“Chryssa & New York”: The mononymous Athens-born artist, a sensation in the 1960s for her experiments with neon, commercial signage and industrial materials, gets art-historically resuscitated with her first major American exhibit since 1982. Featuring 62 sculptures that dismantle language and presage the innovations of Minimalism and Pop Art, jointly organized by the Dia Art Foundation and the Menil Collection. Through July 27 at Wrightwood 659, 659 W. Wrightwood Ave., 773-437-6601 and wrightwood659.org

“Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective”: Some of the kinkiest, funniest artworks made in Chicago in the 1970s were Ramberg’s fastidiously painted female body parts, from tightly coiffed heads to lacily corseted torsos. Less well-known are her experimental quilts of the ’80s and the dark geometries produced before her untimely death at the age of 49. All of it, plus personal archives, is included in the first comprehensive exhibit of her oeuvre in 30 years. Through Aug. 11 at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Ave., 312-443-3600 and artic.edu

“Opening Passages: Photographers Respond to Chicago and Paris”: Dynamic social landscapes are the chosen subject for the 10 artists — five American, five French — in this multisite exhibit. Highlights include Sasha Phyars-Burgess’s efforts to teach traditional darkroom techniques to residents in Clichy-sous-Bois, Marzena Abrahamik’s chronicling of Polish-Chicago migration in reverse, and Rebecca Topakian’s research into the rose-ringed parakeets that entered France via an airport cargo accident. Through Aug. 25 at the Chicago Cultural Center and other venues; more information at artdesignchicago.org

“Nicole Eisenman: What Happened”: There’s no question mark in the title of this first major survey of one of the most celebrated figurative painters of the past two decades; her compositions are statements, not queries. More than 100 large and small canvases, plus a few oddball sculptures, reveal her anarchically wry take on people and the way we live today. Through September 22 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave., 312-280-2660 and visit.mcachicago.org

“What Is Seen and Unseen”: Guest curator Shelly Bahl traces the under-documented history of South Asian American art in Chicago, from the Indian Pavilion at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition; to the rising interest in Asian antiquities during the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s; to contemporary artists practicing in the city today, including Brendan Fernandes, Kushala Vora and Sayera Anwar. Through October 26 at the South Asia Institute, 1925 S. Michigan Ave., 312-929-3911, saichicago.org

“The United Colors of Robert Earl Paige”: The 87-year-old Woodlawn resident gets his largest exhibition to date, full of recent clay sculptures, cardboard collages, an exuberant mural, and decades of iconic fabric designs, merging Bauhaus modernism with West African symbology and Chicago jazz. “Parapluie,” an ancillary exhibit, includes the work of Paige’s “umbrella,” a group of makers who create in sync with his own love for pattern, color and purpose. Through Oct. 27 at the Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave., 773-324-5520 and hydeparkart.org

“Georgia O’Keeffe: ‘My New Yorks’”: Before she became famous for her flowers and Southwestern landscapes, O’Keeffe lived on the 30th floor of an apartment building in midtown Manhattan. From there, she began a series of mesmerizingly modern paintings of skyscrapers, the smokestacks along the East River, and other keenly felt urban sights. “My New Yorks,” as she called them, are here seriously examined for the first time, amid her abstractions and still lifes of the 1920s and early ’30s. June 2 to Sept. 22 at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Ave., 312-443-3600 and artic.edu

“Art on the Mart: Cory Arcangel and Yinka Illori”: Arcangel came to fame 20-odd years ago for his irreverent re-coding of the Super Mario Brothers video game, eliminating all elements except the clouds. Illori runs a studio designing exuberant graphics, products and spaces for clients ranging from the county of Kent to Courvoisier VSOP. Whatever these two artists do in their newly commissioned videos will be colorful, clever, free to watch, and very, very big,  broadcast nightly across the 2.5-acre façade of the Merchandise Mart, one of the world’s largest digital art canvases. June 6 to Sept. 11 at Art on the Mart, best viewed from the Riverwalk on Wacker Drive between Wells Street and Franklin Street; more information at artonthemart.com

“Teresa Baker: Shift in the Clouds”: Truly contemporary painting looks something like what Baker does on large, shaped pieces of colored Astroturf, embellishing them with yarn, buffalo hide, artificial sinew, corn husk and other materials. Evoked are maps and shadows, the Northern Plains where she was raised, the Los Angeles where she currently lives, her Mandan/Hidatsa culture, and so much more both real and impossible. June 26 through August 16 at the Arts Club of Chicago, 201 E. Ontario St., 312-787-3997 and artsclubchicago.org

“vanessa german”: The self-proclaimed citizen artist has been in residence at the University of Chicago since January, working with local communities and their objects to fashion a new series of “power figures,” sculptures that align Black power, spirituality, mysticism and feminism in ways as clever and tender as they are comedic and bold. They’ll debut in her sermonically titled solo show, “At the end of this reality there is a bridge — the bridge is inside of you but not inside of your body. Take this bridge to get to the next ______, all of your friends are there; death is not real and we are all dj’s.” July 19 through December 15 at the Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St., 773-834-8377 and  loganexhibitions.uchicago.edu

That might seem like a silly way to put it, but it’s also true. After two centuries of isolationist policy, Japan was forcibly opened up to foreign visitors and trade. What ensued was an era of modernization in architecture, fashion, industry, government and art like no other, gloriously evidenced in “Meiji Modern: Fifty Years of New Japan,” a building-wide exhibition currently on view at the Smart Museum of Art.

The Emperor Meiji, restored to power in 1868 after more than half a millennium of shogunate rule, wore radical change on his very being. He suited up in European military dress for his official photographic portrait, an image that appears here in the guise of a hand-colored photograph pasted into a U.S. consular report. The Empress Haruko, though depicted early on in layered kimonos, issued a memorandum in 1887 proclaiming that traditional Japanese garments were unsuited to modern life. From then on, she and her entourage sported only the frilly, French-style dresses seen in a war print illustrating an imperial visit to a field hospital during the First Sino-Japanese War. Not everyone agreed, however, that Western customs were the way to go. “Temptation,” a large hanging scroll, is of unclear authorship but has an unmistakable message: in it, a filthy foreign devil leads a blindfolded Japanese woman, enveloped in flowing obi-tied robes, off a cliff toward hell.

Much of the most exciting material on view in “Meiji Modern,” curated by Chelsea Foxwell and Bradley M. Bailey, falls somewhere in between these extremities, exhibiting a fusion of old and new, traditional and modern, Japanese and foreign. Cloisonné artisans like Hattori Tadasaburo innovated the already complex decorative technique to achieve new effects of translucence, relief and color blending, elegantly demonstrated in a phoenix-and-paulownia patterned globe lamp and a vase enveloped in leaves of bok choy. Kobayashi Kiyochika’s moody prints capture the bowler-hatted crowds, gas-lit streets, and devastating fires that defined Tokyo in the late 1870s and early 1880s, updating the old-fashioned medium of woodblock to produce new effects like chiaroscuro, sketchiness and shading. A wastewater bowl by Shibata Zeshin appears to be made of metal alloy but instead is lacquerware, rendered featherlight due to his decision to replace its traditional wood substrate with paper.

