The Anaconda Plan would be the result, a critical strategy the Union employed to cut off the supply chains to the South that would remain in place until the Confederacy was defeated in 1865. The plan became Lincoln’s first direct military action against slave states trying to secede, and it’s codified in a document formally called the “Order to Affix Seal of the United States to a Proclamation of a Blockade.”

On Tuesday, Gov. J.B. Pritzker and his wife, M.K., donated that historic document to the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield. The couple acquired it at auction for $471,000. It’s now one of about 13 million documents and artifacts amassed at the Springfield library and museum.

“This was an act of leadership that required careful consideration but also courage and immediate action to take every action possible to keep the nation intact,” the governor said to a small audience during a ceremony at the library, flanked by his wife, moments before the framed document was unveiled. “To me, this document and the museum as a whole serves as a reminder of how far we’ve come as a nation. Despite our current divisions and challenges, more than 150 years after a terrible Civil War, our nation perseveres.”

Ian Hunt, the acquisitions director for the library and museum, explained the historical significance of the document, discussing the division within Lincoln’s cabinet over how to respond to the Fort Sumter attack and Confederate President Jefferson Davis’ plans to authorize private citizens in the South to capture U.S. shipments, actions that would amount to piracy.

The Anaconda Plan was championed by Winfield Scott, the general and chief of the U.S. Army, who believed it would prevent the Southern states from selling agricultural commodities like cotton and tobacco to Europe, while at the same time denying the South access to arms, munitions and heavy machinery.

But U.S. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles felt the Navy was too small and ill-equipped to properly patrol the roughly 2,500 miles of the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico shoreline. Welles advised that a port could be closed and law enforcement could search and seize vessels with contraband if necessary, which would effectively impose an embargo, Hunt explained.

U.S. Attorney General Edward Bates warned that a blockade was “an act of war” that would by default recognize the Confederacy’s independence.

The cabinet ended up being split down the middle on the issue, and Lincoln chose to order the blockade.

“This document, asking the secretary of state to affix the seal of the United States to his proclamation, was the final step in making the president’s proclamation official,” Hunt said. “While the blockade may not have the dramatic moments that other famous battles such as Gettysburg or Vicksburg are remembered for, it was no less important. It denied the Southern economy much needed revenue from the sale of agricultural exports while simultaneously skyrocketing prices in the South on the limited materials that did make it through.”

Calling the document from April 19, 1861, a “magic piece of paper,” Christina Shutt, the library and museum’s executive director, said it represents “a terrifying decision point” for Lincoln.

“Seven states have already announced they want to tear America apart, rather than risk any chance of freedom for 4 million enslaved people,” Shutt explained. “They opened fire on U.S. troops and seized federal property. They stole weapons and (began) amassing an army. Now the president must decide whether to act boldly to win a war the Confederacy has started or dither and hope that somehow the crisis fails. It was a moment like no other in American history.”

The document will be available for viewing in the library and museum’s Treasures Gallery beginning Wednesday and will remain on display until February, when it will be transferred to the library and museum’s vault.

But Andrew Bolton, the curatorial mastermind behind the blockbuster fashion exhibits at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, begs to differ. His newest show, to be launched by the starry Met Gala next month, seeks to provide a multi-sensory experience, engaging not just the eyes but the nose, the ears — and even the fingertips, a traditional no-no in a museum.

Open to the public beginning May 10, “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” features 250 items that are being revived from years of slumber in the institute’s vast archive, with some in such a delicate state of demise that they can’t be draped on a mannequin or shown upright. These garments will lie in glass coffins — yes, like Sleeping Beauty herself.

As ever, celebrity guests at the May 6 gala, which this year is being hosted by Zendaya, Jennifer Lopez, Bad Bunny and Chris Hemsworth, will get the first look at the exhibit. With a dress code defined as “The Garden of Time,” one can expect lots of creative, garden-themed riffs. But will anyone go so far as to actually wear a living garden? As he began mounting the exhibit late last week, Bolton shared that there’s just such a garment in the show, a coat that has been planted with oat, rye and wheatgrass.

