Our pick of the best museum and gallery shows to see in Chicago this spring – The Art Newspaper

Dabin Ahn, Document, until 6 June

For Dabin Ahn’s first solo show with Document in Chicago, the Korean artist is showing new paintings that meditate on memory, time and grief, and continue his experiments with breaking and expanding the picture plane. It comes just after a solo exhibition with François Ghebaly in Los Angeles, as well as a presentation of his works with the gallery at Frieze Los Angeles. Ahn created both groups of paintings and sculptures in the last weeks of his father’s life, rendering delicate still lifes of broken or fading Korean ceramic vessels, candles, spectacles and insects on linen, with fissured surfaces or handmade frames that break away to reveal the painted canvas underneath.

“It’s inevitable that I still think of my dad,” Ahn says, adding that the show at Document more broadly deals with impermanence. He is showing new works that transform his canvases into atmospheric torsos, and he is also introducing video for the first time, incorporated as a four-inch LED panel within a wider composition on linen.

Ahn, who studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, began devoting his playful experimentation with materials towards the personal events of his life in 2023 when it became apparent that his father, the acclaimed actor Ahn Sung-ki, would not recover his health after a years-long battle with lymphoma. Around the same time, Ahn got a new studio space in the Pilsen neighbourhood that allowed him the freedom to use power tools, and he began making his own stretchers as well as wood and cast resin frames. Depicting candles on the sides of his paintings, integrated into his larger compositions, ignited his continued interest in the peripheries of his images.

“I consider my objects, my artworks, as living things… born rather than made,” he says. Often, he adds, the unintended results of his experiments are what propel his work forwards. “[I] might fail sometimes, but almost every single time something good happens that I didn’t expect to happen, that becomes the focal point of the work. I rely on luck as well as the effort and time that goes into the work.” J.P.

Lucas Samaras: Sitting, Standing, Walking, Looking, Art Institute of Chicago, until 20 July

The Greek American artist Lucas Samaras (1936-2024) was an irrepressible experimenter and this show, drawn from the institute’s permanent collection (including works recently donated by the artist’s estate), foregrounds to what extent his experiments extended to his everyday life. His Polaroid self-portraits, some combining multiple images or featuring manipulated pigment, reveal an endlessly inventive approach to photography and portraiture. “Samaras developed an ongoing dialogue between himself and his image,” says Grace Deveney, the institute’s associate curator of photography and media. “His signature method of manipulating film allowed him to create outrageous distortions of himself and his world.” B.S.

Dancing the Revolution: From Dancehall to Reggaetón, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 14 April-20 September

Examining dancehall and reggaetón as not just musical genres but political and cultural expressions of resistance and affirmation, this exhibition brings together works by more than 35 artists, including Lee “Scratch” Perry, Alberta Whittle, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Edra Soto, Denzil Forrester and Isaac Julien. It tracks both musical movements’ evolutions from their Caribbean origins to Central and North America and, ultimately, into global phenomena. Appropriately, given the subject, the show also offers plenty of opportunities to dance, from a playlist created by two of its co-curators, Carla Acevedo-Yates and Cecilia González Godino, to a youth dance event on 18 April organised by the museum’s Teen Creative Agency and more. B.S.

MoCP at Fifty: Collecting Through the Decades, Museum of Contemporary Photography, until 16 May

This anniversary show spans five galleries, with each representing a decade of the museum’s acquisitions. Although only a small fraction of the 18,000 objects the museum has acquired since its founding in 1976 is on view, the featured works chronicle modern history and the evolution of photography, from Yasuhiro Ishimoto and Ilse Bing to Dayanita Singh and Daniel Arsham. While the early decades reflect a devotion to documentary, street and humanist photography from the 1960s on, subsequent decades saw the collection embrace more expansive definitions of photography. B.S.

Drawing with Metal: Sculpture by Bill Brady, Intuit Art Museum, 9 April-4 October

For decades, the self-taught artist Bill Brady has worked from his home studio in a customised school bus parked on his family’s property in rural Centerville, Pennsylvania, tinsmithing his elegant, playful and largely abstract metal sculptures. This exhibition, Brady’s largest yet outside of his home state, brings together more than 30 sculptures—some of which might evoke Alexander Calder or Joan Miró, but also show hints of Art Deco design and folk-art forms like weathervanes—plus pages from his many, many notebooks. B.S.

Dispossessions in the Americas: The Extraction of Bodies, Land, and Heritage from La Conquista to the Present, Wrightwood 659, 17 April-18 July

Following a dozen museum shows around Latin America exploring the deep and destructive consequences of colonial dispossession, the Chicago institution Wrightwood 659 is staging Dispossessions in the Americas: The Extraction of Bodies, Land, and Heritage from La Conquista to the Present, a cumulative survey that explores the loss of land, culture and language in the region and its consequences today. The exhibition series is part of a $5m Mellon Foundation-supported research project at the University of Pennsylvania.

The show includes works by more than 35 contemporary Latin American artists, some of whom have never shown in the United States. Participants include the Guatemalan performance artist and poet Regina José Galindo, the Indigenous Peruvian artist Rember Yahuarcani, the late Cuban American conceptual artist Ana Mendieta, the Ecuadorian trans activist Purita Pelayo and the Colombian conceptual artist and film-maker Miguel Ángel Rojas. Altogether, their work seeks to show the impacts of dispossession on Indigenous, Afro-descendant, queer and trans communities. J.P.