Zeshin also contributes a simple bowl for serving sweets, turned from conifer wood and minimally decorated with three exquisitely rendered poem cards, imitated in lacquer. A couple of objects throughout “Meiji Modern” are decorated in a similarly clever, picture-in-a-picture sort of way: a sake ewer from the Kinkozan Studio of Kyoto features four overlapping landscape paintings superimposed atop a glitzy array of patterns, while a large ivory-colored vase by Kintozan illustrates 110 individual types of vessels produced throughout the country, like a ceramics catalog — made of ceramic! These wares feel almost postmodern, in the uncanny way of certain artworks of the past, as if they’ve somehow slipped through dimensions to fit with contemporary visitors.

Not everything on view is so exquisitely refined. Much of what isn’t falls into the category of ephemera — woodblock prints and lithographs made quickly and cheaply, to provide ordinary Japanese viewers with news and entertainment, not unlike the illustrated press of today. Dozens are on display throughout “Meiji Modern,” and they make for fascinating viewing, bursting with the hairstyles, political exploits, famous buildings, popular pastimes, theater stars and trendy accessories of the times. Umbrellas were the travel mugs of 1882.

Harder to appreciate are all the tchotchkes. Crystal balls held aloft on minutely rendered metal waves, a trompe-l’oeil incense burner of a hawk on a perch, a finely carved ivory of a god sitting on a lotus riding a boar — these are small objects of incomparable quality but, in my view at least, about as much aesthetic interest as Royal Doulton figurines or Patek Philippe watches.

Far better natural and unnatural scenes can be found in the many folding screens that are a highlight of the show. Utagawa Kokunimasa’s sprawling “Hell Courtesan” is as witty as it is macabre, scattering across its silver-leafed panels anatomically correct skeletons who promenade, play music and board games, even get acupuncture treatment. A pair of golden screens by Takeuchi Seiho renders a white heron on a branch and a trio of black crows pecking at the ground with brushwork of extraordinary deftness and grace. Noguchi Shohin paints a monumental vista of poets gathered amid craggy mountains in a style associated with the Chinese literati, evidence that not all influences during the Meiji era came from Europe and America. The first female painter to become an Imperial Household Artist, Shohin is also the only woman creator named in the exhibition, though many more had a hand in producing the workshop wares on display throughout.

In addition to painted screens, “Meiji Modern” also features a rare surviving hand-embroidered example. Produced by Nishijin Studios, its idyllic woodland grove emerges from hundreds of thousands of stitches in colored silk floss, the effect part Romantic landscape painting, part photographic realism. Not on view at the Smart but included in the traveling exhibition’s first installment at the Asia Society in New York was an even more astonishing screen by Hashio Kiyoshi that used some 250 shades of blue and grey thread to translate a photograph of waves into a stunningly realistic tapestry.

Kiyoshi’s screen won a Medal of Honor at the San Francisco Panama-Pacific Exposition in 1915, one of many successes achieved by Japan at the world fairs that at the time were so important to a nation’s global standing. “Meiji Modern” contains numerous items associated with these events, interspersed among artworks created for both the export and domestic markets, as well as all the print ephemera of modern daily life; together they form an exceptionally well-rounded vision of an era, all of it now belonging to American collections.

Lori Waxman is a freelance critic.

“Meiji Modern: Fifty Years of New Japan” runs through June 9 at the Smart Museum of Art, 5550 S. Greenwood Ave., 773-702-0200, smartmuseum.uchicago.edu/exhibitions

Sin embargo, si se mira con atención, la chapa brillante se agrieta. Los maniquíes de cabello oscuro parecen ser la misma mujer en todo momento, y su maquillaje va más allá de lo vanguardista a lo extraño. Esa exuberante jungla es solo un patio trasero con animales exóticos pegados. Un anuncio de botas mod hasta la rodilla parece vender nociones flexibles de identidad además de calzado de charol. Y también hay una sorprendente cantidad de textiles tradicionales a la vista. Vogue Latinoamérica esto no es así.

La serie es obra de Martine Gutiérrez, una artista queer de herencia maya que escenificó, diseñó, modeló y creó de todas las formas posibles estas imágenes, publicándolas originalmente junto con docenas de otras en “Indigenous Woman”, su parodia de 128 páginas sobre revistas de moda de mujeres.

Esa autopresentación (de la identidad, pero también de la historia, las prácticas cotidianas, la inspiración y el entorno) está en el corazón de “Native America: In Translation”. Quién apunta la cámara es clave. La muestra itinerante se originó como un número especial de la legendaria revista de fotografía Aperture, cuyas copias sirven como catálogo de facto del MoCPS. En el interior hay algunas obras fascinantes que, lamentablemente, no se encuentran en las galerías, incluidos retratos comunitarios históricos de Richard Throssel y Horace Poolaw que proporcionan un precedente artístico para los artistas contemporáneos expuestos. También falta la inmersión de la artista de Syilx Nation, Krista Belle Stewart, en el extraño mundo del “indiantusiasmo”, los aficionados alemanes que recrean artesanías y rituales de los nativos americanos durante campamentos de verano de una semana de duración, y los materiales de archivo con anotaciones penetrantes y las instantáneas decoradas de Wendy Red Star, la artista de Apsáalooke quien editó como invitado Aperture 240 y también fue curador de la exposición.

Aperture había hecho algo similar en 1995, dedicando su edición de verano a fotógrafos y escritores nativos americanos. El artista de Omaskêko Ininiwak, Duane Linklater, quedó impactado por la copia que tenía entonces y la interviene aquí, en la serie imperturbable “ghostinthemachine”. Las páginas seleccionadas del periódico se arrancan, se doblan, se dibujan y luego se escanean, en configuraciones que permiten a Linklater un amplio margen de maniobra. Destaca un párrafo cortante y sabio de Paul Chaat Smith y un ingenioso autorretrato de Zig Jackson, hace sus propias contribuciones a través de dibujos de líneas geométricas superpuestas y mantiene algunas cosas cuidadosamente escondidas. No todo puede ni debe ser revelado a todos.

Nalikutaar Jacqueline Cleveland, nativa de Alaska de ascendencia yup’ik, aborda una extensión de esta pregunta (cómo y para quién fotografiar a las personas, los lugares y las prácticas de una comunidad) en su serie de 2019, “Proyecto Etnobotánica”. Señala que el público objetivo de este trabajo, que forma parte de un estudio financiado por la Fundación Nacional de Ciencias sobre las variaciones en la dieta entre las comunidades nativas a ambos lados del Estrecho de Bering y el impacto del cambio climático en sus tradiciones de búsqueda de alimento, son la población local y estudiantes en el campo. Una pequeña selección de imágenes de Cleveland muestra lo que podría importarles: un espécimen de mora, etiquetado en yup’ik; una anciana de 90 años de Toksook Bay, en casa con su túnica qaspeq y cajas a granel de Cup Noodles ramen apiladas cerca; una madre y sus dos hijos buscando vegetación silvestre en la playa de Quinhagak; la impresionante vista y las modestas estructuras de Umkumiut, un campamento de caza y pesca estacional. Entre líneas de estas imágenes documentales se puede leer un texto sobre la supervivencia, la resistencia y la negociación, sobre el lenguaje, la vestimenta y las prácticas de subsistencia tradicionales que continúan hoy, como parte de la vida contemporánea.

