If you’re going to this year’s Expo Chicago, make sure to make a stop at these shows by L train, Divvy, or (unlike New York) a reasonably priced Uber ride. The city is thriving with DIY spaces and longstanding galleries alike, an off-the-beaten-bicoastal-path treat for anyone swinging through Expo week. We’ve rounded up our favorite outposts showing an array of sculptures, prints, paintings, and… bicycles?
“Into Your Arm’s Length” by Oren Pinhassi
Where: The Arts Club of Chicago
When: Through August 8
Why It’s Worth a Look: In his practice, New York-based sculptor Oren Pinhassi confronts his viewers first with scale. In Chicago, he presents towering sculptures that echo the curves and shapes of the body, though it contorts and protrudes at his will.
Know Before You Go: Pinhassi has named his artistic process an “erotic construction,” featuring rough textures and evocative posing. “The cavities in my work—windows, holes—simultaneously reference the most intimate cavities of the body and, as recognizable architectural elements, become landscapes for this public exchange,” he notes.
“Gaylen Gerber”
Where: Hans Goodrich
When: Through May 17
Why It’s Worth a Look: Over on Halsted, Hans Goodrich is inaugurating its second exhibition space with a presentation of work by SAIC professor Gaylen Gerber, providing a chance to see the creative on his home turf.
Know Before You Go: The artist has spent decades experimenting with the notion of object identity through his art. In his long-running “Supports” series, Gerber took artifacts of different origins and coated them in gray or white paint. By flattening their histories into an unassuming surface, he forces viewers to reexamine the everyday objects in front of them.
“The Strange Task” by Liliana Porter
Where: Secrist Beach
When: April 10 – June 13
Why It’s Worth a Look: At flea markets and antique stores, Argentinian artist Liliana Porter picks up little trinkets. She then uses these found objects as a launching point for works on paper, sculptures, and video—all of which comprise this latest showing—that contend with labor and time.
Know Before You Go: The presentation is being shown concurrently with Secrist Beach’s “Unreal,” a similarly playful group show focused on contemporary interpretations of 1920s Surrealism. Across the gallery, subversion of expectations is the treat on offer.
“Duplexes” by Nate Millstein
Where: Weatherproof
When: Through April 26
Why It’s Worth a Look: Sculptor Nate Millstein deals in the overlooked hardware of industrial life, like U-channel sign posts, elevating them to the status of artifact as they are cast in ceramic, painted, and reconfigured into a malleable artistic material.
Know Before You Go: Weatherproof is a bite-sized, artist-run space in Chicago’s Albany Park neighborhood led by Milo Christie and Sam Dybeck, featured in CULTURED‘s inaugural Young Dealers list last year.
“Change, I Ching (64 Paintings)” by Leah Ke Yi Zheng
Where: The Renaissance Society
When: Through April 12
Why It’s Worth a Look: In her first institutional solo show, Chicago-based artist Leah Ke Yi Zheng displays a series of 64 paintings, each interpreting a hexagram from the Chinese philosophical text I Ching (Book of Changes). “My initial desire was wanting to know about the world, and I Ching is a book of world’s phenomena,” Zheng told CULTURED in an interview. “The idea of the show came very quickly; it’s quite an intuitive response to the architecture of the Ren. I [wanted] to work with the architecture, but the work itself forms another space. Together they form a new experience.”
Know Before You Go: The artist is encouraging viewers to see all 64 paintings as one. Even if doing so requires a few turns around the room.
“No one Knows but the Sky” by Youssef Nabil
Where: Mariane Ibrahim
When: April 8 – May 23
Why It’s Worth a Look: Youssef Nabil presents his films alongside hand-painted photographic prints in his first solo with the gallery. The different mediums converge to tell a story about his homeland, Egypt, through clips about the country’s cinematic history and the artist’s own childhood.
Know Before You Go: Growing up in Cairo, a regularly immortalized location in the cinematic canon, Nabil first encountered art through film, and here casts the medium as its own form of historical record-keeping.
“Good for Future” by Diane Simpson
Where: The Art Institute of Chicago
When: Through April 19
Why It’s Worth a Look: In a world of A.I.-generated smoothness, Diane Simpson is focused on the perfection that’s attainable through the handmade. Each of her sculptures is first rendered in a highly detailed sketched rubric. Simpson, 91, then sits down at the table-saw to get to work on bringing them into three dimensions.