The garment, designed by Jonathan Anderson of the label LOEWE (a sponsor of the show), is currently “growing” right now in a tent at the museum, with its own irrigation system. It will be displayed in all its green glory for the first week, after which it will be replaced with a version, also grown for the show, that has dried out. As the museum puts it, the coat “will grow and die over the course of the exhibition.”

“Sleeping Beauties” will be organized around themes of earth, air and water — but also, Bolton says, around the various senses. The garden gallery where the coat will be displayed is one of four areas devoted to the sense of smell.

This means viewers will be able to sample scents connected to various garments. But it doesn’t mean that a floral gown, for example, will be accompanied by a floral scent. The reality is much more complex.

“What we’re really presenting is the olfactory history of the garment,” Bolton says. “And that’s the scent of the person who wore it, the natural body odors that they emitted, what they smoked, what they ate, where they lived.” For these galleries, the museum worked with Norwegian “smell artist” Sissel Tolaas, who took 57 “molecular readings” of garments, all to create scents that will waft through the rooms and enhance the visitor’s connection to the items on display.

But garments also create sound. Especially if the garment is embroidered, as is one famous gown by the late Alexander McQueen, with dried and bleached razor clams.

Because the original dress would be too fragile to now record the sounds it makes in movement, curators made a duplicate — with the same kind of razor clams that McQueen collected from a beach in Norfolk, England — and then isolated and recorded the sound in an echo-free chamber at Binghamton University. The effect, Bolton says, is “to capture the minutiae of movements.”

The same effect is achieved with a silk taffeta garment, featuring a sound called “scroop,” a combination of the words “scrape” and “whoop.“

“I know it sounds like a garage band,” quips Bolton, “but it’s a specific sound that silk makes.” It can be loud or soft, depending on the finishing of the silk. Taffeta has the loudest, so that’s what visitors will hear in one particular gallery.

And then there is touch.

“It’s one of the difficulties of museums, that you can’t touch things,” the curator says. The exhibit aims to change that, too. An example: an embroidered 17th-century Jacobean bodice. No, you can’t handle such a fragile thing. But with the help of 3D scanning, curators have recreated the embroidery on wallpaper. “The whole room will be covered with this wallpaper,” Bolton says. “You can use your hands to feel the shapes and the complexity of the embroidery.” The same technique will be used to experience the feel of a Dior dress.

Even with the plain old sense of sight, the exhibit aims to enhance the viewing experience with accompanying animations featuring details of the garment one cannot see with the naked eye — rather like looking through a microscope.

For what Bolton says is one of the most ambitious shows the Costume Institute has attempted, he went through the museum’s entire archive of 33,000 garments and accessories to choose the ultimate 250.

He hopes the various new technologies will became a norm, and that the institute will be able to build a database of the sounds and smells of some garments before they enter the collection — capturing them in living form, in their “last gasp” of life before they become museum pieces. Perhaps one day to lie in a glass coffin, like Sleeping Beauty.

“Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” will run May 10-Sept. 2, 2024.

SPRINGFIELD — Paul Powell, the southern Illinois political powerhouse who died and left behind $800,000 in cash in the notorious “Shoebox Scandal,” used to say, “The only thing worse than a defeated politician is a broke one.”

For more than half a century, a Powell-established $250,000 trust sustained his legacy, for better or worse. But the account that maintained his birthplace as a museum will soon run dry. The fate of the home in Vienna, a town of 1,300 about 140 miles (230 kilometers) southeast of St. Louis, is uncertain, but it likely will be sold.

From hero to bum in a flash: How an Illinois politician’s shoebox of money exposed the rot of corruption

For decades it has been home, according to Powell’s wishes, to the Johnson County Genealogical and Historical Society, which has the home looking as it did during the political giant’s time in office, with memorabilia cluttering the walls.

The upkeep runs about $5,000 annually, while last year the society’s income was $4,300, said board member Gary Hacker, 85, whose parents were schoolmates of Powell and mowed his lawn as a teenager in the early 1950s.

