5 Exciting Chicago Exhibitions to See in 2023

A new year always brings an exciting array of new exhibitions landing across the city, spanning time period, medium, and style. In the cold, overcast winter months, there’s nothing better than a day at the museum, taking in a new exhibition. Luckily, we have plenty of exciting exhibitions to choose from, at museums across the city. Here’s just a few that we’re excited to see in 2023. 

Tarik Echols: Open – Intuit Museum of Outsider Art 

December 9, 2022-May 14, 2023

Open is Tarik Echol’s first solo exhibition, after over 15 years of work with the Center for the Arts at Little City in Palatine. His work often uses repeating words and patterns of letters to form the backbone of a piece, with patterns and lines on top, forming a dense and atmospheric world. He often utilizes crayon, alongside collage, watercolor, and other paints. Despite the simplicity of crayon as a material, Echol is able to use them to complex and nuanced effect, playing with texture, bold line, and brash color. 

Not All Realisms – Smart Museum of Art 

February 23, 2023-July 9, 2023

Not All Realisms is a survey of African photography throughout the 1960s–a turbulent and defining decade for the continent as revolutions and anti-colonial movements spread widely and all areas of life raced to modernize. The exhibit includes studio photography, as well as street photography, showing different levels of realism, both personally and collectively. With a particular focus on Ghana, Mali, and South Africa, this exhibit features photo prints, newspapers, magazines, posters, and other ways in which photographs are reproduced for mass consumption.

The Art and Influence of Margaret T. Burroughs – DuSable Black History Museum 

Margaret Burroughs is a formidable figure in the history of Chicago’s south side. As an artist, activist, and educator, Burroughs spent her life devoted to real and lasting change. She was a founder of the South Side Community Art Center, Lake Meadows Art Fair, and the DuSable Museum itself. The exhibition includes Burroughs’ own artwork, as well as that of her contemporaries, her notebooks, and photos. 

Lygia Pape: Tecelares – Art Institute of Chicago 

February 11, 2023-June 4, 2023

A pioneer in the world of Brazilian contemporary art, Lygia Pape was a multidisciplinary artist who worked in painting, printmaking, and sculpture. This exhibition brings together nearly a decade of her woodblock prints, from 1952 to 1960. Overlapping black and gray shapes seem to weave together and create new shapes and ideas. In fact, she called her later works Tecelar, an invented term that loosely translates as “weavings.” 

Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s-Today – Museum of Contemporary Art 

November 19, 2022-April 23, 2023

Forecast Form will be the largest group exhibition to survey the contemporary art of the Caribbean diaspora. It’s anchored around the concept of weather, as a metric for change, a metaphor for displacement, and a reminder that we’re all connected through meteorological shifts. Over 35 artists are featured in the exhibit, all of whose work expresses the relationship between place and identity, as well as the movement and flux of being part of a diaspora.