LeRoy Neiman: A Keen Observer of Style
LeRoy Neiman: A Keen Observer of Style, August 31–November 21, 2026, LeRoy Neiman (1921-2012) was best known for his brilliantly colored, expressionist paintings and screenprints of athletes, musicians, and sporting events. LeRoy Neiman: A Keen Observer of Style focuses on his early work as a fashion illustrator and how it informed his ongoing interest in capturing the clothing, gesture, and style of his subjects. Featuring 80 drawings and paintings from the collection of the LeRoy and Janet Byrne Neiman Foundation, the exhibition spans Neiman’s work from the 1950s through 2000. Neiman was always accompanied by his sketchbook, and his art reflects his curiosity and powers of observation. LeRoy Neiman attended SAIC from 1946 to 1950 and taught figure drawing and fashion illustration at SAIC for the following decade. He received an honorary degree in 2006.
LeRoy Neiman: A Keen Observer of Style was originally curated by Sara Hume, PhD, for the Kent State University Museum. The exhibition was made possible…
Organization: Exhibitions. Building Address: 33 E. Washington St.
Monday, August 31, 2026, 11:00 AM – Saturday, November 21, 2026, 6:00 PM.
SAIC Galleries Street Level.
Style is the Body Thinking
, Benny Andrews (1930–2006), Portrait of Ray Johnson, 1985, The Portraits of... Series, Oil and graphite on canvas with painted fabric, paper and mixed media collage, 72 1/4 x 50 1/4 x 1 1/2 inches / 183.5 x 127.6 x 3.8 cm, signed. The Andrews-Humphrey Family Foundation, Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY. © Benny Andrews Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY,
, Style is the Body Thinking, August 31–December 5, 2026
Style is the Body Thinking is a group exhibition of international artists curated by SAIC Crown Family Professor in Painting and Drawing Michelle Grabner that explores iterations of style, portraiture, and figuration in contemporary art. It examines the social and aesthetic affordances of style and figuration from the 1960s to the present, addressing style’s relationship to identity, power, labor, resistance, taste, the body, technology, and affect.
Style is the Body Thinking features the work of more than 50…
Organization: Exhibitions. Building Address: 33 E. Washington St.
Monday, August 31, 2026, 11:00 AM – Saturday, December 5, 2026, 6:00 PM.
SAIC Galleries Lower Level 2.
An Evening with Karimah Ashadu
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Karimah Ashadu, Plateau, 2021–22. Courtesy of the artist and Sadie Coles HQ,
Over the past 15 years, British-Nigerian artist Karimah Ashadu—recipient of the Venice Biennale’s 2024 Silver Lion—has forged a bold, formally inventive cinema that plunges viewers into the tactile realities of labor. Shooting on location in Lagos, Hamburg, and Nigeria’s Jos Plateau, Ashadu maps informal economies shaped by migration, global commerce, and colonial extraction, deliberately revealing her camera’s presence to unsettle the distance between viewer and subject. Her 2015 film King of Boys (Abattoir of Makoko) observes the raw operations of an open-air butcher shop through the crimson filter of a plastic beer keg, Brown Goods (2020) follows a Nigerian migrant navigating Hamburg’s secondhand export trade, and Plateau (2021–22) moves among undocumented tin miners carving out a living from a landscape scarred by colonial industry. Sensorially charged and keenly observed, these cinematic encounters underscore the uneasy…
Organization: CATE, Film, Video, New Media, and Animation, GSFC. Building Address: 164 N State St.
Thursday, September 10, 2026, 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM.
Gene Siskel Film Center Theater 1.
Catherine Opie Lecture
Catherine Opie, Untitled #2 (Swamps), 2019, Pigment print, artwork dimensions: 40 x 60 inches, framed dimensions: 41 x 61 x 2 inches. © Catherine Opie, Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, London, and Seoul,
Join us for a lecture by artist Catherine Opie followed by an audience Q&A.
Doors open at 5:45 p.m. Free and open to the public. Registration is not required. Explore the Visiting Artists Program homepage for visitor information, recordings of past events, and more.
For more than 30 years, Catherine Opie has captured often overlooked aspects of contemporary American life and culture. One of the most important photographers of her generation, her photographic subjects have included early seminal portraits of the LGBTQ+ community, the architecture of Los Angeles' freeway system, mansions in Beverly Hills, Midwestern icehouses, high school football players, California surfers, abstract landscapes of National Parks, and the Bel-Air residence of Elizabeth…
Organization: Visiting Artists Program. Building Address: 111 S. Michigan Ave.
Monday, September 14, 2026, 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM.