“We’re probably going to be putting it on the market for sale,” Hacker said. “The historical society will relocate.”

Southern Illinois was Powell’s fiefdom for much of the mid-1900s. He brought jobs by expanding the state’s prison infrastructure to the region, pumped money and status into Southern Illinois University and promoted county fairs and pari-mutuel betting on horse racing, which served the dual purpose of enriching Powell, who held racetrack stock.

While in later years Powell spent more time in Springfield and Chicago, when he was at home, favor-seekers streamed to the house. Sunday afternoons were spent in the sunroom he added in the 1950s, where three televisions were tuned to separate networks carrying sports, Hacker said.

“He was pretty adept at watching football, smoking cigars and conducting political business on the telephone or with people who visited him there,” Hacker said.

Winning a House seat in 1934, the Democrat was elected speaker in 1949, 1959 and 1961 — once despite Republicans claiming a one-seat majority. His quid pro quo deals with the boss of Chicago, Mayor Richard J. Daley, ensured projects for both regions and were often punctuated with another Powell aphorism: “I can smell the meat a-cookin’!”

Powell’s leverage only grew with his 1964 election as secretary of state.

“When Paul Powell was a man of influence, people knew where Johnson County was,” said John Rendleman III, a lawyer from Carbondale.

Rendleman’s father, a Powell friend and executor of his estate, uncovered one of the more outlandish political scandals in a state renowned for splashy corruption cases.

After Powell’s sudden death at 68 in October 1970, the elder Rendleman found $750,000 in cash, stuffed mostly in attache cases but also in at least one gift box from Marshall Field & Co., in his suite at Springfield’s St. Nicholas Hotel. Another $50,000 was stashed in his Capitol office about five blocks away.

A federal investigation concluded Powell skimmed much of it by awarding contracts to friends with kickback conditions. His estate, settled in 1978, was worth $4.6 million, the equivalent of $21.8 million today. He had $1 million worth of stock in horse tracks where he determined the most favorable racing dates.

The IRS claimed $1.7 million, and the state of Illinois $230,000. News reports on other politicians with horse racing stock led to federal prison for former Gov. Otto Kerner, at the time a federal appeals judge. Future politicians were required by law to start completing annual statements of economic interest.

The number of curiosity-seekers once drawn to the Powell home by the bizarre legend has dwindled, Hacker said. Few remember Powell even in Vienna.

“Memories last about a generation,” Rendelman said.

About $80,000 remains in the trust, Hacker said. Subtracting legal fees and the home’s value, appraised at about $60,000, will empty the account. A court date for closing the trust has not yet been scheduled.

Telephone and email messages seeking comment were left for the trustee at First Mid Bank & Trust in Mattoon.

It’s not beyond possibility that the house will remain open, Hacker said. One potential buyer has suggested making the three-bedroom home of about 1,700 square feet (160 square meters) into a bed-and-breakfast.

That in itself is not unusual — who hasn’t been to a museum and seen a display case displaying nothing? What’s unusual is the reason: On Jan. 12, federal regulations concerning the exhibition and study of Native American remains and sacred artifacts were tightened, to bring teeth and clarity to a set of rules that languished for decades.

The revised regulations are sweeping: They demand museums speed up the process of repatriating Native American “human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects or objects of cultural patrimony,” establishing ownership and lineage between museum collections and Native American descendants, returning anything requested. Museums must update their inventories of Native American remains and funerary objects within five years. Also, curators can no longer categorize such items as “culturally unidentifiable,” thereby holding them indefinitely. Tribal knowledge and traditions must be deferred to.

Moreover, institutions must get “free, prior and informed consent” from Native tribes before the exhibition or research of sacred artifacts. According to a Field Museum statement, the covered displays hold “cultural items that could be subject to these regulations,” and will stay covered “pending consultation with the represented (tribal) communities.” (The Field also noted it does not have any human remains on display.)

But that’s merely the tip of a cultural sea change.