En algún lugar entre el documental y la performance se encuentran tres imágenes inmensamente poderosas de Rebecca Belmore, una artista de la Primera Nación de Lac Seul celebrada desde la década de 1990 por sus obras de arte orquestadas tanto para el público en vivo como para la cámara. En “nindinawemaganidog (todas mis relaciones)”, vuelve a escenificar momentos clave de su repertorio, creando impactantes retratos vinculados a las vidas de mujeres nativas reales y míticas. La “matriarca” se sienta de espaldas al espectador, de perfil, con el cabello negro cayendo sobre una capa de rosas rojo sangre bordeadas de pelaje marrón. En “keeper”, una mujer lava intensamente el piso con un trapo empapado de arcilla; mancha sus vestiduras y se convierte en el suelo agrietado sobre el que se arrodilla. Las historias no pueden evitar vincularse a estas mujeres, historias que reconocen su fuerza, su trabajo, su centralidad y su dolor.

Con diferencia, las obras más accesibles de “Native America: In Translation” son las exploraciones de identidad exquisitamente sinceras, pero nunca carentes de humor, producidas por Kimowan Metchewais. El artista Cree acumuló un enorme archivo personal de Polaroids, que fotografió, organizó y, a menudo, cortó, pegó con cinta adhesiva y volvió a fotografiar para crear obras de arte a pequeña y gran escala. Todo lo suyo en el MoCP es una revelación: un panorama resplandeciente y surrealista de él y su hermano pescando mientras están inmersos en las infinitas ondas azules de Cold Lake, el cuerpo de agua homónimo de su nación; autorretratos con una camiseta blanca, jeans azules y un sinfín de extensiones de cabello; Polaroids de su mano derecha haciendo gestos simples, algunos con palabras escritas debajo, haciendo referencia a las tradiciones nativas del lenguaje de señas pero también, habiendo sido borradas y reescritas, probablemente de su propia invención.

Metchewais murió en 2011 de un tumor cerebral a los 47 años. Al igual que él, todos nosotros, cualquiera que sea nuestra herencia, en última instancia debemos hacernos cargo de nuestra propia creación, a partir de tradiciones históricas, normas comunitarias, pero también de nuestra propia invención.

Lori Waxman es una crítica independiente

Traducido por Leticia Espinosa/TCA

Look carefully, though, and the glossy veneer cracks. The dark-haired mannequins appear to be the same woman throughout, and her makeup goes beyond avant-garde to bizarre. That lush jungle is just a backyard with exotic animals pasted on. An ad for knee-high mod boots seems to be selling flexible notions of identity in addition to patent-leather footwear. And there are a surprising lot of traditional textiles on view, too. Vogue Latinoamérica this is not.

The series is the work of Martine Gutierrez, a queer artist of Mayan heritage who staged, styled, modeled and in every other way created these images, originally publishing them alongside dozens of others in “Indigenous Woman,” her 128-page parody of women’s fashion magazines.

Such self-presentation — of identity, but also of history, daily practices, inspiration and surroundings — is at the heart of “Native America: In Translation.” Who points the camera is key. The traveling show originated as a special issue of the legendary photography journal Aperture, copies of which serve as the MoCPS’s de facto catalog. Inside is some fascinating work unfortunately not up in the galleries, including historical community portraiture by Richard Throssel and Horace Poolaw that provides artistic precedent for the contemporary artists on view. Also missing is Syilx Nation artist Krista Belle Stewart’s immersion in the bizarre world of “Indianthusiasm,” German hobbyists who reenact Native American crafts and rituals during weeklong summer camps, and the piercingly annotated archival materials and decorated snapshots of Wendy Red Star, the Apsáalooke artist who guest edited Aperture 240 and also curated the exhibition.

Aperture had done something similar in 1995, dedicating its summer edition to Native American photographers and writers. Omaskêko Ininiwak artist Duane Linklater was impacted by the copy he had then and intervenes in it here, in the imperturbable series “ghostinthemachine.” Choice pages of the periodical are torn out, folded, sketched on and then scanned, in configurations that allow Linklater plenty of leeway. He highlights a cuttingly sage paragraph by Paul Chaat Smith and a witty self-portrait by Zig Jackson, makes his own contributions via overlaid geometric line drawings, and keeps some things neatly tucked away. Not everything can or should be revealed to everyone.

Nalikutaar Jacqueline Cleveland, an Alaskan native of Yup’ik descent, addresses an extension of this question — how and for whom to photograph the people, places and practices of a community — in her 2019 series, “Ethnobotany Project.” She notes that the intended audience for this work, which forms part of a study funded by the National Science Foundation about variations in diet among Native communities on either side of the Bering Strait and the impact of climate change on their foraging traditions, are local people and students in the field. A small selection of Cleveland’s images shows what might matter to them: a blackberry specimen, labeled in Yup’ik; a 90-year-old elder of Toksook Bay, at home in her qaspeq tunic, bulk cases of Cup Noodles ramen stacked nearby; a mom and her two kids foraging for wild beach greens in Quinhagak; the breathtaking vista and modest structures of Umkumiut, a seasonal hunting and fishing camp. Between the lines of these documentary pictures can be read a text about survival, resistance and negotiation — of traditional language, dress and subsistence practices that continue today, as part of contemporary lives.

Somewhere between documentary and performance stands three immensely powerful images by Rebecca Belmore, a Lac Seul First Nation artist celebrated since the 1990s for artworks orchestrated both for live audiences and for the camera. In “nindinawemaganidog (all of my relations),” she restages key moments from her repertoire, creating striking portraits linked to the lives of Native women real and mythical. “Matriarch” sits with her back to the viewer, face in profile, black hair tumbling down a cloak of blood-red roses hemmed with brown fur. In “keeper,” a woman intently washes the floor with a clay-soaked rag; it stains her garments and becomes the cracked ground on which she kneels. Stories can’t help but attach themselves to these women, stories that recognize their strength, their labor, their centrality and their pain.

By far the most approachable works in “Native America: In Translation” are the exquisitely sincere but never humorless explorations of identity produced by Kimowan Metchewais. The Cree artist amassed a huge personal archive of Polaroids, which he shot, organized, and often cut up, taped together and rephotographed to make small and large-scale artworks. Everything of his at the MoCP is a revelation: a glowing, surreal panorama of himself and his brother fishing while immersed in the infinite blue ripples of Cold Lake, the namesake body of water of their nation; self-portraits in a white tank top, blue jeans and endless hair extensions; Polaroids of his right hand making simple gestures, some with words written underneath, referencing Native traditions of sign language but also, having been erased and rewritten, likely of his own concoction.

