempsey presents Albert Oehlen & Kim Gordon, an exhibition of new paintings and multi-media works. This is Oehlen’s fifth show with the gallery and Gordon’s first exhibition in Chicago.

In this exhibition, German-born artist Albert Oehlen presents three monumental pieces on shaped aluminum. With enamel paint marks applied directly to the raw substates, which are cut into “omega” shapes similar to those of some newer Oehlen works, these 12-foot-tall, 15-foot-wide metal paintings come equipped with sonic transducers on each of their four adjacent panels. When amplified, the paintings act as de facto speakers and project sound vibrations into the room. Oehlen invited Kim Gordon to make soundtracks for the works. She developed these sound recordings in direct material relationship with the paintings, using the transduced metal plates as amplifiers for her electric guitar. Rather than simply making these sounds for the paintings, she made the sounds on them. Gordon’s bracing improvisations, lasting around 8-minutes each, explore a wide range of colors, from chords, drone, and feedback to electrical noises made with the unplugged guitar cord. The works play intermittently, erupting energetically, then relaxing into silence, their metal forms and the gestural lines inscribed on them supercharged by Gordon’s music. In addition to these three works made collaboratively by the two artists, the exhibition presents a new canvas by Albert Oehlen and a group of small, vibrant paintings by Kim Gordon.

Based between Switzerland, Berlin, Spain, and Los Angeles, Albert Oehlen (b. 1954) is one of the most widely-celebrated contemporary artists. His work has adopted and invented numerous approaches to painting and more recently sculpture. In the last few years, Albert Oehlen has also been writing and directing full-length feature films, including Painter, Bad Painter (featuring Kim Gordon in an acting role), and Yellow. His work has been exhibited in institutions around the world, including recent solo shows at Kunsthalle Hamburg, Germany (2024), Espace Louis Vuitton Beijing, China (2024), Friedrichs Foundation, Weidingen, Germany (2023), and Serpentine Galleries, London, UK (2019).

Kim Gordon (b. 1953) is a musician and visual artist based in Los Angeles. Her latest record, The Collective (2024), was met with widespread critical acclaim and received two Grammy nominations. She has been the subject of a recent solo exhibition at 303 Gallery, New York, and is currently in shows at gnration, Braga, Portugal and Efraín López, New York. Gordon is half of Body/Head and was a founding member of the band Sonic Youth.

CORBETT VS. DEMPSEY

2156 West Fulton Street, Chicago, IL 60612

www.corbettvsdempsey.com

Chicago Style Exhibition @ Georges Adams Gallery, NYC - Featured Joanna Beall, Roger Brown, Leon Golub, Miyoko Ito, Ellen Lanyon, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Ed Paschke, Barbara Rossi, H.C. Westermann, Karl Wirsum

Chicago Style

Joanna Beall, Roger Brown, Leon Golub, Miyoko Ito, Ellen Lanyon, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Ed Paschke, Barbara Rossi, H.C. Westermann, and Karl Wirsum

George Adams Gallery, New York

December 13, 2024 – February 8, 2025

The George Adams Gallery presents Chicago Style, a group exhibition highlighting key figures from Chicago’s vibrant mid-to-late 20th century art scene. The show features works by Joanna Beall, Roger Brown, Leon Golub, Miyoko Ito, Ellen Lanyon, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Ed Paschke, Barbara Rossi, H.C. Westermann, and Karl Wirsum. 

This exhibition traces the development of a unique Chicago aesthetic, shaped by artists from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and the Hyde Park Art Center. These artists rejected the dominant trends of New York and the West Coast, creating diverse and unconventional work in movements like surrealism, figuration, abstraction, and social commentary. 

The exhibition also reflects their overlapping careers and collaborations, such as the 1949 Exhibition Momentum organized by Golub and Lanyon, which included Ito. The spirit of collaboration continued with the founding of Superior Street Gallery by Ito and Lanyon in the 1950s.

Allan Frumkin Gallery, which opened in Chicago in 1952, played a key role in supporting many of these artists and elevating their work beyond the city. Frumkin gave Leon Golub, and H.C. Westermann their first solo exhibitions in Chicago, and employed Ellen Lanyon as a restorer and Jim Nutt as an art handler, fostering a dynamic creative community. By showcasing these artists in both his Chicago and New York galleries, Frumkin helped establish the unique aesthetic that defined Chicago’s mid-20th-century art scene. 

Works in the exhibition includes paintings from the late 1950s by Golub and Ito, works from the 1960s by Lanyon and Beall, and examples from the 1970s by Brown, Nilsson, Paschke, Rossi, and Wirsum. Of special note is Westermann’s The Death Ship (Black Tar Death Ship) from 1974 that has never been offered since it was acquired by a private collector in the late 1970s. 