Midwest museums, universities and the smallest of small-town historical societies — all of which are subject to the revisions — have been collecting Native American remains and funerary items for decades. Some for more than a century. In Illinois, this translates to hundreds of thousands of artifacts. And thousands of human remains. The University of Illinois alone holds 800 Native American remains and tens of thousands of funerary objects. The Field has likely “thousands” in its Native American collections, though a Field spokesperson said it’s hard to say how many objects will be affected. Either way, the rules will transform how institutions exhibit and research this museum cornerstone.

Indeed, quietly, they already have.

Last year at the Chicago History Museum, for instance, curators removed sacred Native American objects from the permanent exhibit “Chicago, Crossroads of America,” items that they expected would become subject to the anticipated changes in the regulations, also known as the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. It was initially implemented by the Department of Interior in 1990. The revisions were unveiled in December after two years of consulting between federal agencies and federally recognized Native American tribal communities, which have long argued that the broad language of the original NAGPRA regulations allowed museums to exploit loopholes, often treating the repatriation process as an afterthought.

“The way I like to explain it to people is, ‘If I had your grandparents’ remains and possessions, and I was holding them, how would you feel?'” said Sunshine Thomas-Bear, historic preservation officer for the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, one of the many Native American communities that traces its heritage and artifacts to Illinois museums.

“I feel like I’ve been trying to just get this pretty obvious idea though people’s heads,” she said. “We want our ancestors. We want our objects. It’s a battle we’re fighting all over the country. The work cannot go far without allies. But not everyone is welcoming.”

Thomas-Bear — who sits on a repatriation committee for the Field Museum that consists of museum staff and members of several tribes — said the Field is “one of the tougher (museums) to deal with on this, partly because it is such a big institution.” And partly, she said, because, like other museums thick with gravitas, “you run into people there who feel they need to hold on to stuff and uphold practices of predecessors. They say they’re keeping it safe but the only people who should have it are tribes it belongs to.”

In one sense, changes to NAGPRA are a continuation of an ongoing 21st century shift among museums to upend and rethink centuries of racist practices — an ugly legacy that often left museums with a sizable chunk of their collections. But it also means many museums may now be required to give up the bounty of those bad practices.

The Elgin Public Museum of Natural History and Anthropology has a full-time staff of two. A few years ago, a curator came out of a storage room and said they found human remains in a drawer. Skulls, ribs, jawbones. This is not unheard of for small museums across Illinois, said Jeanne Schultz Angel, president of the Illinois Association of Museums. “A lot of collections of Indigenous culture were built after, say, a farmer or two was plowing a field. I call them drive-by drop-offs. Those items would end up on a museum’s doorsteps, and a lot of time the records of those items were left incomplete.”

That’s what happened in Elgin.

In 1939, a farmer in South Elgin dropped off a collection of skull fragments he accidentally unearthed. The bones sat in a drawer for decades, until Catherine Bird, a retired archaeologist on the museum’s board of directors, researched tribal connections. “We weren’t even sure they were Native American,” said Sharry Blazier, museum director, “but because of NAGPRA, we took it seriously. We sent information to tribal authorities. Still, we didn’t have money for DNA tests.” Eventually, without a connection, they sent the remains to the Illinois State Museum. “But my understanding is they have such a backlog (of remains) to go through, we still don’t know who they belong to.”

Actually, according to federal statistics, the Illinois State Museum has one of the largest backlogs of unrepatriated remains and artifacts that fall under NAGPRA regulations — partly because of a 1989 state law that made the museum a repository for Native American remains discovered in Illinois.

“We have a ton of work ahead of us,” said Heather Miller, director of tribal relations for Illinois State Museum (and former executive director of the American Indian Center in Chicago). The museum is preparing the repatriation of about 1,100 remains — that’s out of more than 7,000 remains in storage. Miller, a citizen of the Wyandotte Nation (based in Oklahoma), works with about 60 tribal nations on the repatriation of artifacts, and said it only became a priority for state institutions as museum leadership changed.

