Exhibition History

This exhibition includes prints of the prominent Katsukawa School of artists who vividly captured the celebrity actors of the Kabuki theater which served as entertainment and escape in 18th-century Edo (modern-day Tokyo).

Al-Sharif’s two-channel video and a series of banners depicting architectural renderings of proposed urban spaces confronts the legacy of colonialism and the experience of displacement with satire, doubt, and hope.

This selection of three videos celebrates the artist’s recent gift to the museum of many of her video works and demonstrates Fiskin’s frank and often humorous observations on art and life.

The first major solo presentation of Igshaan Adams’s tapestries and textile installations in the United States brings together more than 20 projects dating from 2014 to the present.

The prints and drawings of German artist Käthe Kollwitz functioned as vehicles for social and political protest, depicting the plight of the urban poor, women and children, and workers from the 1890s through two world wars.

This exhibition demonstrates Mel Bochner’s pioneering role in redefining the traditional boundaries of drawing and illuminates the artist’s evolving ideas about seriality, temporality, and the slippage between word and image.

Combining painting and performance, this program explores the relationship between sexuality and the female body on one hand, and space and architecture on the other.

This groundbreaking retrospective sheds new light not only on how this pivotal artist created his works, but also why his art remains so vital today.

Rare surviving examples of a fragile artistry, these headdresses and other adornments feature prized kingfisher feathers, known for their vivid turquoise-blue color.

Does color have shape? What is the texture of scale? Is it possible to eliminate surface? Can space expand? 

For more than a decade, American designer Jonathan Muecke (born 1983) has tackled such deceptively straightforward yet puzzling questions about the relationship between form, material, and perception through a range of creative experiments. Objects in Sculpture, the designer’s first solo exhibition in a major museum, presents a selection of key works that have the capacity to generate new relationships between objects, bodies, and space.

Using copies of photographs from the Art Institute’s collection, Chicago art collective Floating Museum creates a circuit in which museum objects move to other homes and return to the galleries transformed.

Prints made in the period between the Great Kantō earthquake and World War II became a kind of time capsule, reminding us of time’s passage and the ever-changing nature of a dynamic urban metropolis.

Among Friends and Family presents a selection of objects from China, Japan, and Korea that portray some of the gatherings that enrich everyday life and special occasions.

Three video works from the Art Institute’s collection—Untitled (The Great Society) I (2006), A Migration Tale (2014–15), and Preacher Man (2015)—explore events and figures that are often omitted from conventional historical accounts.

Highlighting the scope of the Art Institute’s textiles collection, this exhibition celebrates the artistry and rich legacy of an extraordinary range of fabrics for clothing from around the world. 

This exhibition brings together two series by French artist Sophie Calle: a 1986 series related to questions of vision, art, and recollections of private life, and a recent series detailing her personal reasons for making photographs over the years.

Spanning nearly 250 years, this selection of prints showcases the simple and striking use of dark ink on paper from the years before color printing.