Metchewais died in 2011 from a brain tumor at age 47. Like him, we all, whatever our heritage, ultimately must take some charge in our own creation — out of historical traditions, communal norms, but also our own invention.

Lori Waxman is a freelance critic.

“Native America: In Translation” runs through May 12 at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, 600 South Michigan Avenue; more information at 312-369-8067 or mocp.org/exhibition/native-america-in-translation

Most Catholics will have some familiarity with ex-votos, but I had to read all the wall texts, the exhibition catalogue and some additional research to better understand the form. Essentially, ex-votos are devotional objects connected to a vow. I ask a saint to help me recover from dysentery or to help my son survive a jail term, and when we do, in thanks I commission an artist to paint a small picture representing the narrative, which is then publicly displayed in church alongside other ex-votos. Private suffering, and its concomitant resilience, thereby become communal. The tradition boomed in Mexico after independence, having been first brought to the country by Spanish colonists, but it is thought to have originated in Italy and ultimately thought to date back to the votive rituals of ancient pagan societies.

At Hull-House, dozens of historical examples line the walls of an upstairs room. Selected by curator Emmanuel Ortega, they belong to the collection of the New Mexico State University Art Museum, where the show debuted, and which houses the largest collection of Mexican retablos in the United States. Ex-votos are a type of retablo, or altar painting, and these are classic examples of the genre as it was practiced during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Small and painted on tin, a cheap and readily available material, each image contains three elements: commemorative script, the divine interlocutor, and the Earthly realm in which tragedy has been resolved. The combinations glow with a fusion of magic and reality, and fans of Surrealism will not be surprised to learn that André Breton owned ex-votos and that Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera collected some 400 of them.

Though inspired by a historical format, “Contemporary Ex-Votos” is primarily an exhibit of recent artwork, and those are on view at Gallery 400. Eighteen emerging and mid-career Latinx artists contribute animated videos, large-scale sculptures, embroidered textiles, photographic collages and more, demonstrating approaches to the retablo that range from enthusiastic updates to scathing appropriations.

The most traditional examples are those made by Alfredo and Daniel Vilchis, father and son of a Mexico City family famed for its production of ex-votos. On display are eight of their paintings, commissioned for the exhibition based on stories submitted by students at NMSU and UIC. Each man has his own distinctly colorful and approachable style, and their accounts are invariably moving, recounting the survival of multiple children after medically complicated births, the adoption of abandoned puppies and gratitude for the sun. Also on show are marvelous wall works by Guadalupe Maravilla, featuring ex-votos by Daniel extravagantly encased in spikey, swooping frames made of plant fiber and glue. Each tells of an event from Maravilla’s life, commemorating performances he choreographed in Times Square as well as his journey to the U.S. as an undocumented, unaccompanied 8-year-old.

Novel in material and decidedly light of touch, sculptures by Dan45 and Alberto Aguilar nevertheless keep to the established program. Dan45 repurposes a half-dozen vintage lunch boxes, packing each one with objects, drawings and a text recounting dramatic episodes from his childhood, as charming as they are alarming. In “It’s a miracle we survived as kids, No. 1 ‘Sk8 or Die,’” the artist barely manages to pull himself and a buddy out of a waist-deep mud pit. Aguilar presents three metal signposts to document the moment when he took it upon himself to create the portents that were not otherwise forthcoming on a visit with his daughter to the college of her dreams. Aguilar did what he often does, rearranging found items in their environment — in this case, a garden hose into a large spiral and a stack of folding chairs into a kind of conga line, on the college grounds — and 18 days later, an acceptance letter with full scholarship was received.

Other artists have appropriated the ex-voto form in order to criticize the traditions from which it derives. Targets, ranging from capitalism to aesthetics to homophobia, are not lacking, and the best of these is a video triptych by John Jota Leaños. Each screen in his “Prayers and Testimony” is filled with the image of a retablo, its scene animated to reveal the brutality of the Catholic church in the Americas, in particular the residential schools which indigenous youth were forced to attend. A nun cuts off the long braids of a child, hacking over and over again, as the heart on her frock drips blood. A priest stands watch over a pair of terrified children huddling in institutional beds, then bursts into flames. A nun moves past a wall hung with crosses, rosaries and objects with which she might beat the girl who is hiding in a wardrobe, its door swinging open and shut.

The exhibition concept stretches to accommodate artists more concerned with the spaces of devotion than its objects. Justin Favela crafts towering cardboard versions of signage he grew up seeing in Las Vegas, from the “Aleluya” and “Amén” neons of an Evangelical church to a pagoda-themed pylon sign, bearing the traces of a building’s transformation from Chinese to Mexican restaurant to Evangelical church. But churches aren’t the only places where devotion is due. The domestic refuge of Daisy Quezada Ureña’s elegant “Cleotilde,” named for her maternal grandmother, features a broad awning of strong clay and fragile porcelain tiles protecting a pale turquoise wall and a pair of icons: a historical Madonna and Child, and a fragment of the matriarch’s favorite sweater. Krystal Ramirez builds a minimalist personal sanctuary out of handmade brise soleil blocks awash in the radiance of green neon, a tribute to her father’s history in the Vegas construction industry. Her lights spell out a Spanish phrase that translates as “What have I done to deserve this?”

“This” could be any number of things, but given the context, Ramirez might be posing the meta-question of the entire exhibition, which ultimately takes the gallery as sanctuary, a new form of church, dedicated to art.

“Contemporary Ex-Votos: Devotion Beyond Medium” runs through March 16 at Gallery 400, 400 S. Peoria St., 312-996-6114 and gallery400.uic.edu; and at Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, 800 S. Halsted St., 312-413-5353 and www.hullhousemuseum.org

Lori Waxman is a freelance critic.

Those who prefer marble and bronze, and especially those torn between all these substances, need not dismay. Also ongoing at the AIC is an exhibition of clay sculptures made by the 18th century Italian master Antonio Canova as preparatory sketches for his famously lifelike marble figures of Pope Clement XIV, Napoleon’s mother and a variety of mythological characters. Elsewhere in the museum is a show — mixing finished marbles and bronzes, plus plaster and clay preliminaries — by the trailblazing Camille Claudel, who at the turn of the 19th century defied gender norms to become one of France’s preeminent sculptors.

The decision to use this material or that was not really a choice for historical European artists like Canova or Claudel. A sculpture of any importance first needed to be sketched in clay and molded in plaster, so it could later be cast in metal or carved from stone. Contemporary artists have often thought otherwise, however, and one of Chicago’s most dogged rule-breakers was Ruth Duckworth, subject of an elegantly installed monographic exhibition at the Smart Museum, on view through Feb. 4.