GEORGE ADAMS GALLERY

38 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013

www.georgeadamsgallery.com

Dan Devening, Allison Jae Evans @ LVL3, Chicago - "Shapeshifters" Exhibition

Dan Devening, Allison Jae Evans

Shapeshifters

LVL3, Chicago

April 20, 2024 - May 26, 2024

Dan Devening and Allison Jae Evans

Courtesy LVL3, Chicago

LVL3 presents Shapeshifters, a two-person exhibition of new works from Dan Devening (Chicago, IL) and Allison Jae Evans (Brooklyn, NY).

Dan Devening and Allison Jae Evans journey through shapes, corporeal gestures, and societal narratives that challenge, evoke, and confront. The intersection of 60s graphic design elements with references to contemporary cultural phenomena, like underground culture and mediated interactions, punctuate the tensions innate in our collective pursuit of connection and cultural advancement.

Shapeshifters is a celebration of rawness and vulnerability, expressing a dynamic interplay of forms that subvert the expected. Harnessing a palette rich with tension, Dan Devening and Allison Jae Evans compel viewers to navigate the buoyancy and despondence within societal frameworks, challenging the gravitas of power and the latent desires that underscore our universal human experience.

LVL3

1542 N Milwaukee Avenue, Chicago, IL 60622

www.lvl3official.com

Maia Cruz Palileo @ Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago - Days Later, Down River

Maia Cruz Palileo 

Days Later, Down River 

Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago 

April 1 - May 26, 2023 

Monique Meloche Gallery presents Maia Cruz Palileo: Days Later, Down River, the artist’s third solo show with the gallery. Palileo is a multidisciplinary artist whose paintings, installations, sculptures, and drawings navigate themes of migration and the persistence of tacit knowledge in the face of assimilation. The works on view map an archival, geological, and spiritual topography of the Palileo family’s homeland—the Philippines—and are inspired by their recent residency at the University of Michigan, which houses one of the largest collections of Filipino artifacts outside of the country. Building off their past research at the Newberry Library in Chicago and their personal family archive, Palileo explores the Bentley Historical Library’s photographic archive of Frank C. Gates, a professor of botany at the University of the Philippines (1912-1915) and objects from the Museum of Anthropological Archaeology’s Philippines collection. By incorporating research from these various archives, their paintings recontextualize stories, portraits, and images to resuscitate and remove from the exploitative gaze of the ethnographic image. 

While at the archive, Palileo discovered photo albums of Mount Makiling and Mount Banahaw, dormant volcanoes in the Laguna region of the Philippines. Each mountain is a birthplace of legend; Mount Makiling is the home of the protective spirit Makiling, whose legend was written about by national hero José Rizal, and Banahaw is a sacred mountain for spiritual pilgrimage. These albums served as a portal into the artist’s familial relation to this land, making connections to artifacts in their personal collection of family photographs, blessed amulets, and oral histories. As with volcanoes, they propose history as a site where perceived extinction and dormancy can be uncovered to reveal activity and potential. Memorializing the legacy of invisible histories, dense layers of foliage reveal mysterious figures shrouded by overgrowth and shadow. Parasitic liana vines further complicate the canvas. Native to tropical forests, these rapidly expanding woody vines are increasingly shady, choking rainforest trees, and competing for resources. In contrast, when Rizal writes of the mountain forests in Mariang Makiling he describes, "Tall trees with straight and mossy trunks, among whose branches the vines weave most beautiful laces embroidered with flowers.” Palileo renders the liana’s proliferation, interlacing the visible and invisible through layers of paint, echoing the selective means through which history is presented.

Translating these documents into a creative medium, Palileo cuts out archival images and reassembles them into panoramas where figures occupy mirrored and layered landscapes, offering new dimensions that intertwine ancestry, flora, and fauna. Transferring collaged black-and-white photographs into a vibrant palette, they pollinate a reimagined terrain in paint—an act of becoming where brush strokes render their homeland anew with self-possession and agency. At the center of the exhibition is a banig, a century-old woven mat loaned from the Museum of Anthropological Archaeology; an object used as a place for daily rest and gathering. Surrounded by projections of tree canopies and hand-sculpted clay figures, their foraged memories and histories honor the Filipino heritage that endured during the colonial era. Days Later, Down River uses installation, painting, projection, and ceramic to destabilize fixed narratives from the imperial occupation of the country, reframing artifacts into imagined sacred realms for their ancestors, and inviting viewers the chance to walk into Palileo’s imaginative spaces.

