If spring is the season of new beginnings, then fall is the opposite: the season of reflection. Let’s look back on 20 years of Corbett vs. Dempsey, that deliciously odd gallery — if you can even call it that, as it’s also a performance space, book publisher, music label, and other curious in-betweens. Read more below to learn about the fascinating shenanigans they’re planning for their anniversary exhibition — or visit and see for yourself.
But that’s not to say there aren’t new beginnings in autumn, too — after all, it is the season when the art world wakes up from its summer slumber. Leasho Johnson’s sensuous new works, for instance, mark his debut with Mariane Ibrahim Gallery. And school’s back in session at the Renaissance Society, an affiliate of the University of Chicago, where a streak of inventive exhibitions continues with a show of works by Neïl Beloufa — curator and director Myriam Ben Salah just does not miss. Then there’s a group show exploring Filipino heritage at the Epiphany Center for the Arts, Haegue Yang’s two-dimensional works at the Arts Club of Chicago, a show of protest art in the ’60s, and so much more. —Lisa Yin Zhang, Associate Editor
Suzanne Harris & Gordon Matta-Clark: 1971–1978
Rhona Hoffman Gallery, 1711 West Chicago Avenue, Chicago, Illinois
Through October 11
Rhona Hoffman Gallery places underrecognized dancer, painter, and sculptor Suzanne Harris on rightfully equal footing with sculptor Gordon Matta-Clark in every way in this show of the pair’s work from 1971 to ’78, from pride of place in the title to exhibition material to curation. Both, it suggests, explored space in radical ways. On view, for instance, are Matta-Clark’s cut collages of photo negatives of buildings, as well as glass sculptures by Harris that seem to reconfigure the gallery space, tunneling into the walls and drooping from the ceiling. —LYZ
Leasho Johnson: Escaping the tyranny of meaning
Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, 437 North Paulina Street, Chicago, Illinois
Through October 26
Escaping the tyranny of meaning marks Leasho Johnson’s Mariane Ibrahim Gallery debut with lushly sensuous new works. Inspired by the cunning trickster Anansi of West African folklore, long passages of visceral abstraction recalling the swirling ambiguities of a Julie Mehretu coalesce into figures with the angular presence of a Jacob Lawrence in these paintings. In one work, a recumbent suggestion of a figure lounges in a fertile aquarium of color; another seems to depict a pair of lovers locked in impassioned embrace. —LYZ
David Antonio Cruz: come close, like before
Monique Meloche Gallery, 451 North Paulina Street, Chicago, Illinois
Through October 26
Drawing from his experience at an artists’ residency at Laguarres, Spain, and his grandparents’ home in Humacao, Puerto Rico — as well as the vexed relationship between those two locales — David Antonio Cruz’s elaborately constructed mixed media works consider what “home” means. Here, he posits that it’s something one chooses, rather than something one is born into. “iknowyou’vebeenwonderingwherei’vebeen:adrift,adraft,astare,atilt,asigh,exh the raft.” (2024), for instance, is a cuddle puddle of non-biological intimacy from the chosenfamily series (2020–ongoing), which explores the bonds between queer people. —LYZ
Alice Tippit: The Deep Element
Patron Gallery, 1612 West Chicago Avenue, Chicago, Illinois
Through November 2
Chicago-based artist Alice Tippit takes on the interrelations between language and image in her solo show of movingly enigmatic paintings at Patron — specifically, how both can fail us in ways that nevertheless feel meaningful. These works hover between abstraction and visual puns: “Sound” (2022) depicts the silhouette of a hammer twice-bent, rendering it both useless and helpless. That’s not to say that Tippit communicates on a solely cerebral register, though. Her use of color is simultaneously subtle and surprising, and she’s got an eye for simple yet compelling composition. —LYZ
Hubcap Diamond Star Halo Corbett vs. Dempsey at Twenty
Corbett vs. Dempsey, 2156 West Fulton Street, Chicago, Illinois
Through November 2
It’s been 20 years of Corbett vs. Dempsey, that hybrid gallery-performance space-book publisher-music label and much more, and it’s since become a mainstay of the city. That’s a lot to celebrate, but true to its nature, the gallery is choosing instead to launch yet another novel form. Hubcap Diamond Star Halo features many of the artists shown or affiliated with the space, including Rebecca Morris, Christopher Wool, and Albert Oehlen, through seven one-week exhibitions and a long list of performances. —LYZ
Unwrapping Lumpia: Deconstructing the Filipino American Identity
Catacombs Gallery at Epiphany Center for the Arts, 201 South Ashland Avenue, Chicago, Illinois
Through November 8