The gist of “Ruth Duckworth: Life as a Unity,” curated by Laura Steward, is that Duckworth was a sculptor who worked in clay, as opposed to a potter or ceramicist. The distinction matters a lot in traditional debates of art versus craft, but it needn’t trouble visitors who have come to look closely at the work of one of Chicago’s under-sung masters. In the five decades of work collected here, from organically misshapen “mama pots” to clean-lined biomorphic figures and ecologically textured murals, Duckworth massively expanded the possibilities of her chosen material, using it to express everything from the state of the body to the state of the planet.

Duckworth was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1919, and she fled to Liverpool, England, as a teenager when, as the daughter of a Jewish father, Nazi law forbade her from studying art. After years of trying out different art schools in England, often feeling confined by traditionalism, she traveled with a puppet theater, volunteered in a munitions factory and carved tombstones before gaining enough renown to be offered a job teaching ceramics at the University of Chicago. The year was 1964. She accepted the position mostly because of a desire to visit the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone National Park, and then she stayed, living and working in a converted pickle factory in Lakeview until her death at the age of 90.

Duckworth arrived at the University of Chicago at a propitious moment, when the departments of geology and meteorology were being unified due to scientific advances. Her first big commission, to design lobby art for a new brutalist geophysics building, can still be visited today. “Earth, Water, Sky,” a completely immersive environment located a short walk from the Smart, feels like being simultaneously inside and outside the planet’s crust. Looking for inspiration, Duckworth wandered the faculty labs, and was especially drawn to the cloud and tornado photography of Professor Ted Fujita. The formal motifs she derived from his research reappear in many of the landscape reliefs on view here (and in an enormous 1976 mural, “Clouds Over Lake Michigan,” recently installed in nearby Regenstein Library), looking as much like fins and fungus as the anvil clouds and suction vortexes on which they were based. Hers was an interest in the world guided, as well, by the environmental and nuclear fears of the day, as the Smart explores in a tidy display of archival news clippings, leaflets and other ephemera.

Duckworth’s aerial views of land and its atmosphere — rocky, mysterious, layered and soil-toned — can appear less like they are picturing the Earth than that they are of the Earth. Which of course, being made of clay, they are. Her so-called “mama pots” — the artist referred to them as such but the vessels themselves are untitled — feel similarly grown from the ground, imperfectly built up of thick stoneware slabs, tight coils and rough ridges.

Duckworth’s porcelain sculptures are another thing entirely. She made all sorts, mostly building them by hand then sanding them down until they were gleamingly delicate. Some of these take on charming humanoid and birdlike shapes reminiscent of Constantin Brâncu?i and Henry Moore, two of her early influences. A number of bulbous reliefs recall the bodily sculptures of Louise Bourgeois and the unsettling voids of Lee Bontecou. And then there are her “cups and blades,” delightful sets of small bowls sliced by impossibly thin wedges of porcelain, made separately and put together later, when Duckworth would play through any number of combinations before settling on the right one.

If Duckworth’s reputation lagged on account of tiresome American arguments about craft versus art, the problem has been otherwise in Japan, a country with one of the world’s longest traditions of ceramic manufacture. Its finest practitioners are officially designated Living National Treasures — and to this day, not one is a woman.

And yet, as is magnificently shown in “Radical Clay: Contemporary Women Artists from Japan” at the Art Institute, many of the country’s most extraordinary ceramic artists are female. Examples by 36 individuals, from groundbreaking senior figures to emerging stars, positively flabbergast. This is work that must be seen to be believed and, even then, it can be hard to fathom the mind-numbing detail of Ikake Sayuri’s blue-green “breath,” with its hundreds of thousands of tiny spikes folded in on themselves, or Hattori Makiko’s pale coil, sheathed in even more delicate frills. Uncanny verisimilitude of both nature and culture abound: Futamura Yoshimi uses novel techniques to produce what looks like an enormous burl of old wood, Tanaka Yu somehow fashions clay into bright yellow fabric, tied in a knot, and Mishima Kimiyo exhibits a sheet of crumpled newsprint — made of glazed and silk-screened porcelain. Some works, including Kawaura Saki’s bloody, amorphous organ, are terrifically grotesque, while others push the boundaries of taste, overdecorating for parodical effect, as in a gold-edged dinner plate by Oishi Sayaka, piled high with a face, lizard, fish, coral, knife, hand, ear, butterfly, jewels, shells and more. Delicious.

“Ruth Duckworth: Life as a Unity” runs through Feb. 4 at the Smart Museum of Art, 5550 S. Greenwood Ave., 773-702-0200 and smartmuseum.uchicago.edu. “Radical Clay: Contemporary Women Artists from Japan” runs through June 3 at the Art Institute, 111 S. Michigan Ave., 312-443-3600 and artic.edu

Lori Waxman is a freelance critic.

From speculative futures to documentary pasts, obsessive sculpture to coolly meditative spaces, historical Japanese design to contemporary Latinx devotional painting — there’s something for everyone at Chicago’s galleries and museums in the first few months of 2024. Below is a sampling of the best.

Candace Hunter: “The Alien-Nations and Sovereign States of Octavia E Butler”: Anyone interested in liberated future societies that fully value Black bodies will not want to miss the speculative worlds conjured here by Candace Hunter with synthetic plant sculptures, an Afrofuturist neon mural, culinary experiments and doorways to imaginary places. A lush reading nook completes the exhibition, the better to experience Hunter’s inspiration: “Parable of the Sower” and “Xenogenesis Trilogy,” novels by famed sci-fi author Octavia E. Butler. Through March 3 at the Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave.; more information at 773-324-5520 or hydeparkart.org

David Goldblatt: “No Ulterior Motive”: The great South African photographer, who died in 2018, was committed for all seven decades of his career to showing the realities of daily life in his country. Relatively free to move about the segregated land due to his Lithuanian Jewish heritage, Goldblatt aimed his camera everywhere, attending as incisively to a pair of women working in a funeral parlor in Soweto as to out-of-work nomadic sheep shearers living off roadkill in the Northern Cape and students cheering as a statue of Cecil Rhodes was removed at the University of Cape Town. Featuring 140 photographs by Goldblatt, plus 40 more by a selection of international contemporaries. Through March 25 at the Art Institute, 111 S. Michigan Ave.; more information at 312-443-3600 and artic.edu

“Chicago Works: Maryam Taghavi”: Though not a calligrapher by any means, the Iranian-born artist takes the noghte, the diacritical mark essential to written Persian, as the central motif of her first solo museum show. For Maryam Taghavi, noghtes are everything and nothing: they appear as cutouts in the gallery wall through which to glimpse infinitely mirrored prisms, are strung together to form imaginary horizon lines in a series of airbrushed paintings, and are entirely absent from a 13th-century poem. Through July 14 at the MCA Chicago, 220 E. Chicago Ave.; more information at 312-280-2660 and visit.mcachicago.org