Know Before You Go: Simpson has here crafted three newly commissioned works based on drawings from the 1980s, never realized. These drawings were noted as “Good for Future”—now the title of this exhibition.
“Firelei Báez”
Where: Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
When: Through May 31
Why It’s Worth a Look: With a Dominican mother and a father of Haitian ancestry, Firelei Báez has spent her career navigating between two countries and their charged histories. Through rich, colorful paintings and installations, she rewrites national narratives, elevating marginalized voices as she calls on regional folklore, fantasy, science fiction, and mythology.
Know Before You Go: This is the first mid-career survey in North America of Báez’s work, spanning drawings, paintings, and installations made over the last two decades.
“The Division Street Riots” by Carlos Rolón
Where: 65 Grand
When: Through April 12
Why It’s Worth a Look: In June 1966, Chicago’s Humboldt Park was transformed into a three-day protest site. The uprising, now known as the Division Street Riots, was sparked after the police shot 20-year-old, Puerto Rican Arcelis Cruz. Interdisciplinary artist Carlos Rolón’s 65 Grand show takes this history as a jumping-off point for a greater artistic reckoning with American identity.
Know Before You Go: Expect to see a wide variety of interpretations: from charcoal drawings to bicycle sculptures to embroidery. The Puerto Rican artist asks us to consider what it means to be a citizen, and whether it ever meant something more.
“Ethical Managers Make Their Own Rules”
Where: Bodenrader
When: Through May 2
Why It’s Worth a Look: Three artists—Jessica Diamond, Hélène Fauquet, and Jason Hirata—work together to create a display that, at first glance, seems rather empty. The middle of the gallery is entirely unoccupied, and instead, the works line the edges of the space in a distinctly taunting manner. Is this a gallery show, or a protest of one? “The exhibition supports the exhibition and vice versa, you know? I think it’s a reflex,” say the artists in their statement. “It’s a gift to write something and say nothing, and vice versa. So much, so little, and so on. Does that mean what I think it does? I mean, it is mean.”
Know Before You Go: The exhibition’s fanciful title is derived from businessman Sir Adrian Cadbury’s 1987 article with the same name for the Harvard Business Review. In it, Cadbury discusses how people can construct and trust their individual principles rather than sheepishly follow others.
“Raft” by John Stezaker
Where: Gray
When: Through June 13
Why It’s Worth a Look: Dipping into travel books from the 19th century, John Stezaker has merged a plethora of landscapes in a new series of his signature collages, what he calls “spatial betweens.” (Think, a courthouse in the ocean.) The series emerged from Stezaker being struck by the “mirror-like wet sands” on the beach outside his East Sussex studio.
Know Before You Go: Stezaker has been making collages for nearly 60 years. Through his habitual process of patchwork, he interrogates the vastness of empires, the preconceived expectations our eyes place before us, and links between past and present.
“Countersealed” by Mindy Rose Schwartz
Where: M. LeBlanc
When: April 11 – May 23
Why It’s Worth a Look: This will mark Mindy Rose Schwartz’s first Chicago solo in over a decade. The artist is known for her constructions of macramé, ceramics, and other domestic materials, which push the boundaries of what is considered “women’s work.”
Know Before You Go: The work Hard Scarves sees wood panels painted with patterns pulled from clothing passed down to the artist by women in her family, many of whom are no longer present. The piece immortalizes their contributions to the artist’s own creative life.
“All Lock No Key” by B. Ingrid Olson
Where: Corbett vs. Dempsey
When: Through April 25
Why It’s Worth a Look: Here, B. Ingrid Olson has constructed a space-contorting installation for the gallery’s video room, the Vault. Realia for punishment or distinction (is this a human problem? If so I’d like to keep it) reimagines the minute landscape with a series of bright caramel lights and sculptural forms.
Know Before You Go: Olson’s strange interior points viewers towards a cluster of wall-hanging works in a corner of the space, each toying with the suggestion of violence, whether by surgical encounters or disinterment. Eeriness is a goal here, forcing visitors to embrace their own visceral response to embodying a space.
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