Last week I went to Chicago to host a Come Look at Art with Me at The Arts Club of Chicago. We saw Mernet Larsen’s Situational Awareness, an exhibition of approximately twenty paintings spanning forty years. Larsen takes recognizable situations—people sitting, eating, meeting, occupying rooms—and reconstructs them through unexpected geometries, altered perspectives, and shifts in scale.
I also went to the Art Institute of Chicago, where Willem de Kooning Drawing and Lee Miller: Fearless were both on view. And then, three days after I left, Chicago Exhibition Week began.
Chicago Exhibition Week runs September 14–20, 2026, with more than fifty galleries and cultural spaces participating, and there is so much I could see if I were there this week. Karimah Ashadu’s Tendered at The Renaissance Society. Pope.L’s No Thing Skin Sets at Corbett vs. Dempsey. Clotilde Jiménez at Mariane Ibrahim. Gordon Cheung at Kavi Gupta. Jaume Plensa at GRAY and Alexandra Barth at DOCUMENT. Claire Sherman and Lindsay Adams at PATRON.
Timing determines so much of what we see when we travel. We can plan where we are going, make lists, buy tickets, map the distance between one place and another, and still arrive three days too early for something we would have loved to see.
I like the idea that an itinerary can include what I missed. I saw Mernet Larsen, Willem de Kooning, and Lee Miller. If I were in Chicago this week, I could continue with all of these exhibitions. And if you are there, you can.
What will you see that I missed?
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