“Contemporary Ex-Votos: Devotion Beyond Medium”: What does worship look like today versus yesteryear? Novel answers arise in this curatorial pairing of historical ex-votos — small devotional paintings depicting miracles, often illustrated on tin or other found materials — with new works by emerging Latinx artists, including a pink-frosted chapel by Yvette Mayorga and an installation of 28 panels by Francisco Guevara, who unsettlingly uses colonial artistic techniques to apply pre-Columbian pigments. Jan. 12 through March 16 at Gallery 400, 400 S. Peoria St.; more information at 312-996-6114 and gallery400.uic.edu

Norman Teague: “A Love Supreme”: If John Coltrane had been a furniture designer instead of a musical innovator, what might his bookshelves and chairs have looked like? Maybe something like the stools and pavilions of Norman Teague, who takes the jazz master and his titular album as a touchstone of improvisational bravado and bold Black aesthetics. In addition to a survey of Teague’s work, he and Rose Camara fill McCormick House, the Ludwig Mies van der Rohe digs next door, with jazz-influenced designs by an array of Chicago makers. Jan. 20 through April 28 at the Elmhurst Art Museum, 150 S. Cottage Hill Ave., Elmhurst; more information at 630-834-0202 and elmhurstartmuseum.org

“Native America: In Translation”: If in the past photography was a weapon in the fight to dispossess Native peoples of their land, freedom and culture, today it can be used to challenge that legacy. Apsáalooke artist Wendy Red Star curates work by nine Native creators, including Martine Gutierrez, known for “Indigenous Woman,” a fabulous 124-page fashion magazine starring herself as a trans, Mayan supermodel, and Rebecca Belmore, who reenacts for the camera indelible moments from past performances monumentalizing the lives of First Nations women. Jan. 26 through May 12 at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, 600 S. Michigan Ave.; more information at 312-663-5554 and mocp.org

“Actions for the Earth: Art, Care & Ecology”: As timely as they come, this group show features 18 international artists who care for our endangered planet via practices that borrow from Indigenous knowledge, natural sciences and healing traditions. Included is a meditation space by Katie West; a series of exercises for rethinking human-centered perspectives by Zheng Bo; and a mandala constructed of dirt and seeds by Arahmaiani, to be grown throughout the exhibition. Jan. 26 through July 7 at the Block Museum, 40 Arts Circle Drive, Evanston; more information at 847-491-4000 and blockmuseum.northwestern.edu

Selva Aparicio: “In Memory Of”: One of the most astonishing artists emerging in Chicago today, Selva Aparicio creates sculptures as obsessively painstaking as they are profoundly moving. She does this by decorating a coffin with hundreds of thousands of individually-placed dandelion seeds, by using leaves of lettuce to fashion a rose window as gem-colored as any made of stained glass, and by hand-carving the details of a patterned rug directly into hardwood flooring. March 14 through Aug. 4 at the DePaul Art Museum, 935 W. Fullerton Ave.; more information at 773-325-7506 and resources.depaul.edu

Mina Loy: “Strangeness Is Inevitable”: Born in 1882 and a part of the Parisian and New York art scenes of the 1920s and ’30s, Mina Loy has always defied categorization. A poet, artist, actor, designer, inventor and thinker, she has for too long been overlooked by art history, a situation that ought to be set right by this retrospective, which includes 150 paintings, drawings, assemblages, letters, poems and patents, testifying to her indomitable spirit of revolution, connectivity and hybridity. March 19 through June 8 at the Arts Club of Chicago, 201 E. Ontario St.; more information at 312-787-3997, artsclubchicago.org

Meiji Modern: “Fifty Years of New Japan”: From 1868 to 1912, Japan underwent a period of enormous transformation, opening up its isolated feudal society to rapid economic, scientific, political, philosophical and social modernization. The changes were aesthetic, too, as evidenced in this survey of painted screens and scrolls, woodblock prints, fashionable clothing, cloisonné vases and more, all borrowed from American collections. March 21 through June 9 at the Smart Museum, 5550 S. Greenwood Ave.; more information at 773-702-0200 and smartmuseum.uchicago.edu

An electrifying and illuminating retrospective, “Faith Ringgold: American People,” which garnered critical accolades at the New Museum in New York and traveled to the De Young in San Francisco and the Musée Picasso in Paris before arriving in Chicago, will be on view at the MCA through the end of February. The exhibit spans six decades and is perfectly installed in the museum’s fourth-floor galleries, whose walls have been colored with hues lifted from “Windows on the Wedding,” a series of lively geometric hangings Ringgold painted in the mid-1970s. No one should miss it.

Ringgold, who was born in 1930 in Harlem, is no stranger to deferred mainstream success. Her first painting to enter the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, was not acquired until 2016, though it was painted in 1967 and would go on to become a star attraction in the museum’s 2019 rehang. Her first solo show in SoHo, then the center of advanced American art, was not held until 1987. Her 1964 request to join the Spiral Group, the influential Black artist collective, was rebuffed by co-founder Romare Bearden. “Being an artist is tough; being a Black woman artist was hell on fire back then,” Ringgold explains in an interview in the exhibition catalog. “Who was going to battle for us except ourselves?”

So battle Ringgold did, first in paint on stretched canvases, later with textiles in forms ranging from human-size dolls to her famed story quilts, and along the way in the form of picket lines and political posters. The broad arc of her oeuvre is arranged more or less chronologically at the MCA, beginning with the “American People Series.” Ostensibly portraits, these paintings are depictions less of individuals than of power structures and hierarchies determined by race and gender. “Neighbors,” from 1963, features the unfriendliest family of white folks you’d ever want to live next door to, the heavy stylization of their features linking them as much to the history of modern art as to racism generally. “The In Crowd,” from the following year, stuffs nine businessmen into a vertical frame; the white man on top retains his position by embracing and pushing down those below him, a gesture replicated by others, one of whom muffles the brown man in the second-to-last row.

The “American People Series” culminated, in 1967, in three of Ringgold’s boldest compositions ever: six-foot-high murals representing the contemporary racial landscape of the United States. Two of these — “Die” and “The Flag Is Bleeding” — are missing from the MCA version of the show, a downside to the recent surge of interest in Ringgold’s early work. The third, a fictitious “U.S. Postage Stamp Commemorating the Advent of Black Power” is here and a brilliant example of how graphic design can be used to convey critical content. The ginormous stamp features 100 faces in a grid, 10 of them Black; small letters spelling out “BLACK POWER” can be seen clearly, but the ones that read “WHITE POWER” are so huge and structural they can hardly be deciphered.

Ringgold’s knack for graphics served her well when she got into activism proper, starting in the late 1960s. Her posters calling for the release of Angela Davis, memorializing the Attica prison uprising, and supporting the Black Panthers reveal some of her many political causes. She was an organizer of “The People’s Flag Show,” a legendary exhibit at the Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, New York, that led to the arrest of herself and two compatriots for so-called desecration of the flag. She picketed the Whitney and MoMA for failing to show and collect women artists and artists of color; for not hiring enough black curators; and for having board members invested in corporations that supported the Vietnam War. She was often a leader of the groups that organized those protests, including the Art Workers’ Coalition, the United Black Artists’ Committee, the Ad Hoc Women Artists’ Committee, and Women Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation, which she cofounded with one of her children, Michele Wallace.

