Picasso: Fifty Years Later

This exhibition explores the Modern master’s work, lasting influence, and legacy. Timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s death in 1973, the three-part exhibition features works by Picasso and his contemporaries such as Alexander Archipenko, Wifredo Lam, Fernand Léger, and Joan Miró; a gallery dedicated to the demanding process of Picasso’s printmaking; and a presentation of contemporary figurative artists today. 

Elmhurst Art Museum  • Sept 9, 2023–Jan 7, 2024  

Seeing Race Before Race

When, where, and why did conceptions of race come into being? Centuries before the term race came into popular use, people around the world used distinctions like language, dress, class, geography, and religion—in addition to traits like skin color or facial features—to categorize each other. Seeing Race Before Race explores these early expressions of race in medieval and early modern Europe between 1100 and 1800.  

The Newberry Library  • Sept 8–Dec 30, 2023

Sanford Biggers: Back to the Stars

Sanford Biggers’s art explores overlooked cultural and political narratives from American history. Using antique quilts that echo rumors of their use as Underground Railroad signposts, in Biggers’ hands they become a means of engaging legends while fostering new narratives.

moniquemeloche • Sept 14–Oct 28     

RECOLLECT: Sam Gilliam 

This exhibtion reflects on the innovative production of an internationally recognized artist as well as his impact on the development of Madison’s creative culture, since Gilliam traveled between his home in Washington, D.C. and Madison every summer for over 40 years.

Madison Museum of Contemporary Art  • thru March 4, 2024 

Josiah McElheny: From Red Black to Black, from Blue Black to Black

McElheny presents a suite of new sculptural and wall-hanging works inspired by the concept of transduction, incorporating sound into both their form and the viewer experience. Musician David Grubbs was commissioned to create music for the artworks.

Corbett vs Dempsey  •  Sept 21–Nov 4                

LOVE: Still Not the Lesser

LOVE: Still Not the Lesser brings together 12 international artists uniting across communities to share the ways they’ve encountered and understand love. Together, these artists explore dynamics within sensual eroticism, romantic partnership, family structures, social utopia, and life and death, presenting a world where love as a universal value of respect and care for all humans has been fully achieved. Opening reception Sept 7.

Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP)  • Thru Dec 22, 2023

Alex Katz: Autumn

Alex Katz: Autumn is the artist’s tenth solo exhibition at GRAY and the first exhibition of large-scale landscapes since 2018. The exhibition follows his lauded career retrospective, Gathering, which opened at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in the fall of 2022. As Guggenheim curator Katherine Brinson described: “[One] might be surprised by the unbound rapture of the landscape paintings that have consumed much of the artist’s still-considerable energy in recent years. But [these works] are in fact the culmination of a lifelong artistic project that aspires to compress everything into ‘a single burst of energy… to paint it wide open.’”

GRAY • Sept 8 – Oct 28

Rebecca Morris: 2001–2022

Rebecca Morris: 2001–2022 presents a 21-year survey of painter Rebecca Morris (b. 1969, Honolulu, HI; lives in Los Angeles, CA), an artist best known for her large-scale paintings and inventive approach to composition, color, and gesture. One of the most formidable painters working today, Morris’s practice demonstrates a rigorous commitment to experimentation and abstraction. This exhibition, which originated at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, marks the artist’s first major museum survey since 2005.

Museum of Contemporary Art  • Sept 30–April 7, 2024  

Difference Machines: Technology and Identity in Contemporary Art

This exhibition addresses the complex relationship between the technologies we use and the identities we inhabit. While the internet allows us to express ourselves and connect with each other, there is also a darker side to digital technologies. The 17 artists in this exhibition explore our newly digitized identities by creatively adapting both familiar and emerging technologies.

Wrightwood 659 • Oct 13–Dec 16, 2023

Candace Hunter

Chicago-based artist Candace Hunter’s largest solo exhibition to date, The Alien-Nations and Sovereign States of Octavia E Butler, explores ideas from Parable of the Sower and Xenogenesis Trilogy (Lilith’s Brood) by speculative fiction author Octavia E Butler (1947–2006). Hunter will present a series of collage-based works, installations, video, and sound works that illustrate the meticulously sculpted worlds Butler imagined in her novels, examining their significance for Black bodies and future societies.

Hyde Park Art Center  • Nov 11–Mar 3, 2024