All eyes will be on the Windy City this month as more than 130 galleries convene for the 15th edition of Expo Chicago at Navy Pier (April 9–12), its third outing as part of the international Frieze brand, which purchased the fair (along with New York’s Armory Show) in 2023.
More than 35,000 art lovers attended the 2025 edition, and this year’s visitors will take advantage of the city’s rich art scene, with longstanding commercial galleries as well as scrappy artist-run spaces and institutions large and small, from the encyclopedic Art Institute of Chicago to the avant-garde–focused Museum of Contemporary Art and academically linked institutions such as the Smart Museum of Art and the Renaissance Society, both at the University of Chicago, and (until it closes, anyway) the DePaul Art Museum at the eponymous university.
Here are six shows you shouldn’t miss after touching down at O’Hare.
-
1. “Dancing the Revolution” at the Museum of Contemporary Art
Image Credit: Adrian Boot / Urbanimage.tv This first-of-its-kind exhibition surveys the intertwined histories of Caribbean-born musical genres dancehall and reggaetón in the context of contemporary art. By treating music and dance as global engines of political power and colonial resistance, “Dancing the Revolution” serves as an ambitious and timely examination of global methods of collective resistance and joy.
Curated by Carla Acevedo-Yates, former curator and director of curatorial initiatives, the exhibition features painting, installation, photography, and sound by more than forty artists such as Issac Julien, Edra Soto, Alberta Whittle and Carolina Caycedo alongside legendary figures like Lee “Scratch” Perry, effectively collapsing distinctions between fine art, music, and sonic experimentation.As these genres have spread around the world, so too does the exhibition’s remit, looking at artists and historical events from Kingston to San Juan via Panama, New York City, and London. A standout thread, for example, highlights perreo combativo (or “combative twerking”), which transformed reggaetón’s kinetic vocabulary into a mode of dissent during Puerto Rico’s 2019 protests, illuminating the varied moments in which music and dance have served as modes of protest and celebration in the fight for collective liberation.
-
2. Roger Brown at Gray
Image Credit: courtesy of GRAY Chicago/New York. © The School of the Art
Institute of Chicago and the Brown Family.The late Richard Gray founded his eponymous gallery in the city’s River North area in 1963, and in November his son Paul announced representation of the estate of artist Roger Brown (1941–1997), equally a stalwart of the city’s artistic history as one of the Chicago Imagists. “Weathervane” (on view through June 13) is the gallery’s first showing of his work since then.
Eleven paintings spanning the 1980s and ’90s explore “the artist’s vision of an emotionally charged contemporary life set at the tense border between the built environment and the natural world.” Paintings like Lake Effect, Weather Map and Crosswinds show an artist focused on the larger environmental context for the tiny humans and buildings that also appear in these canvases. The Flight of Daedalus and Icarus underlines the artist’s vision of a fragile humanity in a hostile environment.
-
3. Leah Ke Yi Zheng at Renaissance Society
Image Credit: Forrest Frederick for Bob. It’s your last chance to catch Chicago-based Chinese painter Leah Ke Yi Zheng’s “Change, I Ching (64 Paintings)” at the Renaissance Society (through April 12). (Should you miss it, her work is also on view in in New York in “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” the inaugural show at the reopened New Museum.)
The show’s paintings are based on the hexagrams of the legendary ancient Chinese text the I Ching (Book of Changes), often used in divination. The paintings don’t literally represent the hexagrams but rather interpret them in the artist’s own visual language, in paintings on silk, an unforgiving medium often used in traditional Chinese painting, with hand-built hardwood stretchers. Here, the I Ching provides “a method, a structure, and a philosophical companion.”
Ke Yi Zheng unites Chinese treatment of materials with conceptual art methodologies, bringing East and West into dialogue in a mode inspired by figures such as Hong Kong philosoopher Yuk Hui and American composer John Cage. For this show, the artist went so far as to subtly change the venue’s galleries, covering certain windows and adjusting the proportions of some walls, all as a way of emphasizing “the light of the here and now.”
-
4. Korean National Treasures at the Art Institute of Chicago
Image Credit: National Museum of Korea On public display for the first time are a selection of 140 objects from among the 23,000 pieces that the family of Lee Kun-Hee, late chairman of Samsung Group, donated in 2021 to the Korean government, which officially recognizes fully twenty-two of them as Treasures or National Treasures.
Organized by Yeonsoo Chee, associate curator of Korean art, “Korean National Treasures: 2,000 Years of Art” (on view through July 5) is the Institute’s biggest show of Korean art in four decades and spans from 57 BCE to the 1990s, with the works on view running the gamut from gilt bronze sculptures of Buddha to a painting by Kim Whanki, abstract artist and godfather of the Dansaekhwa movement.
-
5. Liliana Porter at Secrist Beach
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist and Secrist Beach Chicago dealer Carrie Secrist opened her gallery (then called Gallery A) in River North all the way back in 1992, and after some years in West Loop, she launched a new chapter in 2024 (with Bill Beach, her partner in business and in life) as Secrist Beach. She now occupies a 10,000-square-foot home in the West Town neighborhood, doubling her previous size and offering a space for art and a salon-like environment for conversation and community.
The conversation this spring will revolve around her show of Argentinian-born, New York–based artist Liliana Porter, “The Strange Task” (April 10–June 13), showcasing a multidisciplinary practice that spans some six decades. When New York’s Museo del Barrio reopened after a renovation in 2018, it spotlighted Porter in a survey that, per Artforum, “put forward a strong case for the ongoing vitality of Porter’s art.” The Secrist Beach show spans various media, “all featuring Porter’s coterie of endearing inanimate found objects, toys and figurines.”
The Porter show appears alongside a group exhibition, “UNREAL,” with artists exploring “contemporary anxieties and the surreal dimensions of everyday life.”
-
6. Alma Thomas at the Smart Museum
Image Credit: Smithsonian American Art Museum Born in Georgia and a longtime resident of Washington, DC, Alma Thomas (1891–1978) had a long career as a schoolteacher before she took up artmaking. She was the first student to earn a fine art degree at Howard University and in the 1940s was vice president at the Barnett-Aden Gallery, a showcase for modern art and a pioneer of racial integration. In 1972, at age 80, she became the first African American woman to have a solo exhibition at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art.
“Composing Color: Paintings by Alma Thomas from the Smithsonian American Art Museum” (though July 5) looks at her most prolific period, spanning the years 1959 to 1978, a moment of enormous upheaval in American society in which the artist looked to music, nature, and the cosmos for inspiration. (At the fair, New York’s Michael Rosenfeld Gallery will also present a selection of works by Thomas.)
“Through color I have sought to concentrate on beauty and happiness, rather than on man’s inhumanity to man,” said the artist. Those inspirations led to riveting abstractions (take it from me! I saw the show at the Denver Art Museum) so rich with color and pattern, you’ll be nailed to the floor.