Maia Cruz Palileo (b.1979, Chicago, IL) received an MFA in sculpture from Brooklyn College, City University of New York, Brooklyn, NY (2008) and BA in Studio Art at Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA (2001). Palileo has had solo exhibitions at the Kimball Arts Center, Park City, UT (2022); the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, CA (2021); the Katzen Arts Center, Washington D.C. (2019); moniquemeloche, Chicago, IL (2019); Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY (2018); Taymour Grahne Gallery, New York, NY (2017); and Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space, New York, NY (2015). Palileo has been featured in recent group exhibitions at The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC (2023); National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C. (2022); Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA (2022); San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA (2022); Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2022); The Rubin Museum of Art, New York, NY (2018); and the Bureau of General Services Queer Division, New York, NY. Forthcoming exhibitions include a group exhibition at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, NE (2023). 

Their work is in the collections of The San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA; The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC; The Speed Museum, Louisville, KY; and The Fredriksen Collection at the National Museum of Oslo, Norway. Palileo is a recipient of the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program Award, NY (2022); NYFA Painting Fellowship (2021); Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Program Grant (2017); Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2014); Astraea Visual Arts Fund Award (2009); Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant (2018); and Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Award (2008). Palileo has participated in residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Madison, ME; Lower East Side Print Shop, NY; Millay Colony, Austerlitz, New York; and the Joan Mitchell Center, New Orleans.

MONIQUE MELOCHE GALLERY

451 N Paulina Street, Chicago, IL 60622

www.moniquemeloche.com

Free + Open Chicago @ Design Museum of Chicago - 10-Year Anniversary

Free + Open Chicago

Design Museum of Chicago

Through April 3, 2023

The Design Museum of Chicago explores the unique and ever-evolving landscape of design in their latest exhibition, Free & Open Chicago. The exhibit celebrates their 10-year anniversary by showcasing places that are free and open to the public year-round. 

Design surrounds us. Its broad impact and inescapable force drives us – from the planning of our streets to how we protect Lake Michigan. The exhibition creates a database in the form of a map highlighting communities, locations, and free experiences around Chicago. 

The exhibition also features community partners that impact the design of communities all around Chicago. Each has a distinct influence on Chicagoans shared design history while being free and open to the public, just like the Design Museum. Partners range from the National Museum of Mexican Art, the most prominent first-voice institution for Mexican Art and culture in the United States, to the Global Garden Refugee Training Farm, a productive garden started by 42 refugee families from Burma and Bhutan to uplift traditional strengths of refugees from rural backgrounds. Other exhibitors include alt space, Busy Beaver Button Museum, Chicago Bridgehouses, Garfield Park Community Plaza, James R. Thompson Center, Pilsen Arts & Community House

The exhibit also showcases a new poster series dedicated to their most free and open resource, Lake Michigan. Artists from the series include: Amid Alavi, David Alvarado, Alyssa Arnesen, Bridget Bilbo (GingerrBridge), Sage Coffey, CzrPrz, Elloo (Elloo), Josh Epstein (TotesFerosh), Won Kim, Adrianne Hawthorne (Ponnopozz), Jeremy Hlinak, Matthew Hoffman (You Are Beautiful), Rod Hunting, Cheryl Kao, Ashley King, Kelly Knaga, Shawn Smith (Shawnimals), Unyimeabasi Udoh, Helen Wargo, Jo Zhou. 

Finally, the exhibit features a new Little Free Library inside an old converted bank vault. This public bookcase aims to increase access to design and art books for readers of all ages and backgrounds. Contribute by taking or sharing books. 

DESIGN MUSEUM OF CHICAGO

72 E Randolph Street, Chicago, IL 60602

www.designchicago.org

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Krista Franklin @ DePaul Art Museum, Chicago - Solo(s)

Krista Franklin: Solo(s)

DePaul Art Museum, Chicago

September 8, 2022 - February 19, 2023

KRISTA FRANKLIN

Out of Love But Maybe There’s Still Some Romance, 2019

Ink, watercolor, pencil, pen, and collage on handmade paper. 

Photo: Latitude

Chicago-based artist KRISTA FRANKLIN (American, b. 1970) presents “Solo(s),” an exhibition that draws on the artist’s vast range of materials and references. Franklin’s work intersects poetry, popular culture and the dynamic histories of the African Diaspora.

A surrealist at heart, Krista Franklin’s works on display include books, poetry, collages, handmade paper, installations, murals, performances, sound works and sculptures. “The word ‘solo’ often refers to the performance of a single musician,” curator Ionit Behar said. “Here, it highlights the artist’s commitment to collaboration with fellow artists, writers and musicians.”