Filipino lumpia are a spring roll-like snack of sweet or savory fillings wrapped in a thin pastry skin. Though delectable, the reduction of Asian cultures to little more than their food culture by a White majority in the United States is an ongoing problem. In time for Filipino American History Month in October, four Chicago art organizations come together to present Unwrapping Lumpia at Catacombs Gallery, which features the work of 38 artists who explore and complicate their heritage. —LYZ
Neïl Beloufa: Humanities
Renaissance Society, 5811 South Ellis Avenue, Chicago, Illinois
Through November 10
One of, if not the most, consistently interesting exhibition spaces in Chicago lives up to its reputation with a newly commissioned installation by the difficult-to-categorize Neïl Beloufa. You know those ads for interactive choose-your-own-destiny games you get on TikTok? He’s made a sort of art-world multi-media version, through which you can become the protagonist of a success story in which you start a company, a cult, or a political party. Those things, he shows us, aren’t so different. —LYZ
Women at War: 12 Ukrainian Artists
Chicago Cultural Center, 78 East Washington Street, Chicago, Illinois
Through December 8
The debut of Women at War at New York’s Fridman Gallery in 2022 arrived months after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Two years on — and 10 years out from Russia’s annexation of Crimea — these works by 12 Ukrainian artists slice even deeper, as the war drags brutally on and the world enters deeper orders of devastation. —LYZ
Haegue Yang: Flat Works
Arts Club of Chicago, 201 East Ontario Street, Chicago, Illinois
Through December 20
New York audiences might be most familiar with Haegue Yang’s movables through her two-year takeover of the Museum of Modern Art’s atrium, in which monumental, rollable sculptures covered with metallic bells zigzagged across the gallery. But Yang has been experimenting in two dimensions for decades. At the Arts Club of Chicago, she plays with envelopes, wallpapers, sandpaper, and more in the most comprehensive exhibition yet of these works. —LYZ
Virginia Jaramillo: Principle of Equivalence
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 220 East Chicago Avenue, Chicago, Illinois
Through January 5, 2025
Virginia Jarmillo’s first major retrospective — the largest show of her work to date — traces over half a century of her socially conscious abstraction. Formed in the crucible of New York and Los Angeles in the ’60s and ’70s, the more than 40 works on view propel her theory that philosophies of the world are inevitably couched in the physical. In “Genesis” (1969), for instance, two curved shapes seem to kiss against a deep purple background in a moment tender yet tenuous: One seems poised to slip down the slick curve of the other and out of the composition entirely. —LYZ
John Akomfrah: Four Nocturnes
Wrightwood 659, 659 West Wrightwood Avenue, Chicago, Illinois
Through February 15
John Akomfrah, who represents Great Britain at this year’s Venice Biennale, shows two installations at Wrightwood 659, including “Four Nocturnes” (2019), a work commissioned for Ghana’s inaugural pavilion at the 2019 Biennale. In the work, elephants — specifically, their declining populations across the African continent — are metonym for Akomfrah’s meditations on the interconnections between cultural heritage, the natural world, and humanity’s propensity for self-destruction. It pairs well with “Toxic Cloud,” an assemblage of hundreds of plastic jugs hanging from the ceiling like the looming threat of climate catastrophe. —LYZ
Designing for Change: Chicago Protest Art of the 1960s–70s
Chicago History Museum, 1601 North Clark Street, Chicago, Illinois
Through May 4, 2025
Walking into Designing for Change, you might feel at first like you’re back in school, being dragged on another field trip to a de rigueur Civil Rights-Era “immersive” exhibition that says nothing new. But take one more step and you’ll find a glorious array of original protest art pulled from an expansive archive, from first-edition printed posters to buttons and clothing worn by activists marching in the streets. It took me over two hours to get through four small rooms, as I couldn’t help pouring over every text. I learned about (and even listened to recorded voice messages from) artists I wish I’d known more about before coming in, like Barbara Jones-Hogu from the AfriCOBRA movement, Estelle Carol from the Chicago Women’s Graphics Collective, and Mario Castillo, the painter behind “Peace” (1968), the only anti-Vietnam War mural in Chicago at the time. The brilliant colors and graphics of this classic era of protest art that flourished in the city inspired teens in the museum’s Chicago Artivism program to create their own works of art, which the museum hung as an expansion of the original exhibition on walls outside and nearby. —Isabella Segalovich
