What’s New Chicago: Exhibitions, Immersive Art & Museums

The Art Institute of Chicago has announced its winter/spring programming. (Neighborhood: The Loop)

• David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive (through March 25, 2024) – Known for his nuanced portrayals of life under and after apartheid, South African photographer David Goldblatt (1930–2018) devoted himself to documenting his country and its people. Born into a family of Lithuanian Jews who emigrated to South Africa, Goldblatt focused much of his work on Johannesburg, the city where he lived for most of his life. His relative freedom to move within a society bitterly divided by racial segregation influenced the critical perspective of his work. In a church facade, down a mineshaft, through the exchange of glances between a passing man and woman, Goldblatt recorded the uneven application and reception of South Africa’s political values and beliefs. The highly descriptive captions he wrote for his photographs—which grew increasingly detailed over time—express his incisive attention to the country’s land, people, and history.
• Radical Clay: Contemporary Women Artists from Japan (through June 3, 2024) – Radical Clay celebrates thirty-six contemporary ceramic artists—all women—through 40 stunning, virtuosic pieces. Since World War II, women have made influential contributions to the ceramics field in Japan that have not been adequately recognized. This exhibition focuses on the explosion of innovative and technically ambitious compositions by such artists since 1970—a body of work that developed in parallel with, but often separately from, traditional, male-dominated Japanese practice and its countermovements.

Chicago History Museum’s Back Home: Polish Chicago is open now through June 8, 2024. Through the lens of Chicago’s Polish communities, experience the journeys immigrants have taken to get to the city, how they have established themselves in its neighborhoods, and the duality of feeling a deep connection to two places at once. Back Home: Polish Chicago features more than 90 artifacts and documents  and more than 100 reproduced photographs to help tell the story of the Chicago area’s vibrant Polish communities from the mid-1800s to today. Explore personal narratives, music, and community involvement, and art installations from five local Polish artists. (Neighborhood: Lincoln Park) 

Damen Ave Nocturne, Oil on canvas, 48 x 60”, Emily Rapport

Cleve Carney Art Museum will present UNEARTH: Karen Perl, Emily Rapport & Gwendolyn Zabicki (January 20-March 10, 2024). The built environment is an aspirational reflection of social self-awareness. Buildings are torn down, built up, and then torn down again. An empty lot holds space like a pause. The push to optimize our bodies, schedules, and relationships underscores the impermanence of all structures to time and calamity. In the tradition of American painters from the early 20th century who described the activities and moments that comprise daily life, the three artists represented in this proposal find beauty and meaning in everyday urban scenes. United by their choice of materials, painters Perl, Rapport, and Zabicki follow strong individual sensibilities to delve into perceived reality and unearth a moment or interaction that, when painted, reveals an intensely present experience. (Glen Ellyn, Illinois)

NBCUniversal and Imagine Exhibitions have announced that Downton Abbey: The Exhibition (until March 31, 2024), an immersive experience celebrating the global hit series, is set to take up residence at the Westfield Old Orchard Shopping Center. Chicago marks the sixth U.S. stop of the exhibition’s hugely popular U.S. tour, following successful engagements in New York; West Palm Beach, FL; Boston; Atlanta; and The Biltmore Estate in North Carolina. (Skokie, IL)

Elmhurst Art Museum’sexhibit A Love Supreme (January 20-April 28, 2024), a solo exhibition by Norman Teague inspired by legendary jazz musician John Coltrane, will have an adjoining installation in Mies van der Rohe’s McCormick House by Chicago-based BIPOC designers. Teague uses Coltrane’s album “A Love Supreme” as a personal, cultural, and spiritual touchstone to consider design influences from his life-long home in Chicago, exploring how the power of bold improvisational jazz and unapologetic Black aesthetics have expanded the minds and inspired creative communities of color.(Elmhurst, Illinois)

Hyde Park Art Center presents Aimée Beaubien: Through the Hothouse (March 2-June 2, 2024). The installation by the internationally exhibited artist, who has established herself as an educator and peer in the Chicago art community, showcases her innovative techniques and transforms a 92-foot-long hallway into a green corridor by integrating elements such as plant matter, weaving, photographs, and 3D drawings. These elements symbolize the intricate interplay between ecological, social, and cultural dimensions within the vibrant creative community of the Art Center. (Neighborhood: Hyde Park)

• Alice Shaddle: Fuller Circles (March 23-June 16, 2024) – Discover the intricate world of Alice Shaddle (1928 – 2017), an artist whose practice centered more than 60 years on paper-based creations in Chicago. The exhibition introduces Shaddle’s ingenious, original manipulations of paper, including daring papier mâché bas relief sculpture; shadow boxes with haunting visages; enigmatically constructed and layered collaged objects; documentation and remnants from Shaddle’s elaborate, immersive installations with related, large-scale colored pencil drawings; and her meticulously constructed, cut paper mosaic collage compositions. The exhibition will reveal Shaddle’s intensive modes of working and inventive use of materials. Among these is a collection of handcrafted collaged notecards with missives to her closest artist friend, Kathryn Kucera, revealing her sharp sense of humor and evidence of their deep friendship and support for each other’s creative lives.