Fullerton Hall, Art Institute of Chicago.
Hamza Walker: Bill & Stephanie Sick Distinguished Visiting Professor Lecture
MONUMENTS, 2025-2026 installation view LA MOCA Geffen, still from Julie Dash/Davone Tines video Homegoing, photo credit: Fredrik Nilsen
Doors open at 5:45 p.m. Free and open to the public. Registration is not required. Explore the Visiting Artists Program homepage for visitor information, recordings of past events, and more.
Join us for a lecture by curator Hamza Walker followed by an audience Q&A.
Hamza Walker is director of The Brick (formerly LAXART), a nonprofit alternative art space in Los Angeles. Walker has been chasing the same high for over three decades. Ever since seeing avant-garde concerts and performances in late '80s Chicago, he has felt compelled to share a boundless curiosity about art. In the ensuing years, Walker has curated dozens of exhibitions ranging from solo to thematic exhibitions, from the production of new work to career surveys. Recent exhibitions include MONUMENTS, co-curated with Bennett Simpson and Kara Walker, and co-organized with the Museum of Contemporary Art,…
Organization: Visiting Artists Program. Building Address: 111 S. Michigan Ave.
Monday, September 28, 2026, 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM.
Fullerton Hall, Art Institute of Chicago.
Nancy Andrews' Phantom Limbs
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Nancy Andrews, On a Phantom Limb, 2009. Courtesy of the Estate of Nancy Andrews,
The mysteries of the body, mind, and natural world animate the darkly funny, deeply tender, and genre-defying films of artist and musician Nancy Andrews (MFA 1995), who probed the boundaries between scientific knowledge and the unexplained. Andrews, who passed away this summer, emerged from Chicago’s experimental performance scene of the 1990s, presenting unruly, handmade productions that combined projected film, music, puppets, and sculptural sets. She carried this radically hybrid approach into her moving-image work, casting visionary women, talking animals, and psychic doubles in tales of natural history, paranormal phenomena, medicine, trauma, mortality, and the body’s capacity for transformation. Bringing together works and collaborators from across Andrews’ career, this program celebrates her cosmic cinema and its capacious embrace of the unknown. Introduced by the filmmaker Jennifer Reeder and accompanied by remarks…
Organization: CATE, Film, Video, New Media, and Animation, GSFC. Building Address: 164 N State St.
Thursday, October 1, 2026, 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM.
Gene Siskel Film Center Theater 1.
Adam Khalil and Zack Khalil: Aanikoobijigan [ancestor/great-grandparent/great-grandchild]
, Adam Khalil and Zack Khalil, Aanikoobijigan [ancestor/great-grandparent/great-grandchild], 2026. Courtesy of the artists, A formally audacious act of reclamation, Aanikoobijigan [ancestor/great-grandparent/great-grandchild], by acclaimed Ojibwe artist-filmmakers Adam and Zack Khalil—directors of the landmark INAATE/SE (2016) and core contributors to the public-secret society New Red Order—is both a searing indictment of institutions holding Indigenous Ancestors and a stirring testament to those working to bring them home. Winner of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival’s NEXT Audience Award, the film follows the Michigan Anishinaabek Cultural Preservation and Repatriation Alliance, a coalition of specialists from tribes across Michigan, in its decades-long effort to press museums, universities, and archives to return human remains stolen from Indigenous communities. The film moves through vérité observation, essay, and kaleidoscopic animation to expose the racialized science that sustains these collections—and to…
Organization: CATE, Film, Video, New Media, and Animation, GSFC. Building Address: 164 N State St.
Thursday, October 8, 2026, 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM.
Gene Siskel Film Center Theater 1.
Ronald Rael Lecture
Ronald Rael, still from Teeter-Totter Wall, 2019, single-channel video with sound, 3:00 min. Courtesy of Rael San Fratello,
Doors open at 5:45 p.m. Free and open to the public. Registration is not required. Explore the Visiting Artists Program homepage for visitor information, recordings of past events, and more.
Join us for a lecture by architect Ronald Rael followed by an audience Q&A.
Ronald Rael is a trained architect, artist, activist, design technologist, multi-generational rancher, and traditional builder. His work blurs the borders between architecture, art, technology, land-based practice, and social justice. He writes books, forms startup companies, advocates for human rights at the US-Mexico border, creates software, invents novel materials and new forms of construction, and designs buildings as an applied research enterprise. His work often combines indigenous and traditional materials and processes with contemporary technologies to speak to the contrasts, contradictions, and complexities…
Organization: Visiting Artists Program, Architecture, Interior Arch, Designed Objects. Building Address: 111 S. Michigan Ave.