“I think we can make significant changes in my lifetime,” she said, “but there are so many now, I doubt Illinois will never not have a NAGPRA case. We’ll never get to zero.”

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Farmers still find skulls in their fields.

“But some museums are shaking in their boots,” Miller said. “They see (the revisions) as a challenge to everything they’ve done up until recently. Museums were often founded to collect ‘dying cultures.’ Stuff was dug out of graves, bought from people taken advantage of. They came out of colonization, genocide — that’s the start of what we formally see as museums. Yet those communities are still here. As a Native person, artifacts, remains, it’s an extension of me. The treatment is sickening, to say the least.”

“Museums typically took a clinical view of indigenous human remains and funerary objects,” said Rachel Morgan, an archaeologist and author of “Sins of the Shovel,” a 2023 history of American archaeology. Breaking down bones to obtain information on dates and diets was seen by scientists as a harmless way to understand the past, she said, but to tribes, “it was the desecration of ancestral human remains that perpetuated historic human rights abuses.”

The changes in NAGPRA that give weight to tribal knowledge intend to correct this, often seen as a historic imbalance of power. “What museums have done in the past to Native American communities is position themselves as primary experts on Native communities,” said Shannon O’Loughlin, a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and chief executive of the Association on American Indian Affairs. “I see Native nations as the primary experts on Native nations.”

Generally, institutions, at least in public statements, are quick to agree with NAGPRA.

The Art Institute said it prioritizes NAGPRA obligations and has repatriated works in the past. Southern Illinois University in Carbondale — which contains the Center for Archaeological Investigations — has worked on repatriation with Native tribes that have ties to Illinois, as well as the Navajo and the Hopi tribes in the Southwest, and plans to hire a full-time NAGPRA coordinator by mid-February. Rose Miron, director of the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the Newberry Library, said the rules do not apply to their collection, but added the institution is working with Native communities to identify and possibly restrict access to books and manuscripts that contain information on funerary ceremonies and Native sacred beliefs.

The Field Museum — founded in 1894 partly as a home for artifacts collected by pioneering anthropologist Franz Boas, whose work is upheld today as a mixed legacy, both challenging and promoting outdated ideas on Indigenous communities — has made major changes in recent years toward how it displays and researches Native American culture. A spokesperson noted the 2022 opening of a permanent exhibit, “Native Truths: Our Voices, Our Stories,” made in consultation with 130 Native tribes, and added that the museum is committed to compliance with NAGPRA and regards the regulations as “a positive step.” The museum worked with 350 tribes in 2023, the spokesperson said, and that most of those relationships are positive, though some are “more difficult — this can be the result of specific collecting histories or, more generally, of historic distrust.”

That said, last January, during a public comment period offered by the National Park Service, Julian Siggers, president and CEO of the Field Museum, wrote in a letter to the national NAGPRA program that the museum maintained “serious concerns” about the new “expectations and implementation,” citing overreaching “unrealistic deadlines,” an increased bureaucracy and a minimum $1.2 billion in costs for museums to repatriate the 850,000 “culturally unidentifiable” remains and funerary objects in national databases. Other museum professionals contacted for this article were concerned the new weight placed on tribal knowledge might dismiss the knowledge of archaeologists and historians.

Yet, the reality is, said Krystiana Krupa, the NAGPRA program officer for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a lot of museums don’t “actually know what they have until a tribe tells them.”

There are 574 federally-recognized Native communities the United States, and several thousand history museums, large and small. Matthew Bussler, tribal historic preservation officer for the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians in southwest Michigan and northeast Indiana, said he deals with repatriation from more than 50 museums and institutions. “You once had to be proactive on this, but with the new rules, every week, new places are coming out of the woodwork to work with us.”

He loves dealing with the Illinois State Museum, for instance, but cites the Field Museum as an example of an institution “making hollow statements and checking boxes.” He said repatriation is often a long process and “it can feel like a lot of places just want to know what they have to do to comply. You feel like you’re their busywork.”

It’s a bittersweet moment, he said.