In addition to working politically with her then-young daughter, Ringgold also collaborated extensively with her mother, the Harlem fashion designer Willi Posey. Posey sewed the elaborate brocade borders for Ringgold’s tankas, painted scrolls she began making in 1972, inspired by Tibetan religious banners, and initially comprised of impressionistic landscapes and quotes from historic Black feminists like Harriet Tubman. Indicative of Ringgold’s openness to non-white forms of artmaking, they also served the practical purpose of being easy for a lone woman to handle and transport.

The foray into textiles never stopped. Ringgold’s “Family of Woman Mask Series” and other soft sculptures featured painted, beaded and embroidered fabric hoods, plus clothing designed by Posey. These full-size constructions were based on the Dan masks of Liberia and often worn in performances Ringgold would orchestrate. Little seen since, the plentifulness of their presentation at the MCA — an imposing two dozen are on display — would benefit from descriptions of their original activation.

The entire second half of “American People” is dedicated to the form for which Ringgold is best known today: her story quilts. These combine the patchwork skills she learned from her mother with her own desire to rewrite and repaint history with Black females at the center. “Tar Beach,” a story quilt from 1988, uses a combination of images and text to tell the tale of 8-year-old Cassie Louise Lightfoot, who flies off the Harlem rooftop where her family is spending a hot summer night, claiming the George Washington Bridge and an ice cream factory and anything else she wants by dint of being free and airborne. The quilt spawned a children’s picture book of the same name, Ringgold’s first of 17, and won both a Caldecott Honor and a Coretta Scott King Award.

If “Tar Beach” is her most beloved story quilt, “The French Collection” series is her most complex and ambitious. It invents the story of Willia Marie Simone, a young African American artist who moves to Paris in the 1920s, dances in the Louvre, poses for Picasso and later has him pose for her, sends her children back to America to be raised by an aunt, becomes an owner of the Café des Artistes, attends Gertrude Stein’s salon, and more. Willia is unsettlingly clear-eyed about both French and American takes on her color and her sex, and Ringgold has no compunctions about raising great Black feminist figures from the dead. There are twelve quilts in total, five of which can be seen at the MCA, all of which make for a transfixing read. (The museum helpfully provides transcripts as well as audio recordings on its website, including in Spanish translation.)

Is Willia an alter-ego for Ringgold? How could she not be, boldly inserting herself and her work into the tradition of Parisian modernism, eyes unclouded to racism and sexism, wit and intelligence intact, talent and drive in full force? “You asked me once why I wanted to become an artist. It is because it’s the only way I know of feeling free,” Willia writes in a letter to her aunt, sounding exactly like Ringgold in interviews. “My art is my freedom to say what I please.”

“Faith Ringgold: American People” runs through Feb. 25 at the MCA Chicago, 220 E. Chicago Ave., 312-280-2660 and visit.mcachicago.org

Lori Waxman is a freelance critic.

A whole lot, it turns out. And “CAB 5: This is a Rehearsal” offers an invigorating, eclectic, unmissable exploration into the built environment as a place always in process.

This core idea gets investigated at dozens of sites throughout Chicago, from the Loop to West Garfield Park, Englewood to Little India. Some are small stand-alone projects, others multilevel group exhibitions, and as has become the norm with international arts festivals, it is nearly impossible for any one visitor to experience it all. With opening dates that have been rolled out since late September and closings that extend into February 2024, this year’s biennial is gargantuan. Also very much on trend is the selection of a collective as artistic director, the local quartet of avery r. young, Andrew Schachman, Faheem Majeed and Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford, who work together on the Floating Museum.

The Cultural Center, the CAB’s traditional headquarters, is filled to capacity with diverse and electrifying examples of the city as a place of practice. If you can visit only one venue, this is it. For the literal-minded, there are multiple rehearsal spaces throughout the building, like LOT-EK’s “Theater for One,” a stage set for a single performer and a single audience member, upcycled from road cases, or WOJR’s “The Gray Veil,” a 23-foot-tall enclosure of layered mesh in which Red Clay Dance Company, Era Footwork and others are holding run-throughs. Wayfinding signs are propped up on concrete blocks and the graphics themselves are cleverly redesigned at every turn.

Spatial reshaping includes Barkow Leibinger’s transformation of the Cultural Center’s ornate lobby via new walls, pillars and archways constructed from recycled cardboard tubes lashed together with web straps. Leticia Pardo’s quixotic scaffolding, deployed throughout the building, acts as free-standing displays for other participants’ work and as sculpture in its own right. Uncountable lengths of discarded black rubber tubing, coiled by Asim Waqif up through the sublimely mosaicked south stairwell, compares one type of decoration and excess with another.

Architects typically try things out through models and dioramas, and there are plenty here for visitors to consider. Some will soon become reality: on the ground floor is a full-size mock-up of a plaza planned for Marion, Indiana, memorializing the 1930 lynching that impelled Billie Holiday to sing “Strange Fruit,” itself the inspiration for an artistically grafted fruit tree specially commissioned for the garden. Some are hilariously awful ideas, like Para Project’s proposed three-story awning for the Washington Street entrance into the Cultural Center. Others are entirely imaginary, like the conversion of palatial Yates Hall into a minimalist art park, landscaped in slabs of exposed white Geofoam, the polystyrene blocks that form the hidden structure beneath actual landscape architecture, and which will be reused by Site Design, its creator, for future projects.

Standouts of the sculptures displayed atop all that foam include one of Ugo Rondinone’s monolithic figures, looking just barely carved out of a lapis lazuli boulder, and Ghanaian master craftsman Paa Joe’s fantasy coffin in the shape of the Ludwig Mies van der Rohe-designed S.R. Crown Hall. Chris Bradley’s giant jumble of bronze rods, painted to resemble pretzel sticks stuck together with chewing gum, balances not too far from Tschabalala Self’s buxom legs, posed in high-heeled boots on an oversize milk crate, dazzling in neon yellow. In between loiter a trio of oddly empathetic, almost-people made of sand and rock and shower accessories by Oren Pinhassi.

Dispersed throughout the Cultural Center are instances of the speculative, the experimental and the futuristic, with alternative visions of what has been and can be. A set of artist books by Deb Sokolow postulates, through blueprint-like illustrations, wild conspiracies about famous architects and their buildings. Depave Chicago presents its plans for removing 10,000 square feet of asphalt surrounding the Montessori School of Englewood and replacing it with a green campus. Anupama Kundoo Atelier offers a sample of small domed houses built in Puducherry, India, constructed as kilns and fired to a state of durability, a labor-intensive but highly sustainable and economical process. Oneida architect Chris Cornelius dreams up an angular pavilion featuring jingle bells and animal skin walls, connections to the sky and ground, and other forms of Indigenous modernity.

