Exhibition History

This exhibition illustrates the various ways Japanese printmakers have represented nighttime over the past several centuries—whether as a darkened backdrop for action-packed figural scenes or as a dominant presence over unpeopled landscapes.

The first US museum exhibition of the Megyik’s work focuses on photograms the artist made from his earlier constructions in larch wood, part of his ongoing poetic investigation of perspectival systems and fractal geometry. 

This presentation of three video works by Rafael França presents the breadth of the artist’s work with the medium while he lived in Chicago in the 1980s and early 1990s.

This exhibition, drawn entirely from the Art Institute’s permanent collection, explores the beautiful diversity of this ancient and global practice through the works of 13 contemporary artists from five countries.

This comprehensive exhibition includes Ramberg’s well-known figural works as well as her lesser-known quilts, mid-career paintings, late abstractions, and ephemera from her informal archive.

This exhibition features works by women artists who were drawn to the new sōsaku hanga (creative print) movement that approached printmaking as a form of artistic expression. Included are members of Joryū Hanga Kyōkai and the printmakers of the Yoshida family.

This exhibition—of nearly 100 works across four decades—explores the modernist aesthetic often associated with the Bauhaus, as it developed through exchanges among a broader set of artists from Germany, Japan, and the United States.

John Knight creates projects, both in situ and ex situ, that are context dependent and crystalize the social, political, and economic forces that structure our built environment. 

The exhibition brings together 95 works by four Chicago artists to showcase how their lives intersected across generations to shape the visual culture of our inimitable city.

The first exhibition to seriously examine O’Keeffe’s paintings, drawings, and pastels of urban landscapes, taking seriously O’Keeffe’s declaration that her “New Yorks would turn the world over.”.

Clown Torture chronicles the absurd misadventures of four clowns that locks both clown and viewer in an endless loop of failure and degradation, the humor turning to horror.

This exhibition brings together, for the first time, the full series of Kelly’s Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance collages along with the 1953 painting.

This exhibition contains prints from all stages of Sharaku’s short but generative career.

Six films by modern and contemporary artists working between Africa and the diaspora underscore the great attention paid by African and African diasporic contemporary artists to legacies of the 1950s and ’60s.

During her short life, Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) radically charted her own path, exploring the singular aspects of the feminine experience in a bold style that foreshadowed Expressionism.

This exhibition showcases 25 paintings from the preeminent private collection of French 18th-century art in the United States: The Horvitz Collection.

Featuring approximately 90 drawings made during one of the most turbulent periods in French history, this exhibition demonstrates the expressive versatility and powerful immediacy of drawing as a medium of persuasion, propaganda, and, above all, aesthetic stimulation.

The Art Institute’s spectacular 18th-century Neapolitan crèche tells the story of Jesus Christ’s birth using more than 200 painted terracotta figures staged in an elaborate environment inspired by 18th-century Naples.