Featured Events in Chicago in February 2025 (March Updated)

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.

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.

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.

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.

Pan-Africanism, first named and theorized around 1900, is commonly regarded as an umbrella term for political movements that have advanced the call for both individual self-determination and global solidarity among peoples of African descent. It has yet to be fully examined as a worldview that takes its force from art and culture.As the first major exhibition to survey Pan-Africanism’s cultural manifestations, Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica gathers together some 350 objects, spanning the 1920s to the present, made by artists on four continents: Africa, North and South America, and Europe. Panafrica, the promised land named in the exhibition title, is presented as a conceptual place where arguments about decolonization, solidarity, and freedom are advanced and negotiated with the aim of an emancipatory future.

Pan-Africanism, first named and theorized around 1900, is commonly regarded as an umbrella term for political movements that have advanced the call for both individual self-determination and global solidarity among peoples of African descent. It has yet to be fully examined as a worldview that takes its force from art and culture.As the first major exhibition to survey Pan-Africanism’s cultural manifestations, Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica gathers together some 350 objects, spanning the 1920s to the present, made by artists on four continents: Africa, North and South America, and Europe. Panafrica, the promised land named in the exhibition title, is presented as a conceptual place where arguments about decolonization, solidarity, and freedom are advanced and negotiated with the aim of an emancipatory future.

Across three decades, artist and filmmaker Arthur Jafa has developed a singularly dynamic practice comprising films and videos, photographs, and sculptures. Through his multidisciplinary work, Jafa seeks to encompass what he describes as “the full complexity, specificity, beauty, and potentiality of what Black folks have made and continue to make out of the bleak existential circumstance we’ve attended to over the past several hundred years.” Utilizing found imagery, music, and artistic techniques such as montage and collage, he has constructed an extensive assemblage of Black expression, layered and arranged in ways that reveal the diverse and complex realities of Black being.

Across three decades, artist and filmmaker Arthur Jafa has developed a singularly dynamic practice comprising films and videos, photographs, and sculptures. Through his multidisciplinary work, Jafa seeks to encompass what he describes as “the full complexity, specificity, beauty, and potentiality of what Black folks have made and continue to make out of the bleak existential circumstance we’ve attended to over the past several hundred years.” Utilizing found imagery, music, and artistic techniques such as montage and collage, he has constructed an extensive assemblage of Black expression, layered and arranged in ways that reveal the diverse and complex realities of Black being.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Descending the Staircase considers novel artistic approaches to representing the human body. Spread across two floors of the museum, the exhibition presents figures of all kinds, from the fragmented, absurd, and surreal to the curated, self-aware, and media savvy. Puppets, masks, and automatons merge bodies with objects, juxtaposing the animate and inanimate, while abstract sculptures evoke the human form through soft and fleshy materials such as nylon, wax, hair, and latex. Elsewhere, artists deploy the living body as a medium, setting it in motion with performance and gesture. Together, these artworks delve into fundamental questions about the human body in the contemporary world, including its relationship to labor and machines, its presentation in advertising and social media, and its role within the everyday domestic sphere.

Descending the Staircase considers novel artistic approaches to representing the human body. Spread across two floors of the museum, the exhibition presents figures of all kinds, from the fragmented, absurd, and surreal to the curated, self-aware, and media savvy. Puppets, masks, and automatons merge bodies with objects, juxtaposing the animate and inanimate, while abstract sculptures evoke the human form through soft and fleshy materials such as nylon, wax, hair, and latex. Elsewhere, artists deploy the living body as a medium, setting it in motion with performance and gesture. Together, these artworks delve into fundamental questions about the human body in the contemporary world, including its relationship to labor and machines, its presentation in advertising and social media, and its role within the everyday domestic sphere.

Renowned multimedia artist Dieter Roth’s preferred form, and the one he spent his lifetime pursuing, was the Gesamtkunstwerk, a German term for “total work of art.” Working across a diverse range of media, disciplines, and creative activities, Roth developed an artistic practice that dissolved the boundaries between art and life, upending traditional categories, hierarchies, and even timeworn notions of singular authorship. Often collaborating with other artists, including his son Björn, Roth produced an ever-expanding body of work that gestured toward the cumulative effects of a life spent making and remaking.

This longest-running exhibition of African American art has been displayed annually at Griffin MSI since 1970. Black Creativity Juried Art Exhibition features paintings, drawings, fine art prints, sculpture, mixed-media, ceramics and photography by African Americans, including youth artists between the ages of 14 and 17.

This longest-running exhibition of African American art has been displayed annually at Griffin MSI since 1970. Black Creativity Juried Art Exhibition features paintings, drawings, fine art prints, sculpture, mixed-media, ceramics and photography by African Americans, including youth artists between the ages of 14 and 17.

This longest-running exhibition of African American art has been displayed annually at Griffin MSI since 1970. Black Creativity Juried Art Exhibition features paintings, drawings, fine art prints, sculpture, mixed-media, ceramics and photography by African Americans, including youth artists between the ages of 14 and 17.

