Featured Events in Chicago in July, 2025 (March Updated)

Jitish Kallat’s site-specific installation, Public Notice 3, returns to the Art Institute of Chicago’s Grand Staircase this fall after a 14-year hiatus. Initially unveiled on September 11, 2010, the work connects two significant historical events separated by 108 years: the First World’s Parliament of Religions which began on September 11, 1893, and the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. At the earlier event, the World Parliament of Religions, held in an auditorium that encompassed the area that today includes both the museum’s Fullerton Hall and Woman’s Board Grand Staircase, a young Hindu monk, Swami Vivekananda electrified audiences with a powerful speech calling for an end to religious fundamentalism, intolerance, and bigotry.

Jitish Kallat’s site-specific installation, Public Notice 3, returns to the Art Institute of Chicago’s Grand Staircase this fall after a 14-year hiatus. Initially unveiled on September 11, 2010, the work connects two significant historical events separated by 108 years: the First World’s Parliament of Religions which began on September 11, 1893, and the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. At the earlier event, the World Parliament of Religions, held in an auditorium that encompassed the area that today includes both the museum’s Fullerton Hall and Woman’s Board Grand Staircase, a young Hindu monk, Swami Vivekananda electrified audiences with a powerful speech calling for an end to religious fundamentalism, intolerance, and bigotry.

Descending the Staircase considers novel artistic approaches to representing the human body. Spread across two floors of the museum, the exhibition presents figures of all kinds, from the fragmented, absurd, and surreal to the curated, self-aware, and media savvy. Puppets, masks, and automatons merge bodies with objects, juxtaposing the animate and inanimate, while abstract sculptures evoke the human form through soft and fleshy materials such as nylon, wax, hair, and latex. Elsewhere, artists deploy the living body as a medium, setting it in motion with performance and gesture. Together, these artworks delve into fundamental questions about the human body in the contemporary world, including its relationship to labor and machines, its presentation in advertising and social media, and its role within the everyday domestic sphere.

Descending the Staircase considers novel artistic approaches to representing the human body. Spread across two floors of the museum, the exhibition presents figures of all kinds, from the fragmented, absurd, and surreal to the curated, self-aware, and media savvy. Puppets, masks, and automatons merge bodies with objects, juxtaposing the animate and inanimate, while abstract sculptures evoke the human form through soft and fleshy materials such as nylon, wax, hair, and latex. Elsewhere, artists deploy the living body as a medium, setting it in motion with performance and gesture. Together, these artworks delve into fundamental questions about the human body in the contemporary world, including its relationship to labor and machines, its presentation in advertising and social media, and its role within the everyday domestic sphere.

Renowned multimedia artist Dieter Roth’s preferred form, and the one he spent his lifetime pursuing, was the Gesamtkunstwerk, a German term for “total work of art.” Working across a diverse range of media, disciplines, and creative activities, Roth developed an artistic practice that dissolved the boundaries between art and life, upending traditional categories, hierarchies, and even timeworn notions of singular authorship. Often collaborating with other artists, including his son Björn, Roth produced an ever-expanding body of work that gestured toward the cumulative effects of a life spent making and remaking.

Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me is the first major survey of internationally renowned artist Wafaa Bilal (b. 1966, Najaf, Iraq; lives in New York, NY). Working in performance, sculpture, and with online and interactive technologies, Bilal’s interdisciplinary practice investigates the dynamic between international and interpersonal politics while highlighting the tension between his home in the United States, which he has deemed the “comfort zone,” and the “conflict zone” of Iraq. The exhibition covers the breadth of Bilal’s versatile career by exploring his performance practice, the use of power in Saddam Hussein’s regime, and Iraqi history and antiquity. It will feature archival displays of his iconic month-long performance Domestic Tension (2007) and year-long performance 3rdi (2010–11), as well as two new works including a sculptural commission for the MCA.

This exhibition focuses on a single artwork by Pipilotti Rist (b. 1962, Grabs, Switzerland; lives and works in Zürich), the 2001 video installation Supersubjektiv. Rist filmed the video footage featured in Supersubjektiv using a handheld digital camera during a month-long trip to Japan in December 2000. The hallucinatory video, presented in the Turner Gallery as a multichannel installation accompanied by sheepskin seating and an artist-made pillow, offers viewers a dream-like space for contemplation and curiosity. Paired with an ambient electronic soundtrack with lyrics sung in English and Japanese, the artwork examines nature, the built environment, and technology with wide-eyed wonder. Visitors are encouraged to relax and lose track of time as they take in Rist’s audiovisual meditation on longing for connection in our vast, globalized society.

Unveiling Frida Kahlo’s work for the first time in the Art Institute galleries, 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. Drawing upon the extensive Mary Reynolds Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago and extraordinary Kahlo loans from public and private collections in the US, Mexico, and Europe, the presentation sheds light on this little-known chapter of 20th-century art history, recounting the legacies of Kahlo and Reynolds—both artists themselves and partners of artists—as they navigated Surrealism, identity, and cross-cultural exchange on the eve of World War II.

