Exhibition History

Browse exhibitions from as far back as 1883. For more information on exhibitions, contact the Archives at archives@artic.edu.
2023
Showing 20 out of 26 Exhibitions-
Lygia Pape: Tecelares
This exhibition focuses on the rarely seen and understudied woodblock prints Brazilian modernist Lygia Pape made in the 1950s and 1960s, situating them within her broader career and revealing new insights into her process.
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Lygia Pape: Ballet Neoconcreto
Inspired by a Reynaldo Jardim poem and first performed in 1958, Lygia Paper’s ballet consists of colorful tubular and cuboid shapes moved slowly across a stage by dancers hidden inside—almost as if her Tecelar prints have come to life.
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Salvador Dalí: The Image Disappears
More than 30 paintings, drawings, and objects from the period in which Dalí invented his own brand of Surrealism come together to consider two defining, if contradictory impulses: the desire for visibility and the urge to disappear.
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Kwame Brathwaite: Things Well Worth Waiting For
Featuring a selection of photographs, magazines, albums, and color slides from the 1960s to the 1980s from the Brathwaite Archive, this exhibition focuses on Brathwaite’s passion for music and how it informed his pictures and approach to photography.
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stanley brouwn
this was an exhibition of the work of stanley brouwn.
apr 8, 2023–jul 31, 2023 -
Gio Swaby: Fresh Up
Swaby’s first solo museum show brings together seven series from 2017 through 2021, along with approximately 15 new works, including her largest to date, a commission for the US Embassy in Nassau, Bahamas.
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Ink Play: Paintings by Lui Shou-Kwan
Approximately three dozen works by this pioneer of the New Ink painting movement—including his signature Zen paintings—illustrate Lui Shou-Kwan’s revolutionary impact on the development of Chinese art in the mid- to late 20th century.
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The Arranged Flower: Ikebana and Flora in Japanese Prints
Discover the centuries-old tradition of Japanese flower arranging, or ikebana, which began in Buddhist temples to capture the beauty of paradise.
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Peter Hujar: Performance and Portraiture
Featuring more than 60 photographs by Hujar, as well as selected works by artists in his circle, this exhibition connects both the experimentation Hujar and his subjects pursued and the new realities they each created—whether through photographs or performance.
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Van Gogh and the Avant-Garde: The Modern Landscape
More than 75 paintings and drawings by five interconnected artists—Vincent van Gogh, Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, Emile Bernard, and Charles Angrand—highlight the tremendous creativity that was sparked by their time in Paris’s evolving working-class suburbs.
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Christine Sun Kim: Cues on Point
American, Berlin-based artist Christine Sun Kim’s video reflects on the the linguistic layers of her 2020 American Sign Language (ASL) performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “America the Beautiful” at Super Bowl LIV.
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Ellsworth Kelly: Portrait Drawings
Nearly 100 works from 1941 to 2011 showcase how one of the most famous post-war American abstract artists was also a dedicated and prolific portraitist, who drew likenesses of himself and his friends throughout his long life.
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Ghosts and Demons in Japanese Prints
Supernatural beings have always been common features in Japanese legends, prints, and Kabuki theater. The prints on view in this exhibition, all from our celebrated Clarence Buckingham Collection, capture common Japanese folk tales as well as their Kabuki adaptations, offering distinct insight into the nature of these beloved stories and characters.
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Remedios Varo: Science Fictions
More than 20 paintings along with sketches and personal possessions from Varo’s archive showcase the artist’s novel, enchanting, and mysterious imagery and offer a window into her distinct and diverse art-making techniques.
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Kameelah Janan Rasheed: Unsewn Time
Bringing together recent videos with a new body of photographs and prints that sets written words aside in favor of mark-making outside of text, Unsewn Time asks us to consider our relationships to unpredictable change and ruptures in time.
Aug 25, 2023–Jan 8, 2024 -
Dan Friedman: Stay Radical
Featuring over 50 works drawn primarily from the Art Institute collection, this exhibition—the first retrospective focused on Dan Friedman’s extraordinary and underrecognized career—showcases Friedman’s unbounded and subversive creativity, a sensibility that resonates with the stylistic and political directions of art and design today.
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Among Friends and Rivals: Caravaggio in Rome
Two rarely loaned paintings by Caravaggio join works by his devoted followers in this intimate exhibition highlighting both the grand spectacle and intense influence of Caravaggio’s extraordinary work.
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Maren Hassinger: This Is How We Grow
For her first solo exhibition in the Midwest, Hassinger created a site-specific environment that encompasses Paradise Regained (2020), a floor-based sculpture presents numerous strands of slightly curved industrial rope, and Showers (2023), a set of suspended galvanized steel objects hanging from the museum’s overhanging roof.
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Marwa Arsanios: Who Is Afraid of Ideology? Part 4: Reverse Shot
The latest chapter of Arsanios’s video series Who Is Afraid of Ideology?, this video uses a range of visual techniques—from fantastical animation to worm’s-eye-view camera work—to document an attempt to extricate a parcel of land from the construct of ownership.
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Camille Claudel
Featuring some 60 sculptures from more than 30 institutional and private lenders, the presentation showcases Camille Claudel’s remarkable technical ability and innovative creations across multiple genres and materials, highlighting a genius and sensibility that are thoroughly modern.
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