Art

The Difficulty of Representation is a visual essay composed of illustrated voice notes that trace frustration, a projected future, boredom, or a memory that bursts into consciousness.

The video piece works from the façade itself as a key support, continuously transforming.

A collage of possibilities and ideas in constant mutation.

Building on two years of successful collaboration, ART on THE MART’s Spring 2026 season spotlights emerging talent from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), the internationally recognized Chicago institution and one of the world’s leading schools of art and design. Guided by SAIC faculty and artists Jan Tichy and Austen Brown.

Art, Activism, Policy, Power

Art, Activism, Policy, Power / Museum of Contemporary PhotographyEntwined, a collaborative film created by Chicago artist Colleen Plumb, animates camera-less prints made by 95 students from Prosser Career Academy and South Shore College Prep. Through the Museum of Contemporary Photography’s Art, Activism, Policy, Power program, students learned about Colleen’s practice as an artist-activist focusing on environmental issues. They participated in educational tree walks with Chicago conservation organization, Openlands, and created unique cyanotypes with Plumb using collected tree specimens, reflecting on the role trees play in the health, wellness, history, and ecological life of the city. Sound by composer and sound designer Teerath Majumder.

https://www.mocp.org/

Led by artist and facilitator Sage Lin our next iteration of this popular partnership with Chicago Public School students has expanded to include work not only from high school seniors but also from younger students with their teachers’ collaboration. We again plan to display an equitable range of works from across CPS districts. https://www.cps.edu/sites/cpsarts/student-programs/art-on-themart/

Art is our first language, an elemental expression that predates the written word. It begins in personal resonance and expands outward, connecting colleagues, friends, neighbors, cities, and the world beyond. Across distances and differences, we communicate through gestures, forms, and shared curiosity, guided always by purpose. Why? To seek growth, affirmation, and a sense of belonging. To be human is to create with intention and to design with love. At its essence, this is our Love Language.

Trazos (Traces) is a forthcoming projection by Chicago artists and filmmakers Alan Medina and Wills Glasspiegel. The projection expands upon the living history of public art in Pilsen, a neighborhood on the near southwest side of Chicago. Trazos amplifies and animates the murals, dances, and sounds of life in this historically Mexican-American neighborhood. Accompanying Trazos’ release in the summer of 2026, Medina and Glasspiegel will also share a series of short oral histories related to public art and its protagonists in Pilsen since the
1960s.

Sodalite cages are structural units found in the mineral sodalite and related materials like zeolites. Machine learning models are used to
understand growth processes and atomic-level dynamical transitions in silica. Naturally occurring and synthetic zeolites have numerous applications,
including water purification, catalysis in oil refining, and as components in detergents.

The Adler Planetarium’s Astrographics explores the ways in which humans conceptualize and visualize the universe, and how that has changed over time. The piece consisted of four movements (Earth, Other Worlds, Stars, and Beyond) that step out to progressively deeper and more speculative realms. Each of these movements feature scientific visualizations produced by The Adler Planetarium’s Space Visualization Group, woven together with imagery from the world’s telescopes and works on paper from The Adler’s collections. The projection was accompanied by music from Sun Ra archives, curated by the Experimental Sound Studio. The piece premiered in 2020 and honored the progress that has occurred in the 90 years since The Adler Planetarium was founded on May 1930, becoming the first planetarium in the Americas.


Adler site