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, […]

Over the last century, Chicago has led the nation in progressive arts education for K-12 students, as teachers and their students linked art education to movements for social justice, access, and self-determination. Gallery 400’s Learning Together centers the progressive art pedagogy of a diverse group of Chicago artist educators from the mid-1960s through the 2010s, […]

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 […]

Edgar Miller (1899–1993) arrived in Chicago in 1917, and over the next fifty years established a successful career as multi-hyphenate creative practitioner. He worked as an architect, artist, craftsperson, curator, designer, and illustrator during a particularly rich period that saw the emergence and establishment of modernism across the visual culture of the city. The tremendous […]

Over the last nine years, artist Theaster Gates has been the steward of the Johnson Publishing Company’s ephemera, periodicals, furniture, inventory, and architectural fragments originally housed at the Johnson Publishing Company building on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. The devices for the interrogation of these objects and their permission to be public have created one of […]

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 exhibition includes maps, landscape designs, installations, wall drawings, sculptures, and multimedia works by more than 25 artists. The exhibition features artwork by Alexandra Antoine, Rebecca […]

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. Give the Drummer Some! is rooted in Paige’s decades-long practice as an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and educator who bridges cultural boundaries. A lifelong resident of the […]

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 causes and consequences of immigration/migration, including displacement, colonization, trauma, and assimilation. The cost of belonging is choosing what to leave behind. Its reward: creating new […]

This exhibition explores typography, the shape and design of letters, within Chicago's diverse neighborhoods to investigate design legacies and their contemporary echoes. The exhibition highlights alternative modernisms by considering how revolutionary movements and concepts like love and safety shape the way communities spread and design information for one another. Featured designers and lettering artists activate […]

This exhibition and accompanying public program reflect on the lived experiences of immigrant printers, designers, and bookmakers in Chicago and explore how printing by and for immigrant communities has shaped the city’s cultural landscape. 

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 where the National Public Housing Museum is located. The project includes a temporary mural outside the museum by artist Andrea Carlson (Ojibwe) that links Indigenous […]

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 Ojibwe/European descent), Kelly Church (Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Tribe of Pottawatomi/Ottawa), Nora Moore Lloyd (Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe), and Jason Wesaw (Pokagon Band of Potawatomi) —Woven Being explores confluences that are […]