“Ancestors have been held captive in some of these places for more than 100 years and had destructive work done to their bones, notwithstanding the spiritual pain. Some of our elders have grandparents still in museums. I know it’s tough for some of these places. I know it costs money, I know they adopted the result of bad practices of predecessors. But it’s on you. Make change. One conversation at a time. Start there.”

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com

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.

Ochoa comes to the museum after serving as president of the ChiArts Foundation of the Chicago High School for the Arts. He had been the founding artistic director of ChiArts, and before that was the superintendent of the Cultural Arts department for Nashville, Tennessee.

Ochoa takes over from Carlos Tortolero, 69, the museum’s founder, president and CEO who retired on Dec. 31. Tortolero will continue as consultant until March 31.

The National Museum of Mexican Art in Pilsen is recognized locally and internationally as one of the cultural cornerstones of Chicago, and is reported to be the only nationally accredited museum dedicated to Mexican art and culture. It has a staff of 40 employees and an annual budget of about $8 million, operating with free admission with some 150,000 annual visitors. The museum is open Tuesdays through Sundays (though it is closed Tuesday, Jan. 16, due to severe weather).

“The Board sought a visionary leader who could build on the Museum’s achievements,” said Carlos R. Cardenas, chair of NMMA’s Board of Trustees, in part in a statement announcing Ochoa’s hiring. “We focused on candidates with strong educator backgrounds, robust career credentials in the arts, sound financial acumen in running organizations, a history of effective fundraising, experience driving growth and operational excellence, a commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion, a deep appreciation for Mexican culture and art.”

According to the announcement, the appointment is effective immediately.

dgeorge@chicagotribune.com

Museums across the country have been preparing for the new regulations, which go into effect on Friday, with officials consulting lawyers as curators scramble to read through rules that will influence staffing and budgets for years to come.

The federal government overhauled rules that were established in the 1990s, hoping to accelerate the repatriation of Native American remains and cultural patrimony — a process that tribal officials and repatriation advocates have long criticized for moving too slowly.

The Field Museum’s decision relates to a provision that requires institutions to “obtain free, prior and informed consent” from tribes before exhibiting cultural items or human remains, or allowing research of them. Museums have had to decide whether to leave Native objects on display and risk violating the new rules, or to remove the objects while engaging in what might be a lengthy process of requesting tribal consent.

The decision by the Field Museum, which was announced this week on its website, applies to display cases in its halls of the ancient Americas, focused on civilizations in the Western Hemisphere spanning 13,000 years, and in a hall about 10 Native nations in the Pacific Northwest.

“Pending consultation with the represented communities, we have covered all cases that we believe contain cultural items that could be subject to these regulations,” said the museum, which noted it does not display human remains.

It was not immediately clear which items had been obscured and which tribes the museum was planning on consulting. Museum representatives did not immediately respond to requests for further information.

Many institutions that display Native American cultural items, including the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, have not announced how their exhibitions will be affected.

“It’s as clear as day,” said Shannon O’Loughlin, chief executive for the Association on American Indian Affairs, a nonprofit that assists Native nations and Indigenous people with repatriation. “They need to proactively fix it if they are out of compliance.”

Part of the newfound urgency around repatriation has been fueled by a broader effort at museums and universities to right historical wrongs. Holdings of Native American remains are often linked to grave robbing, archaeological excavation and development on burial grounds.

Another driver has been the Biden administration, which has been trying to find ways to accelerate the repatriation process since 2021. The remains of more than 96,000 Native American individuals continue to be held in institutions that include large museums and tiny local historical societies.

The new regulations end some practices that repatriation advocates said were responsible for delaying returns. Institutions can no longer label remains as “culturally unidentifiable,” a category that made it more difficult for tribes to make claims on those holdings.

Created in consultation with dozens of federally recognized Native American tribes, the new rules also seek to address long-standing concerns about how much consideration tribes are paid regarding exhibitions and research.

“If people were treating that relationship with respect in the first place, there probably wouldn’t be a need for the rule,” said Bryan Newland, the assistant secretary for Indian affairs and a former tribal president of the Bay Mills Indian Community.