The 1940s and 1950s were a pivotal time for Japan’s creative print movement, known as sōsaku hanga. Just after World War II, artists who had primarily trained in oil painting turned to woodblock prints to portray the people around them, using the medium’s power and immediacy to capture a disappearing traditional world. This exhibition features the work of four sōsaku hanga artists: Onchi Kōshirō (1891–1955) and his followers Sekino Jun’ichirō (1914–1988), Saitō Kiyoshi (1907–1997), and Kitaoka Fumio (1918–2007). Onchi was the movement’s main advocate, and his name is synonymous with the group. From 1939, sōsaku hanga artists met at his home on the first Thursday of every month, where they received the encouragement they needed to flourish.

The 1940s and 1950s were a pivotal time for Japan’s creative print movement, known as sōsaku hanga. Just after World War II, artists who had primarily trained in oil painting turned to woodblock prints to portray the people around them, using the medium’s power and immediacy to capture a disappearing traditional world. This exhibition features the work of four sōsaku hanga artists: Onchi Kōshirō (1891–1955) and his followers Sekino Jun’ichirō (1914–1988), Saitō Kiyoshi (1907–1997), and Kitaoka Fumio (1918–2007). Onchi was the movement’s main advocate, and his name is synonymous with the group. From 1939, sōsaku hanga artists met at his home on the first Thursday of every month, where they received the encouragement they needed to flourish.

Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me is the first major survey of internationally renowned artist Wafaa Bilal (b. 1966, Najaf, Iraq; lives in New York, NY). Working in performance, sculpture, and with online and interactive technologies, Bilal’s interdisciplinary practice investigates the dynamic between international and interpersonal politics while highlighting the tension between his home in the United States, which he has deemed the “comfort zone,” and the “conflict zone” of Iraq. The exhibition covers the breadth of Bilal’s versatile career by exploring his performance practice, the use of power in Saddam Hussein’s regime, and Iraqi history and antiquity. It will feature archival displays of his iconic month-long performance Domestic Tension (2007) and year-long performance 3rdi (2010–11), as well as two new works including a sculptural commission for the MCA.

This exhibition focuses on a single artwork by Pipilotti Rist (b. 1962, Grabs, Switzerland; lives and works in Zürich), the 2001 video installation Supersubjektiv. Rist filmed the video footage featured in Supersubjektiv using a handheld digital camera during a month-long trip to Japan in December 2000. The hallucinatory video, presented in the Turner Gallery as a multichannel installation accompanied by sheepskin seating and an artist-made pillow, offers viewers a dream-like space for contemplation and curiosity. Paired with an ambient electronic soundtrack with lyrics sung in English and Japanese, the artwork examines nature, the built environment, and technology with wide-eyed wonder. Visitors are encouraged to relax and lose track of time as they take in Rist’s audiovisual meditation on longing for connection in our vast, globalized society.

Level up your sensual bachata by attending this second edition of Sensual Weekender Chicago! Once again, we are bringing artists from the Bachata Sensual organization to provide guest with high quality instruction from artists mentored by Bachata Sensual creators, Korke y Judith. Join us at Latin Street Music & Dance for this unforgettable weekend! What to expect: Instruction by Bachata Sensual Ambassadors with International teaching experience(4) hours of day workshops(1) Pre-Party Class w/ Jorelle & Monica(2) nights of social dancing w/ Bachata Sensual Ambassador DJ TimMost importantly, GOOD VIBES!See below for the schedule! Information Source: B-mac | eventbrite

Welcome to the Ultimate Showdown at SPF Chicago! Join us for an electrifying evening at our first-ever Fight Club Pickleball Tournament! This isn’t your average pickleball event—it’s a high-energy competition where 12 top-tier teams will battle for glory, and the audience gets in on the action by choosing a winning team for a chance to win cash prizes! We’re offering three exciting ways to participate: 🏆 Free General Admission – Come cheer, vibe, and enjoy the high-energy atmosphere! 🏆 Pick the Winning Team Experience / Buy-In – Predict the champion, and if your chosen team wins, you win a cash prize! 🏆 Team Sign-Up / Buy-In – Compete for the title, bragging rights, and a $500 cash prize! Event Itinerary: 6:00 PM – Check-In & Social Hour Welcome by Ashley & Izzy: Guests who purchased the Winning Team Experience ticket will check in during the first hour and draw a number from a bowl to match with a competing team.Enjoy drinks and snacks from our sponsors. 6:30 PM – Team Introductions & Bracket SetupIzzy will introduce the teams and assign numbers to each one.Bracket will be displayed on an easel for easy viewing. 7:00 PM – Tournament BeginsMatches will be played on two courts, with games to 11 points (rally scoring in case of a tie).Each match is best of 3 games, leading into a bracket-style competition. 8:00–8:30 PM – Championship GameThe final match will take place on a single court for an epic showdown. 9:00 PM – Awards CeremonyCelebrate the champions, honor the winning audience members, and thank everyone for an incredible evening! Want to compete? We’re looking for teams with a 3.6+ DUPR rating. Whether you’re a competitive player or just love the game, this is your chance to showcase your skills in a fun, exciting atmosphere! Each team is guaranteed a minimum of 3 games. What to Expect: 🎵 Live DJ spinning energetic beats to keep the excitement going 🎉 A hyped-up crowd cheering and supporting their teams 🏆 $500 cash prize for the winning team and cash prizes for winning audience participants 📍 Venue: SPF Chicago, Lincoln Park Spots are limited, so sign up now and secure your place on the court!Ready to join the fun? Whether you’re here to play, cheer, or win, Fight Club Pickleball promises an unforgettable night! Information Source: eventbrite