Featured Events in Chicago in January 2025 (January Updated)

Discover how Chicago’s African-inspired design scene connects global traditions with local creativity inConnecting Threads: Africa Fashion in Chicago. Featuring stunning garments, jewelry, and textiles from talented Chicago-based designers like Olivia Ogbara, Stephane St. Jaymes, Hayet Rida and Jennifer Akese-Burney, this exhibition explores fashion as a medium for storytelling and cultural expression. Visitors will experience thematic environments inspired by Chicago’s skyline, enhanced by Robert Earl Page’s custom patterns, and interactive programming like panel discussions and collaborations withBlack Fashion Week USA.

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.

The exhibition focuses on the life and research experiences of scientist Dr. Sara Ruane, reinterpreting the diversity of modern scientific professions and the pathways of scientific exploration through her personal story.

This exhibition uses narrative, artifacts, and multimedia to showcase Lesley de Souza's personal growth and research trajectory, telling the story of how she developed from a childhood curiosity about nature into a conservation biologist dedicated to the protection of freshwater ecosystems.

Access the adventure where science and imagination meet. Explore the iconic cars, gadgets and props of the James Bond film series. 007 Science: Inventing the World of James Bond is the first-ever official exhibition to focus on the science and technology behind the world’s longest-running movie franchise. Go behind the scenes to learn how the Bond production teams harness real-world science to craft 007’s on-screen adventures. See fantastical gadgets created for the Bond films alongside the real-life inventions they prefigured—see a prototype jetpack from “Thunderball” and the modern Gravity Industries Jet Suit.

In the early 1970s, Nancy Holt (American, 1938–2014) created her first sculpture, a viewing device that she called a Locator. Made from two pieces of welded steel pipe, with a viewing aperture set at the height of her own eyes, the Locator became a powerful means for Holt to ground her viewer in the conscious process of perception. The first Locators were installed in Holt’s New York studio in 1971. From here she could train a viewer’s eye on overlooked aspects of the urban landscape, focusing attention on found elements, such as ventilators on nearby rooftops or windows on neighboring buildings. She then created site-responsive installations, using the Locator as an apparatus to frame surprising passages in the built environment, which she selected and marked with paint. In this installation, conceived in collaboration with the Holt/Smithson Foundation, two historical works—Dual Locators (1972) and Locator (PS1) (1980)—are presented for the first time out-of-doors on a sculpture terrace, where the interior and exterior architecture of the museum are in constant dialogue with each other and the surrounding city. Drawing awareness to the act of looking, these devices ask us to attend to our individual experience of vision, while challenging the presumption that how we see is in any way self-evident.

What meanings has Earth held for people of African descent, and what can an environmental consciousness grounded in Pan-Africanist perspectives teach all of humanity today? Conceived to accompany the major survey exhibition Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica (on view at the Art Institute December 15, 2024–March 30, 2025), this exhibition, drawn from the museum’s collection, addresses the planet itself. Works by 17 artists in film, photography, and book arts draw attention to three vital and intertwined interactions with the land: as a path to freedom, as a means of spiritual and bodily sustenance, and as a source of enlightenment. Works by artists such as Carrie Mae Weems and Dawoud Bey retrace nocturnal paths to freedom. For example, Weems’s North Star stems from the experience of her grandfather, labor organizer Frank Weems, who made a path from rural Arkansas to Chicago in 1936 by traveling at night and following Polaris, the North Star. Like many others who found their way to freedom, Weems saved his life but lost his family and never could return to his birthplace. Foregrounding the interrelation of food and spiritual wisdom are works by Radcliffe Bailey and Luis Medina as well as the room-filling photo installation Bori (Feed the Head) by Candomblé priest and visual artist Ayrson Heráclito. Bori memorializes a ritual performance in which Heráclito encircled the heads of one dozen initiated participants with mounded ingredients to nourish individual Yoruba deities.

From wild carnivores to domestic companions, cats have their paws in science and culture alike. Learn about the characteristics of cats, big and small; walk through dynamic dioramas with dozens of felines frozen in time; and spot your own furry friends in a fan submission photo gallery. This interactive exhibition is the purr-fect blend of science, history, and pop culture.

GRAY presents Torkwase Dyson: Of Line and Memory. For the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, Torkwase Dyson debuts a pair of monumental sculptures, new paintings, and constructions in glass and wood.

For decades, critics have argued that painting is dead. Despite this, artists continue to push the medium forward. This exhibition defines painting itself as a manual “technique,” ​​showing viewers that painting is an ever-changing artistic expression.