Krista Franklin creates collages from the text and images of vintage magazines and other printed matter she collects. The DePaul Art Museum created a fully illustrated exhibition catalogue for “Solo(s)” featuring documentation of the artist’s ongoing collage work, handmade paper, book and record covers, and installations alongside her poetry and other writings.

Exhibition organized by the DePaul Art Museum

Curated by Ionit Behar, associate curator of DePaul Art Museum

DePaul Art Museum - DPAM

DePaul University’s Lincoln Park Campus

935 W. Fullerton Ave., Chicago, IL 60614

artmuseum.depaul.edu

Brian Maguire @ Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago - North and South of the Border

Brian Maguire 

North and South of the Border

Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago

September 16 – October 22, 2022

Rhona Hoffman Gallery presents North and South of the Border, an exhibition of new and recent paintings by Irish painter and social activist BRIAN MAGUIRE. The exhibition is comprised of a selection of portraits and landscapes from three different bodies of work: Missing and Murdered Indigenous People (M&MIP), Montana; The Remains, Arizona; and The Aleppo Paintings, Syria. Spanning depictions of scenes and individuals from Montana, Mexico, Central America, Arizona, and Aleppo, Syria, Brian Maguire’s paintings represent the voices of marginalized groups whose stories are not widely disseminated. 

The M&MIP painted portraits, the most recent body of work in the exhibition, was created while Maguire participated in a residency at the Missoula Art Museum in Montana. Missoula is a city near both the Flathead Reservation and the Blackfeet Reservation and proved an apt location for the project. Throughout parts of the United States and Canada, an epidemic is quietly transpiring wherein thousands of Indigenous peoples have disappeared or have been murdered. Brian Maguire’s memorial portraits are rendered from photographs that the family members select, the finished painting being an intimate rendition capturing the likeness and spirit of the subject. There are ultimately two paintings created, one for public exhibitions and one for the family. 

Regarding his The Remains (Arizona) paintings - the second body of work reflected in this exhibition - Brian Maguire says: “...it is the death I record or memorialize in this project. No family would like to retain this image of a loved one, except as needed by a process of seeking justice. My work since 1997 has become increasingly focused on lives lost, often with a political perspective on the event of the loss.” These gestural paintings of skulls in the dirt or a splayed face-down body, as is the case in Arizona 6, reference the migrant crisis at the US/Mexico border, specifically the annual fatalities of Central Americans in the deserts around Tucson, Arizona. The Remains (Arizona) paintings confront issues of migration, displacement, and the dangers forcing those to risk their lives to relocate. 

Aleppo 5 is a commanding painting from Brian Maguire’s The Aleppo Paintings series. Depicting a crumbling and dilapidated building in Aleppo, Brian Maguire first photographically documented the structure during a 2017 visit to Syria before replicating it in his studio. His interest in covering migrant crises through his art transcends specific locations to address the global and widespread issue of forced migration, made more pervasive now due to war, social upheaval, and climate change. The ongoing Syrian Civil War, which officially started in 2011, prompted millions of Syrians to seek refuge in Europe and other surrounding areas, resulting in a major humanitarian emergency. The desolate setting of Aleppo 5 with an isolated passing figure is representative of the trauma inflicted on Syrians and their culture - architecture, infrastructure, art, and history.

Brian Maguire’s investment in social activism stems from his involvement in the civil rights movement of Northern Ireland in the 1970s. He remains committed to making artwork that responds to humanitarian catastrophes, hoping to promote dialogue and support for those afflicted.

BRIAN MAGUIRE (b. 1951 Dublin, Ireland) lives and works in Dublin and Paris. Solo exhibitions have been mounted at institutions and venues such as The Missoula Art Museum (Montana); The Crawford Art Gallery (Cork, Ireland); The United Nations Headquarters (New York); The Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at Texas University (El Paso, TX); Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juárez (Mexico); and The Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin, Ireland). His artwork is in the collections of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; Museo de Arte do Rio, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland; Dublin City The Hugh Lane, Dublin; Arts Council Collection, Dublin; Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, Ireland; Dun Laoghaire Rathdown County Council, Dublin; National Portrait Collection, Limerick Office of Public Works, Kilkenny Art Gallery Collection, Kilkenny, Ireland; Trim, Ireland; Openbaar Psychiatrisch Zorgcentrum, Geel, Belgium; Trinity College, Dublin; University College, Cork and Dublin; Wicklow County Council, Ireland; Tia Collection, Santa Fe, New Mexico; Gemeentemuseum, The Hague-Netherlands; Jyvaskyla Art Museum, Finland; Liverpool University, UK; and Wolverhampton Art Gallery, UK.

RHONA HOFFMAN GALLERY

1711 West Chicago Avenue, Chicago, IL 60622

www.rhoffmangallery.com

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