• The United Colors of Robert Earl Paige (April 6-October 27, 2024) – The largest exhibition of Robert Paige’s work to date, The United Colors of Robert Earl Paige, surveys the iconic textile designs and painted fabric of one of the most generative artists/designers from the South Side of Chicago. In addition to the fabric work made over the past sixty years, the exhibition will debut recent clay, wall/floor paintings, drawings, and collage work made during his Radicle Residency at Hyde Park Art Center in 2022-23. 

Illinois Holocaust Museum presents a new temporary special exhibition,Shtetl in the Sun: Andy Sweet’s South Beach 1977-1980 (through October 13, 2024). In the late 1970s, more than 20,000 elderly Jews, many of them New York transplants and Holocaust Survivors, called South Beach home. This area of barely two square miles had become a modern-day shtetl, reminiscent of the tightly knit, predominantly Jewish Pre-World War II Eastern European villages. Sweet’s photographs capture the liveliness of this “shtetl in the sun,” their interactions with one another, day-to-day activities, outdoor Jewish services, and the hustle and bustle of a vibrant, energetic populace. They dispel the stereotype of 1970s South Beach being “God’s Waiting Room.” Instead, we see an array of daily activities on the sand and in the sun, in cafeterias and delis, and the constant flow of parties that fill the neighborhood. The lightheartedness, bright colors, and geniality of the people Sweet photographed illustrate the ways Survivors lived full and joyful lives after the Holocaust. (Skokie, Illinois)

Poetry Foundation will feature Kara Walker: Back of Hand from February 15 to May 18, 2024. The exhibition features 2015 Book, a series of 11 typewritten pages with ink and watercolor illustrations and two large-scale drawings, The Ballad of How We Got Here and Feast of Famine. Completed in 2021, this will be the first time these works are shown in Chicago. The mural-like compositions present a disorienting tableau of inked collaged forms surrounded by swirling forms of handwritten text. Words and sentence fragments jump out from the deluge, appearing like excerpts from a larger, ongoing conversation around power and history. In The Ballad of How We Got Here and Feast of Famine, these torrential narratives unfold as visual poems, yielding a multiplicity of parallel readings. New York-based artist Kara Walker is best known for her candid investigation of race, gender, sexuality, and violence. Her work can be found in museums and public collections throughout the United States and Europe including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Modern Art, and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Tate Gallery, London; the Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo (MAXXI), Rome; and Deutsche Bank, Frankfurt. (Neighborhood: River North)

The Museum of Science and Industry has annually displayed the Black Creativity Juried Art Exhibition since 1970. On view through April 21 2024 and included in the Museum Entry, this exhibit features paintings, drawings, fine art prints, sculpture, mixed-media, ceramics and photography by African Americans, including youth artists between the ages of 14 and 17. (Neighborhood: Hyde Park)

The National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture is hosting “Caribbean Indigenous Resistance / Resistencia Indígena del Caribe ¡Taíno Vive!”(Until June 16, 2024). The exhibition from the Smithsonian presents the history of the Taínos, the Indigenous peoples of the northern Caribbean islands, and how their descendants are reaffirming their culture and identity today. (Neighborhood: Humboldt Park)

The Richard H. Driehaus Museum will present A Tale of Today Sif Itona Westerberg: Twin Flame, Double Ruin (February 16-April 14, 2024) this spring. This is the first solo US museum exhibition of Copenhagen-based artist Sif Itona Westerberg, featuring recent bronze and concrete sculptures that draw from popular mythological narratives in dialogue with the museum’s richly-ornamented 1883 Nickerson Mansion. Curated by Stephanie Cristello, Sif Itona Westerberg: Twin Flame, Double Ruin is presented as part of the Driehaus Museum’s contemporary art series, A Tale of Today, in which emerging artists build upon the immersive experience and cultural history of the Gilded Age building to expand our understanding of the world through the art, architecture, and design. (Neighborhood: River North)