Current Exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago during Design Chicago
DesignChicago 2025, held on October 8, 2025, was a remarkable event that showcased a series of thought-provoking exhibitions. The Art Institute of Chicago curated an impressive lineup of displays, each exploring themes of media critique, cultural reflection, immersive design, and identity exploration.
Four notable exhibitions included:
- Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom This exhibition critically re-examines mass media through immersive spaces featuring disembodied basketball players, floating trophies, and erased celebrity images. It combines humor and sadness to question media representations and challenges traditional video-centric retrospectives in design and art.
- Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me A provocative career survey using immersive design, this exhibition addresses war, surveillance, and cultural exploitation. It includes interactive media like a game where viewers decide “who to shoot” in a compound, confronting audiences with their role in geopolitical power structures and the subversive potential of art/design.
- Objects of Common Interest (presented as part of the Chicago Architecture Biennial, but exhibited at the Art Institute during the event) Founded by Eleni Petaloti and Leonidas Trampoukis, this work intersects art, design, and architecture to explore themes relevant to radical social and environmental change. Their participation emphasizes the merging of disciplines in design practice and addresses current global transformations.
- Low-Residency MFA Exhibition (School of the Art Institute of Chicago, shown in SAIC Galleries at the Art Institute) Featuring 22 MFA candidates, this exhibition spans diverse practices that interrogate personal, historical, and social relationships through material explorations. Themes include ecological crises, gender identity, representation, and speculative responses to contemporary challenges, highlighting new directions in design thinking and making.
These exhibitions collectively push design beyond aesthetics, encouraging critical engagement with media, power, identity, and environment. They utilize immersive and interactive methods, reflecting a shift towards experiential and participatory design. By blending art, architecture, technology, and activism, these shows underscore the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of design.
The Art Institute of Chicago also hosted other captivating exhibitions during DesignChicago 2025, such as:
- Pixy Liao: Relationship Material, an exploration of themes of intimacy, authorship, and gender roles.
- "Raqib Shaw: Paradise Lost", a 21-panel, 100-foot-wide painting developed over sixteen years, drawing on memories of Kashmir and a wide-ranging visual lexicon.
- The Dawn of Modernity: Japanese Prints, 1850-1900, focusing on subjects like newly modernized cityscapes, Western-style architecture, changing representations of women, and daily life.
- H. C. Westermann: Anchor Clanker, a retrospective of H. C. Westermann's sculptural practice, celebrating his deft use of materials, especially wood.
Each show is precise in its curatorial vision and formally rigorous in its execution. H. C. Westermann's work combines technical precision, existential commentary, absurdist humor, and cultural critique. The H. C. Westermann: Anchor Clanker exhibition is the most comprehensive presentation of H. C. Westermann's sculptures in Chicago in over two decades and is on display at Gallery 227 from October 8, 2025, to May 17, 2026.
The Dawn of Modernity: Japanese Prints, 1850-1900 exhibition is on display at Gallery 107 from October 8, 2025, to October 13, 2025. It traces the visual response of Japanese printmakers to the nation's rapid transformation following its opening to international trade in 1859.
After the museum, there is a workshop called "Build Your Dream Team" to turn inspiration into an actionable growth plan for business. Collectively, they remind us that museums, like marketplaces, are sites of influence, reflection, and production. These incredible exhibitions showcased innovative approaches and urgent themes that are shaping contemporary design practice and its societal role.
The "Low-Residency MFA Exhibition" highlights diverse design practices that delve into personal, historical, and social relationships, offering speculative responses to contemporary challenges. This exhibition, showcased at the SAIC Galleries, underscores new directions in design thinking and making.
The "Build Your Dream Team" workshop, held after the museum tour, provides an opportunity to transform inspiration into a practical growth plan for businesses, reiterating the influence, reflection, and production that museums and marketplaces share.
