The 12th edition of the contemporary art event known as EXPO Chicago brought 35,000 visitors to Navy Pier on April 24-27.
With Northern Trust as the presenting sponsor, the 2025 fair featured 170 leading galleries from 29 countries.
New initiatives for 2025 included a major partnership with the Galleries Association of Korea to bring 20 leading Korean galleries to EXPO Chicago, deepening the fair’s international reach and building on Chicago’s growing cultural ties to Korea, following the Art Institute of Chicago’s recent opening of a dedicated gallery for Korean art. The debut of CONTRAST, a new section, also expanded the fair’s curatorial scope. These were presented alongside the core Galleries sector; the EXPOSURE, PROFILE and IN/SITU sections; and a program of Special Exhibitions and Editions + Books.
Per usual, the /Dialogues stage brought together curators, artists, designers and arts professionals for panel discussions, forums and artistic discourse. A few of the /Dialogues events that took place this year were “Creative Voices: Fashion, Art, and Cultural Impact,” with Hebru Brantley and out artist Derrick Adams; “Im/Migration and Self-Taught Art in Chicago”; and “City in a Garden: Queer Art and Activism in Chicago,” which featured artists Edie Fake, Doug Ischar and Patric McCoy.
However, events did not just take place at Navy Pier. On April 25 at the Stony Island Arts Bank, renowned artist/professor Theaster Gates delivered “A Clay Sermon”—a 12-hour durational performance that showed him transforming the bank’s space into an active ceramics workshop through improvisational sonic responses and sermonic vignettes. The Bad Ass Cross Stitch talk and workshop took place at 21c Museum Hotel Chicago, in River North. “Beyond Basquiat,” complete with a panel and screening, took place at Three Cities Social, in Streeterville. And, celebrating movement, “Hedwig + The Bauhaus”—part of Hedwig Dances’ milestone 40th-anniversary season—was at Ruth Page Center, in the Gold Coast.
Photos of exhibit items by Andrew Davis
