Dancing the Revolution: From Dancehall to Reggaetón is a major exhibition that explores and expands the visual, political, and spiritual histories of dancehall and reggaetón through contemporary art—two dynamic genres that have transcended their grassroots origins to shape global culture. From Kingston to San Juan through Panama, New York City, and London, Dancing the Revolution positions music and dance as a revolutionary practice for collective liberation rooted in the struggle against colonial oppression.
Presenting work across varied mediums, Dancing the Revolution includes painting, sound sculptures, installations, photographs, and video, showcasing how artists have been and continue to be inspired by these histories and the visual forms that emerge from them. The exhibition features more than forty contemporary artists, including Isaac Julien, Edra Soto, Alberta Whittle, Carolina Caycedo, and Lee “Scratch” Perry. A special commissioned mixtape project by Juan Rivera invites visitors to learn about the evolution of these popular genres in Panama and hear the iconic songs that have paved the way for the global phenomenon of reggaetón.
Chicago Works | Mike Cloud: Worldless Obstruction, Saturday, May 02, 2026–Sunday, Feb 07, 2027
For over two decades, Mike Cloud (b. 1974, Chicago, IL; lives in Chicago) has created symbolically loaded paintings that play with viewers’ intuitions. While his artworks’ shapes and forms have immediate associations—a Star of David, a teepee, an arrow, and more—Cloud decontextualizes these symbols, connecting them to many possible meanings. In doing so, he responds to art historical framings of abstract painting as pure, apolitical, and pristine, emphasizing instead that paintings are objects that circulate in systems of commodities, personal experiences, and language.
In this exhibition, the MCA presents new paintings by Cloud that incorporate recent developments in his practice: emojis, hinges, and the shape of an “X.” Cloud uses these elements to juxtapose emotions and introduce a flexible structure to his foldable paintings, which will be installed in various configurations on the walls and floors of the gallery. Referencing barricades and obstructions, these sculptural paintings resist straightforward interpretation and invite viewers to forge unexpected connections between form and meaning.
Atrium Project: Celeste Rapone, