Chicago’s April art season is arriving with unusual density. As more than 130 galleries prepare to gather at Navy Pier for the 15th edition of Expo Chicago, running April 9–12, the city’s museums and galleries are mounting a parallel program that stretches from Caribbean sound culture to Korean antiquity.
This year’s fair is the third to take place under Frieze, which acquired Expo Chicago in 2023 along with New York’s Armory Show. But the broader draw for many visitors may be what happens beyond the fair floor. Several exhibitions across the city offer a sharper sense of Chicago’s range, and of how institutions are using the week to frame larger conversations in contemporary art.
At the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Carla Acevedo-Yates has curated “Dancing the Revolution,” a first-of-its-kind exhibition examining the intertwined histories of dancehall and reggaetón through contemporary art. The show brings together painting, installation, photography, and sound by more than forty artists, including Issac Julien, Edra Soto, Alberta Whittle, Carolina Caycedo, and Lee “Scratch” Perry. Rather than treating music as a backdrop, the exhibition positions it as a political force — one that has carried ideas of resistance, collective joy, and colonial critique across Kingston, San Juan, Panama, New York City, and London.
Gray is presenting “Weathervane,” a survey of late Chicago Imagist Roger Brown (1941–1997), through June 13. It is the gallery’s first showing of Brown’s work since announcing representation of his estate. The eleven paintings on view, made in the 1980s and ’90s, place small human figures and buildings inside landscapes that feel both precarious and charged, with titles such as “Lake Effect,” “Weather Map,” and “Crosswinds” underscoring Brown’s attention to climate, architecture, and vulnerability.
At the Renaissance Society, Chicago-based Chinese painter Leah Ke Yi Zheng’s “Change, I Ching (64 Paintings)” remains on view through April 12. The series draws on the hexagrams of the I Ching, or Book of Changes, but translates them into Zheng’s own visual language on silk, using hand-built hardwood stretchers. The result is less illustration than interpretation: a dialogue between conceptual method and traditional material.
The Art Institute of Chicago is also offering one of the week’s most expansive historical presentations with “Korean National Treasures: 2,000 Years of Art.” The exhibition includes 140 objects on public display for the first time, and the Korean government officially recognizes twenty-two of the donated works as Treasures or National Treasures. Spanning from 57 BCE to the 1990s, the show gives unusual breadth to a collection shaped by both scholarship and private patronage.
Elsewhere, Secrist Beach is opening a new 10,000-square-foot space in West Town with work by Liliana Porter, adding another layer to a week that already makes Chicago feel less like a fair destination than a citywide exhibition circuit.
