Exhibition History

Modern Japanese Portraits presents 24 groundbreaking portraits, including many rare editions, from the Art Institute’s collection. 

This exhibition brings to North America, for the first time, a selection of 58 rarely seen ancient Roman sculptures from Italy’s storied Torlonia Collection.

The first exhibition to focus on the connections between drawing and printmaking brings together around 90 works on paper by some of the greatest artists in the Western tradition to explore their creative process and the links between the two mediums.

This video by New York–based interdisciplinary artist and writer Coco Fusco commemorates victims of coronavirus buried in the public cemetery on Hart Island, New York.

This exhibition focuses on the celebrated Mexican artist’s first and only trip to Europe and her brief yet pivotal encounter with Mary Reynolds, an American avant-garde bookbinder who stood at the center of a rich Parisian artistic community.

For her first exhibition at a major US institution, Góngora has collaborated with artist Matías Quintero Sepúlveda and Juven and Yinela Piranga Valencia, leaders of the Ko’revaju Indigenous community of the northern Colombian Amazon, to create a “cosmic weaving” that reflects the collaborators’ experiences of the innate ties between humanity and our shared environment.

The prints in this exhibition show the various ways that artists, including the world-famous Katsushika Hokusai, have interpreted the stories of two of Japan’s most renowned poets, Murasaki Shikibu (about 973–1016) and Ono no Komachi (active about 833–57).

This first substantial presentation of Iman Issa’s Heritage Studies in the US in a decade showcases these sculptures based on historical artifacts—“art that is not exactly part of the world but is certainly tied to it, revealing of it.”

The largest gathering of sculptures by H. C. Westermann in Chicago in over 20 years, this exhibition celebrates the generous gift of 17 sculptures by the artist from the Estate of Alan and Dorothy Press.

This exhibition celebrates the Stenn family’s 2023 gift of 100 drawings and prints and offers Art Institute visitors the chance to delve into the experimental ethos of much of 20th-century art and to experience the work of trailblazing artists who had the audacity to try something new. 

More than 120 paintings, works on paper, photographs, and other ephemera come together in this major exhibition exploring the very personal interests and relationships that shaped Impressionist artist Gustave Caillebotte’s world.

Prints from this period following Japan’s almost 250 years of near-total isolation reflect the country’s attempts to define itself between Eastern and Western influences and to become Asia’s modern empire.

Presenting 45 works from Liao’s ongoing series Experimental Relationship, this exhibition wryly examines the power dynamics between artist and muse and documents the evolution of Liao and Moro’s relationship.

This exhibition is the first museum presentation of Night/Crimes, a series Gaines created from 1994 to 1997, in which he paired archival photographs of violent crime scenes, victims, and indicted murderers with images of constellations that could have been seen in the night sky when the crimes occurred.

Leslie Thornton’s film Jennifer, Where Are You? revolves around a young girl haphazardly applying red lipstick while a man off-screen calls out, “Jennifer, where are you?” As the imagery, music, and child’s facial expressions change, our perception of the question—one that never gets answered—also shifts, displaying media’s powerful ability to alter meaning with colliding sounds and images. 

Bringing together over 100 works from across Catlett’s awe-inspiring career, this long-overdue retrospective showcases the significant role this revolutionary artist and radical activist played in her time and still today.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s video explores how the Ngurrara people of Western Australia secured legal rights to their ancestral land by creating a monumental painted map in 1997 and shows how collective memory heals and engenders solidarity.

More than 100 objects from diverse cultures and periods reveal the ways people use textiles to sustain spiritual beliefs, understand death, cope with grief, remember those who have passed, and heal from trauma, both personally and collectively.

Three newly commissioned sculptures derived from a set of drawings she made in the mid-1980s for sculptures that were never realized, Diane Simpson: “Good for Future” places Simpson’s architectonic forms in dialogue with the Chicago skyline.

This display featuring over 85 Symbolist works on paper by artists including Edvard Munch, Odilon Redon, and Paul Gauguin captures the beauty and strangeness of a mysterious generation of artists.