2024 Featured Alignments

Explore EXPO CHICAGO's featured aligments below, highlights of major exhibitions taking place across Chicago during EXPO ART WEEK. Navigate the side bar for full listings of exhibitions and events taking place around the city. 

CLICK HERE FOR MAP

Radical Clay: Contemporary Women Artists from Japan

On view through June 3, 2024 
The Art Institute of Chicago | 111 S Michigan Ave 

Radical Clay celebrates 36 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 which they developed in parallel with, but often separately from, traditional, male-dominated Japanese practice and its countermovements. 

A Journey: Highlights from the Ron and Ann Pizzuti Collection 

On view through June 2024 
The Peninsula Chicago | 108 E Superior St 

Ron and Ann Pizzuti have been collecting modern and contemporary art over the last 40 years. The Peninsula Chicago presents the exhibition, A Journey, which reflects the Pizzuti’s experiences in art collecting and features a global roster of artists. 

Nicole Eisenman: What Happened 

April 9-September 22, 2024 
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago | 220 E Chicago Ave 

What Happened is the first major exhibition surveying Nicole Eisenman’s expansive artistic practice, bringing together roughly 100 works produced from 1992 to today. Formally inventive and materially ambitious, Eisenman works across a range of formats and techniques, from painting to drawing to large-scale murals and installations. A similar sense of variety carries forward into the artist’s subject matter, which features an array of cultural and historical sources, including Renaissance painting, underground comics, and 1930s socialist murals, among many others. Through careful juxtaposition and idiosyncratic detail, Eisenman confronts the most pressing crises of our time, examining significant contemporary moments with a style and vision that is entirely her own. The exhibition is organized by Museum Brandhorst and Whitechapel Gallery, London, and curated by Monika Bayer-Wermuth and Mark Godfrey. The MCA presentation is curated by Jadine Collingwood, Associate Curator, and Jack Schneider, Assistant Curator. 

Kara Walker: Back of Hand

On view through May 18, 2024
The Poetry Foundation | 61 W Superior St

Back of Hand foregrounds New York-based artist Kara Walker’s long-term engagement with language and text. 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. 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. This exhibition comes to the Poetry Foundation from the Atheneum, part of University of Georgia’s (UGA) Lamar Dodd School of Art in Athens, Georgia. The exhibition is curated by Katie Geha and organized by Katherine Litwin and Fred Sasaki.

Nora Turato: THIS IS A TEST OF SEVERANCE. can you let go? 

April 12-June 5, 2024 
ART on THE MART | Visible from Chicago Riverwalk between Wells and Franklin Street 

ART on THE MART’s spring season (April 12–June 5, 2024) will kick off to coincide with EXPO CHICAGO’s eleventh edition with a commission by internationally-acclaimed artist Nora Turato. This new projection will explore contemporary society’s fixation with self-optimization while also continuing the artist’s exploration of language. Turato is known for her text-based works and performances addressing the possibilities of language in a culture oversaturated with information.

A Tale of Today | Sif Itona Westberg: Twin Flame, Double Ruin

February 16–April 14, 2024
Driehaus Museum | 40 E Erie St

The Driehaus Museum presents Sif Itona Westerberg: Twin Flame, Double Ruin, the fourth iteration in the contemporary exhibition series A Tale of Today. Dissolving the boundaries that define culture and nature, Westerberg’s bronze sculptures and intricately hand-carved friezes of aerated concrete compose a language of hybrid forms where the human body, animals, and plants coalesce. Across the installation, Westerberg explores the dominant presence of twins in global origin stories—a primordial belief in the symmetry, doubling, and inversion used to convey the creation of our world. Informed by Classical statuary and ancient mythology, the artist’s interest in duality unfolds in relation to nature, the built environment, and ourselves. EXPO CHICAGO ticket holders and VIP Pass holders can show their tickets for free entry to Driehaus Museum from April 11–14.

Actions for the Earth: Art, Care & Ecology 

On view through July 7, 2024 
The Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University | 40 Arts Circle Drive, Evanston 

Actions for the Earth: Art, Care & Ecology is a traveling exhibition that considers kinship, healing, and restorative interventions as artistic practices and strategies to foster a deeper consciousness of our interconnectedness with the earth. The exhibition presents the work of eighteen artists and collectives who foreground reciprocity and exchange in their work by sharing participatory interventions, healing practices, ecology and science, as well as ancient beliefs. The artists create space for honoring ancestors, the significance of Indigenous knowledges, and engage in fantastical speculation through science-fiction and organic, digital, and spiritual network sciences. Curated by Sharmila Wood and produced by Independent Curators International (ICI), New York. 

Barely Fair 

April 12–21, 2024 
Color Club | 4146 N Elston Ave 

The fourth edition of BARELY FAIR, Chicago’s international miniature art fair presents a tiny peek inside the programming of thirty-six contemporary art galleries, project spaces, and curatorial projects. Included spaces will exhibit works in 1:12 scale booths built to mimic the design of a standard fair.