Some leaders in the museum and archaeology worlds have argued that the new rules overstep and that museums should maintain autonomy in managing their collections. If a museum is accused of not following the federal regulations, which are administered by the Interior Department, the government can issue a fine.

The Field Museum, which was founded in 1894 after the World’s Columbian Exposition as a repository for items displayed at the fair, is among the museums that have renewed their commitments to repatriation in recent years. It has one of the largest collections of Native American remains, with holdings that represent more than 1,200 individuals, according to federal government data published in the fall.

c.2024 The New York Times Company

The following cultural institutions have — at least, last I checked — four walls, a roof and something on the docket for winter that promises to leave you a little changed, or, better yet, hungry to learn even more. (Speaking of “hungry,” hang onto that thought for, oh, two paragraphs or so.)

Ten new or soon-closing exhibitions:

Deck the halls

Hey, at least it’s still Christmas at the Swedish American Museum. Traditionally, Swedish peasant homes busted out their bonader — paintings on canvas, fabric or paper kept as family heirlooms — to decorate for Advent and feast days. Heiress and folk art enthusiast Florence Dibell Bartlett donated 29 bonader to the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1930s. The Art Institute, in turn, gave them to the Swedish American Museum in 2000. This exhibition, closing soon, shows off that collection, the eighth largest in the world. “Bonader,” through Jan. 14, open 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays and 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays at the Swedish American Museum, 5211 N. Clark St.; tickets are $6 for adults; $4 for students, seniors and children; $15 for families, swedishamericanmuseum.org

Delicious history

How did chop suey and egg foo young become as American as apple pie? “Chinese Cuisine in America” traces the history of this ever-adaptable tradition, hitting on the history of Chinese immigration, the emergence of urban Chinatowns and current food fads along the way. The exhibition casts a nationwide net, but cameos by Chicago favorites like Orange Garden, Sun Wah and Triple Crown are the clincher. The very best part? The Chinese American Museum is within walking distance from all the Chinatown dining classics, for your edible edification. “Chinese Cuisine in America: Stories, Struggles and Successes,” through Jan. 21, open 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesdays and Fridays and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays at the Chinese American Museum of Chicago, 238 W. 23rd St.; suggested donation $8 for adults, $5 for students and seniors, ccamuseum.org

Innovation as tradition

In 1970, with the Black Arts Movement in full swing, artists teamed up with the Chicago Defender to produce the first Black Creativity celebration, then called Black Esthetics. More than 50 years on, this multidisciplinary event, exhibition and education series still calls the Museum of Science and Industry home. Its centerpiece is the Black Creativity Juried Art Exhibition, the longest continuously running exhibition of African American art in the United States. This year’s is 150-plus works strong, representing more than 100 different artists, some of whom are still in high school. “Black Creativity,” Jan. 14 to April 21, daily 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Museum of Science and Industry, 5700 S. DuSable Lake Shore Drive; $26 adults and $15 children 3 to 11; plus a full schedule of associated Black Creativity events at msi.org.

Stranger than fiction

During the Great Depression, rather than spend her wealth on herself, Jazz Age it-girl Colleen Moore constructed a fantastical Fairy Castle to tour the demoralized country. The miniature marvel became a beloved mainstay at the Museum of Science and Industry from 1949 onward, giving even the Art Institute’s Thorne Rooms a run for their money. In recent months, the Fairy Castle seized public imagination anew via Kathleen Rooney’s novel “From Dust to Stardust,” which fictionalizes Moore’s story. This all-day event includes a conversation between Rooney and Moore’s granddaughter, a book signing, an artisan market and a screening of “Flaming Youth,” starring Moore. “Moore’s Marvelous Minis,” 9:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Jan. 27 at the Museum of Science and Industry, 5700 S. DuSable Lake Shore Drive; tickets are $26 for adults and $15 for children ages 3 to 11, with some events requiring extra entry fees; for more information check msichicago.org