Monday, October 19, 2026, 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM.
Fullerton Hall, Art Institute of Chicago.
An Evening with Lilli Carré
, Lilli Carré Evacuations, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.
In the unruly, shape-shifting films of animator, comics artist, and sculptor Lilli Carré (BFA 2006), bodies, lines, and even space refuse to stay put. Drawing on the elastic traditions of cartooning and experimental abstraction, her rebellious figures ignore commands, return the viewer’s gaze, leak into their surroundings, and disappear into murky swamps. Carré presents works from across her career, from Jill (2016), whose gawky computer-animated double—modeled on Carré herself—resists her maker’s commands, to the hand-painted Glazing (2021), in which a woman twists through poses borrowed from art history before shaking off the fantasies they impose. The program concludes with her latest works—the multiple award-winning Evacuations (2025), where painted smears haunt photocopied images of emptied public spaces, and 5000 Years of Counting Sheep (2026). Witty, seductive, and more than a little ominous, Carré’s works revel in the freedom and danger of…
Organization: CATE, Film, Video, New Media, and Animation, GSFC. Building Address: 164 N State St.
Thursday, October 22, 2026, 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM.
Gene Siskel Film Center Theater 1.
Fall 2026 Norma U. Lifton Lecture with Jori Finkel
The Art History Department is pleased to present this year's Norma U. Lifton Lecture with Jori Finkel.
The Treachery of Biography: The Pitfalls of Writing Artist Profiles and Obituaries
Over the last two decades, Jori Finkel has written numerous profiles and obituaries of artists for the New York Times among other outlets. In almost every case, she has to make tricky decisions about how much of their "personal" life to include. Do you mention the children who interrupt studio visits, exposing an artist's other job as caregiver? What about long career gaps that successful artists aren’t supposed to have, or signs of dementia affecting older artists? These details are particularly fraught for women, LGBTQ artists and artists of color, who are at risk of being further marginalized when coverage strays from their work. Here, for the first time, Finkel will discuss how she grapples with the pitfalls of biography in her ongoing effort to counter and complicate the classic great-white-male genius narratives…
Organization: Art History, Theory, & Criticism. Building Address: 112 S. Michigan Ave. ACCOUNT-FUND-ORG # for billing: 522.
Wednesday, October 28, 2026, 4:30 PM – 7:00 PM.
MacLean Center Ballroom.
McKenzie Wark Lecture
McKenzie Wark. Photo by Z. Walsh,
Join us for a virtual lecture by scholar McKenzie Wark followed by an audience Q&A.
Click HERE to join via Zoom at 6:00 p.m.
Free and open to the public. Registration is not required. Explore the Visiting Artists Program homepage for recordings of past events and more.
McKenzie Wark is best known for a series of books of 21st-century critical theory, including A Hacker Manifesto, Gamer Theory, and Capital is Dead. She has also written works that contribute to an alternate history of Marxism, including Leaving the Twentieth Century and Molecular Red. Her survey books on contemporary theory and problems in collaborative knowledge production are General Intellects and Sensoria. She also writes in an autotheoretical style in books such as Dispositions, Philosophy for Spiders, Raving, and Love and Money, Sex and Death. She is a professor of media and cultural studies at a university in New York.
This event will be live captioned by Communication Access Realtime…
Organization: Visiting Artists Program. Building Address: Virtual.
Tuesday, November 3, 2026, 6:00 PM – 7:15 PM.
An Evening with John Smith
, John Smith, Pyramids / Skunk (Hotel Diaries #5), 2006–07. Courtesy of the artist, Few filmmakers have unsettled the boundaries between documentary and fiction, abstraction and representation, and the personal and political as slyly—or as ingeniously—as British artist-filmmaker John Smith. A towering figure in experimental film and CATE’s very first visiting artist, Smith returns with a program pairing the 16mm deadpan masterpiece The Girl Chewing Gum (1976)—widely considered one of the most influential avant-garde films of the 20th century—with incendiary and deeply personal works made since his 2001 CATE debut. Two chapters from the extraordinary Hotel Diaries connect the anonymous spaces of international accommodations to war and occupation, while Dad’s Stick (2012) and the multi-award-winning Being John Smith (2024) reckon with family history, aging, fame, and making art amid political catastrophe. The Chicago premiere of Two Pids (2026) concludes the evening. Curated by Abina Manning, Video Data Bank’s…
Organization: CATE, Film, Video, New Media, and Animation, GSFC. Building Address: 164 N State St.
Thursday, November 5, 2026, 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM.
Gene Siskel Film Center Theater 1.