Catching up with old friends during Alumni Weekend? Supporting your graduate during Convocation? Looking for a fun, free activity on a rainy afternoon? Whatever your reasons for coming to campus, a wealth of exhibitions at the University of Chicago has got you covered.
From African modernism to the colorful art of Alma Thomas to the intellectual life of Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, check out these exhibitions open this spring.
A Bestiary of Ancient Nubia
Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures | 1155 E 58th St. | Open April 16 – August 16
Ancient Nubia, a region located along the Nile in what is today southern Egypt and northern Sudan, lived in symbiosis with animals. Companions of daily life, sources of artistic and religious inspiration, subjects of trade, familiar even in the afterlife, animals in the ancient world had their place at the top of society and power.
From the lion to the crocodile, from the ibis to the ibex, from cattle to insects, A Bestiary of Ancient Nubia presents a world-first panorama of animals in ancient Nubia from the A-Group culture to the medieval period (3800 B.C.E.–900 C.E.).
Beyond Boundaries: Three Decades of Contemporary Chinese Art at the Smart
Smart Museum of Art | 5550 S. Greenwood Ave. | Open March 24 – July 5
In February 1999, UChicago Prof. Wu Hung opened his first exhibition at the Smart Museum of Art. The field-defining Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century—and many more exhibitions Wu curated in the ensuing years—forged new avenues for situating Chinese art within a broader global contemporary framework.
Beyond Boundaries: Three Decades of Contemporary Chinese Art at the Smart reflects on the enduring adaptability of contemporary art from China as it continues to grow within and beyond cultural and academic institutions.
Bringing together artworks acquired by the Museum over the last three decades, archival materials, ephemera, and new work, Beyond Boundaries explores how artists navigate and challenge physical limitations across cultural, environmental and political terrains.
Black Culture in Chicago
Logan Center for the Arts, Cafe Logan | 915 E 60th St. | Open April 17 – July 30
Black Culture in Chicago, a photography exhibition by internationally renowned photographer Mark Joseph and director Ada Nivia López, began with a question: Who gets to define how a community is seen?
Chicago has been shaped by those who arrived carrying memory, culture, and hope. This collection stands in respect of the contributions of African Americans and their enduring legacy.
Composing Color: Paintings by Alma Thomas from the Smithsonian American Art Museum
Smart Museum of Art | 5550 S. Greenwood Ave. | Open March 24 – July 5
Alma Thomas (1891–1978) is a singular figure of twentieth-century American art. She developed her form of abstraction—characterized by the dazzling interplay of pattern and hue—late in life, after retiring from a long career as a schoolteacher. Her vibrant and rhythmic art transcended established genres, incorporating elements of gestural abstraction and color field painting and creating a style distinctly her own.
Composing Color: Paintings by Alma Thomas draws on the extensive holdings of the artist’s paintings at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) and offers an intimate view of Thomas’s evolving practice during her most prolific period, from 1959 to 1978.
History on the Edges: Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Caribbean
Regenstein Library, Special Collections Research Center | Open April 20 – August 21 | Gallery hours: Weekdays, 9 a.m. – 4:45 p.m.
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, professor emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, passed away in 2012 at the age of 62. Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti into a family of professionals and intellectuals, Trouillot is best known for his magnum opus, Silencing the Past, which meditates on the question of power and the production of history in colonial archives, academic writing, and popular memory.
Through his personal archive of writings, manuscripts and ephemera, this exhibition traces Trouillot’s intellectual development alongside his status as a Haitian national exiled by the Duvalier dictatorship and an anthropologist who understood history to be shaped equally by peasants and professional historians.
Mike Cloud & Nyeema Morgan: Story Structure, Pt. 2
Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society | 5701 S. Woodlawn Avenue | Open April 7 – June 28
The Chicago-based artist couple Mike Cloud and Nyeema Morgan deploy starkly divergent aesthetics. Cloud’s work is steeped in effusive colors and symbols, while Morgan’s tends toward minimalism. Yet despite these formal differences, both artists share an interest in works that explore the complexity of communication.
This exhibition features a mixed-media installation continuing Morgan’s “Studies for Traps” series alongside Cloud’s signature multi-dimensional paintings and a jointly produced sound work.
Sightlines, Ghosts, and Other Stories of the Impossible
Arts Incubator | 301 E. Garfield Blvd. | Open March 26 – July 25 | Gallery hours: Thursday–Saturday, 1–5 p.m.
Jess Atieno’s (the 2023 Arts + Public Life Artist-in-Residence) latest exhibition considers the shifting legacy of African modernism through the afterlives of independence-era architecture.
Once positioned as markers of a newly imagined modern Africa, many Brutalist and modernist structures now exist in states of weathering and transformation, revealing modernism as unstable, incomplete and continually renegotiated.
In dialogue with Black diasporic histories across the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, the work engages water, sound and circulation as spatial forces that complicate architectural permanence.
2026 MFA Thesis Exhibition: Too Much, Not Enough
Logan Center for the Arts | 915 E 60th St.
Part 1: Open May 1 – 16 | Part 2: Open May 22 – June 7
The University of Chicago’s Department of Visual Arts and Logan Center Exhibitions present the 2026 MFA Thesis Exhibition Too Much, Not Enough in two parts, featuring works (in Part 1) by Jef Biesinger, Faye Yingfei Liang, Olivia Isabel Rosato and Kiana Shahnia; (in Part 2) Otis Boat, Maya Janine D’Costa, el n.k. lee, Zihan Qiu and Hyeseul Song.