Unveiling Frida Kahlo’s work for the first time in the Art Institute galleries, 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. Drawing upon the extensive Mary Reynolds Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago and extraordinary Kahlo loans from public and private collections in the US, Mexico, and Europe, the presentation sheds light on this little-known chapter of 20th-century art history, recounting the legacies of Kahlo and Reynolds—both artists themselves and partners of artists—as they navigated Surrealism, identity, and cross-cultural exchange on the eve of World War II.

Juliana Góngora Rojas is a Colombian sculptor who engages with organic materials, such as soil, salt, stones, or spider threads. Interested in establishing networks of community and spiritual exchange, Góngora collaborates with artisans, farmers, and Indigenous communities in works that emphasize the importance of ordinary materials and daily actions, as well as the ties that intimately bind human beings with nature.

Juliana Góngora Rojas is a Colombian sculptor who engages with organic materials, such as soil, salt, stones, or spider threads. Interested in establishing networks of community and spiritual exchange, Góngora collaborates with artisans, farmers, and Indigenous communities in works that emphasize the importance of ordinary materials and daily actions, as well as the ties that intimately bind human beings with nature.

Iman Issa’s Heritage Studies are displays based on historical artifacts, which attempt to communicate their significance to the present moment. In her process, the objects are altered: Issa changes their materials, scale, and color to a degree that the resemblance between the historic artifact and Issa’s work can be difficult to discern. Despite these dissimilarities, the artist insists on the equivalence of these objects, almost like the equivalence between a photograph and its subject.

Iman Issa’s Heritage Studies are displays based on historical artifacts, which attempt to communicate their significance to the present moment. In her process, the objects are altered: Issa changes their materials, scale, and color to a degree that the resemblance between the historic artifact and Issa’s work can be difficult to discern. Despite these dissimilarities, the artist insists on the equivalence of these objects, almost like the equivalence between a photograph and its subject.

Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom presents 25 years of work from artist Paul Pfeiffer (b. 1966, Honolulu, HI; lives in New York, NY), whose practice interrogates ideas of spectacle and mass culture. By repurposing the tools and systems of media production—including editing, staging, and outsourcing—Pfeiffer recontextualizes global celebrities such as pop stars, film actors, and athletes to reveal relationships between audiences and athletes. icons. As the artist puts it, “who’s using who? Is the image making us, or do we make images?”

H. C. Westermann’s work combines a graceful mastery of materials, rough and tumble physicality, commonsense philosophizing, acrobatic wit and wordplay, and a sensitive worldview shaped in equal measure by the horrors of wartime and the devotions of love. He used a wide-range of materials but was most dedicated to woodworking, once stating that wood was his “whole life.”

Impressionist artist Gustave Caillebotte (1848–1894)—known and beloved by many Art Institute visitors for his monumental painting Paris Street; Rainy Day—takes center stage in this major exhibition exploring the very personal interests and relationships that shaped his world.

Impressionist artist Gustave Caillebotte (1848–1894)—known and beloved by many Art Institute visitors for his monumental painting Paris Street; Rainy Day—takes center stage in this major exhibition exploring the very personal interests and relationships that shaped his world.

City in a Garden: Queer Art and Activism in Chicago is an intergenerational group exhibition that highlights Chicago’s essential, yet often underacknowledged, role in the story of queer art and activism. The exhibition examines this history from the mid-1980s, when activists radically mobilized in response to the US government’s disastrous handling of the AIDS crisis. In this moment of change, activists reclaimed the historically pejorative epithet “queer” as a liberatory term, encompassing all who purposefully deviate from heteronormative society. Drawn from the MCA’s collection and other local collections, City in a Garden follows this paradigm shift in LGBTQ+ history by bringing together work from over 30 artists and collectives working in Chicago from the 1980s to the present.

City in a Garden: Queer Art and Activism in Chicago is an intergenerational group exhibition that highlights Chicago’s essential, yet often underacknowledged, role in the story of queer art and activism. The exhibition examines this history from the mid-1980s, when activists radically mobilized in response to the US government’s disastrous handling of the AIDS crisis. In this moment of change, activists reclaimed the historically pejorative epithet “queer” as a liberatory term, encompassing all who purposefully deviate from heteronormative society. Drawn from the MCA’s collection and other local collections, City in a Garden follows this paradigm shift in LGBTQ+ history by bringing together work from over 30 artists and collectives working in Chicago from the 1980s to the present.

Since 2007, Pixy Liao (廖逸君) has collaborated with her partner, Takahiro Morooka (諸岡高裕, nicknamed Moro), on a series of staged, often humorous self-portraits. These works wryly examine the power dynamics between artist and muse, prod at conservative gender roles, and document the evolution of their relationship.