Chicago activists in the 1960s and ’70s used design to create powerful slogans, symbols, and imagery to amplify their visions for social change. Designing for Change: Chicago Protest Art of the 1960s–70s features more than 100 posters, fliers, signs, buttons, newspapers, magazines, and books from the era, expressing often radical ideas about race, war, gender equality, […]

This exhibition makes visible the photograph collection of Japanese photographer Akito Tsuda, who documented Chicago's Mexican American Pilsen neighborhood in the early 1990s while attending art school at Columbia College. […]

Radical Craft, an exhibition, catalog, and workshop series, celebrates the work of immigrant artists and reformers at the country's most important social settlement. The exhibition showcases Hull-House’s rarely exhibited textile collection, drawn from a wide array of immigrant traditions. Also included are handbound books from Ellen Gates Starr’s bookbindery, newly restored paintings by Alice Kellogg […]

Myth of the Organic City presents an historical and contemporary overview of Chicago’s design and land use, from its Indigenous roots through 20th century infrastructure projects to present-day developments. The […]

For the Smart Museum’s 50th anniversary, South Side artist Robert Earl Paige creates a multi-part pattern-based installation and sprawling public art project that invites communities into a collective experience of space. […]

Exploring identity and place through the diverse work, perspectives, and legacy of three immigration periods of Lithuanian artists in Chicago, this exhibition and its associated programs and publications consider the […]

Zhegagoynak, the place now known as Chicagoland, is a vital center for Indigenous art, past and present. Through the perspectives of four collaborating artists with connections to Zhegagoynak—Andrea Carlson (Grand Portage […]

This exhibition examines contemporary approaches to traditional Woodlands style art, highlighting the underrepresented and diverse Native cultures of the Great Lakes region and the materials, art forms, and processes they […]

This exhibition, curated Dr. Lucy Mensah, uses art, archives, and public dialogue to explore and connect the histories of displacement of Indigenous people and African American families on the land […]

Created by Luftwerk, this interactive installation captures and reimagines fragments of the landscape we inhabit as a reminder of the loss of native prairie. Works on the walls depict an […]