Frame by frame

Founded in 2008, the annual Architecture & Design Film Festival plants itself at the Chicago Architecture Center after roving through other North American cities. The featured films train their lens on subjects as wide-ranging as Soviet-era bus stops to squatters in Sao Paulo. Keep an eye out for the festival’s double features, which screen two short documentaries for the price of one. Architecture & Design Film Festival, Jan. 31 to Feb. 4 at the Chicago Architecture Center, 111 E. Wacker Drive; tickets are $20 per screening, full lineup and details at architecture.org

Coming to a dome theater near you

The Adler Planetarium debuts its first new production in the Grainger Sky Theater since 2019: “Niyah and the Multiverse,” a family-friendly Afrofuturist romp starring a Chicago preteen and her cat. The script was written by Taylor Witten, a Wakandacon producer, and Ytasha Womack, author of the 2013 book “Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci Fi and Fantasy Culture.” (Both also collaborated with the planetarium to create “A Night in the Afrofuture” in February 2019 for the Adler After Dark series.) “Niyah and the Multiverse” opens Jan. 13, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Fridays-Mondays and 4-10 p.m. Wednesdays at Adler Planetarium, 1300 S. DuSable Lake Shore Drive; tickets are $19 for adults, $8 for children, adlerplanetarium.org

Study up

Even ancient Mesopotamians had midterms. “Back to School in Babylonia,” at the University of Chicago’s Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (nee Oriental Institute), reunites objects unearthed from the footprint of a scribal school in the ancient city of Nippur, in central-southern Iraq, in the 1950s. The artifacts, split between UChicago and UPenn’s collections, document cuneiform exercises, studies in subjects like mathematics and legal writing, and occasionally even students’ frustration and boredom. One tablet was discovered balled up, like a crumpled piece of paper, while another seems to have been gnawed on. Through March 24, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily except Fridays (open 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.) and Mondays (closed), at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, 1155 E. 58th St.; suggested admission $10 for adults and $5 for children; isac.uchicago.edu

Molding new futures

The Art Institute boasts an impressive Japanese print collection: this winter, it follows up on last year’s “Ghosts and Demons in Japanese Prints” with “By the Light of the Moon: Nighttime in Japanese Prints” (Jan. 20 to April 14). But of its special exhibits on Japanese art, “Radical Clay: Contemporary Women Artists from Japan” is the can’t-miss of the two, its bafflingly intricate pieces by living sculptors on loan to the museum for a limited time. “Radical Clay: Contemporary Women Artists from Japan,” through June 3, open 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays and Fridays-Sundays, and 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursdays at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Ave.; tickets are $32 for adults; $26 for seniors, students and teens; children are free; Illinois residents are $20 for adults; $14 for seniors and students, artic.edu

Taíno tenacity

The Smithsonian links up with Chicago’s National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture (the exhibition host) and the Field Museum for this spotlight on the Indigenous Arawak-speaking peoples of what is now Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. The Taíno were also the first group to encounter Christopher Columbus; like so many other peoples in the Americas, their population and culture were ravaged by Spanish colonization. This exhibition shows how Taíno found ways to retain their heritage, tracing that knowledge-keeping to today’s Taíno revivalist movements. “¡Taíno Vive! Caribbean Indigenous Resistance,” Jan. 6 to June 16, open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays-Thursdays, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Fridays and 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturdays at the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture, 3015 W. Division St.; free, nmprac.org

Requiem for a nightclub

Independent venues are painfully ephemeral: they come, they go, they’re mostly lost to time. Luckily for Mister Kelly’s — the defunct Gold Coast nightclub now occupied by Gibson’s Steakhouse — the Newberry Library took in its collection after it closed in 1975. A new exhibition invites visitors to imagine what it might have been like to visit the fabled club, which hosted jazz legends, comedy icons and, per the Tribune in 1959, “girl throwing” (acrobatics). “A Night at Mister Kelly’s,” March 21 to July 20 from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesdays-Thursdays, and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays at the Newberry Library, 60 W. Walton St.; free, newberry.org

Hannah Edgar is a freelance writer.

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.