CAB 5’s other venues are a mixed batch.

Most successful is a group show at the Graham Foundation, which might be thought of as the biennial’s sociopolitical R&D wing. Projects meticulously installed in its historic Gold Coast mansion include large-scale drawings by Larissa Fassler that sympathetically map Manchester, New Hampshire, using everything from the price of fried chicken to dropout rates and stats on homelessness to spatialize the various interlinked crises facing that city. Worth hours of time is “You Are the Voice; We Are Its Echo,” a research room assembled by interim studio and its many collaborators, who use film, photography, artist books and more to document and participate in Jawlani resistance to the occupation of the Golan Heights in the Middle East.

The Neubauer Collegium features an endearingly silly giant pizza sculpture by the Viennese collective Gelitin, topped with red and yellow secondhand clothes and, when participants are willing, heads popped up through half a dozen holes. The postmodern architectural marvel that is the James R. Thompson Center fails epically as a site because its vast, colorful atrium drowns out everything on display there, regardless of individual worth.

A handful of individual projects on the printed CAB 5 visitor’s map were not able to be realized as planned. Andrea Carlson’s tipi did not fit in the Gertrude Bernstein Memorial Garden and is being moved to an as-yet-to-be-announced outdoor site. Kiel Moe’s sauna has been tricky to connect to the electrical grid of the Cultural Center. Feda Wardak’s public artwork for Grow Greater Englewood evolved, after community review, from three 15-foot water towers to one 40-foot beacon, necessitating onerous financial and permitting challenges that remain unmet for now. Likewise, bureaucracy has so far kept “Shamiana,” SpaceShift Collective’s foliate redesign of the Devon and Artesian intersection, from becoming the more permanent installation it hopes to be.

But all of this is to be expected in any truly ambitious and visionary undertaking, and especially at CAB 5. For this, too, is a rehearsal.

Lori Waxman is a freelance critic.

“CAB 5: This is a Rehearsal” runs through February 2024 at venues throughout Chicagoland. For specific closing dates, hours and addresses, visit chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org

Yes, I’m talking about the airport.

O’Hare International Airport specifically, where sculptures, videos, photographs and collages by some of the city’s most exciting midcareer and emerging artists debuted in October in the newly renovated and expanded Terminal 5. Finished artworks currently number 16, with three more nearing completion. The $3.5 million public art commission is Chicago’s single largest acquisition in three decades from local creators, including jina valentine, Bernard Williams and Huong Ngo.

Airports are odd places to encounter art. Like hospitals and shopping malls — and very much unlike museums and galleries — their primary reasons for existence have nothing to do with art viewing. That doesn’t necessarily make them unfit to display art, just unusual, and with unique considerations related to their patients, customers and world travelers. There are also doctors, shopkeepers, Transportation Security Administration workers and custodial staff to think about. All of these people have needs extraneous to the contemplation of, say, abstract expressionism versus postmodern conceptualism, though various types of aesthetic experience can contribute meaningfully to the atmospheres of distraction, wellness and welcome that are central to these environments.

Airport administrators have caught on, with art becoming an increasingly familiar sight in hubs from Philadelphia to Amsterdam. At O’Hare, curator Ionit Behar and architect Andrew Schachman, working together as Behar X Schachman, chose a thrillingly diverse selection of artists, many of whom took creative leaps in adapting their existing practices to the large budgets and material constraints of a permanent installation in a place most move through very fast, under intense scrutiny, after the exhaustion of long-haul flights and with plenty else on their minds.

Some of the most obvious display issues were smartly solved by presenting nearly all of the artworks in generous wall vitrines that punctuate the International Arrivals Corridor — an endless hallway conducting deplaning passengers to U.S. Customs & Immigration and its infamously slow lines. Captive audiences could do far worse than Mayumi Lake’s “Shinsekai Yori/From the New World,” a large collage of flowers, spirals and other motifs scanned from kimonos and arranged in the shape of a cyclone-cum-giant flying turtle, amid wispy clouds and a gold sky. Equally worth the wait is Leonard Suryajaya’s “Connection Lookup,” a diorama that expands the surrealistic intensity of his staged portraits of family and friends via realistic human-eye wallpaper, plus floor-to-ceiling shelving, itself covered in images of grinning mouths and stacked with riotously patterned soda cans, “welcome cat” figurines and fake plants.

As might be expected, Chicago and Chicagoans feature prominently as subject matter. Assaf Evron offers a clever view of Lake Michigan, repeating the same perfect image of our inland sea three times, once as a framed photograph, twice as a view ostensibly being seen through a window wall hung with wavy blue-velvet curtains. (It’s really a photo mural.) Chris Pappan takes a long and recuperative position, reverently depicting a Sac and Fox chief in three ledger book drawings, enlarged and mounted against a bright purple historic map of Chicago from a time when the Fox and other tribes lived freely in the area.

“Skywalkers,” a crowd-pleasing video by Wills Glasspiegel, Winfield RedCloud Woundedeye and Jemal “P-Top” Delacruz, shows off two famously fast-paced local boogie styles: Chicago footwork, developed by Black youth as part of the house music scene in the late 1990s, and grass dancing, a surviving Northern Plains choreography. Respectively outfitted in high-tops and hoodies versus festive regalia, the dancers battle at iconic locations that would top any tourist must-see list — the Skydeck of Willis Tower and the lakeshore, with skyline behind — but just as important are less-familiar locales like the South Side Community Art Center, the oldest African American art center in the country. The center’s distinctive wood-paneled gallery, hung with five pieces from its inimitable collection, forms the setting for Faheem Majeed’s “Push Pull,” in which performer Damon Green lugubriously, tenderly, exhaustingly unrolls, gathers and drags an enormous length of fabric from one end of the screen to the other.

The Arrivals Corridor is a one-way route. Sometimes passengers align with Green, but mostly, rivetingly, they go in opposite directions. The same cannot be said for Selina Trepp’s “We Walk Together,” a boisterous stop-motion animation of figures pieced together from colorful studio scraps, all of them moving in sync with visitors, schlepping vases, herding stones, teetering with pipe cleaners and tassels. No matter how jet-lagged you might feel after that 15-hour flight from Geneva, they’re weirder and proceeding more awkwardly, but always with enough good humor to keep on going. Installed anywhere else, “We Walk Together” would not be about travel, but here it most helpfully is. Likewise, Nelly Agassi’s neon sign blinks “Welcome home” and “come home” in her son’s shaky cursive, greeting folks returned from abroad but also plaintively asking them to do so if they haven’t yet.

O’Hare hasn’t yet made the list for World’s Best Art in the Airport, an award given out by the air transport rating organization Skytrax. But it surely will.

Lori Waxman is a freelance critic.

Artwork is on display in the International Arrivals Corridor at O’Hare International Airport Terminal 5, as well as elsewhere in the airport; more information at www.flychicago.com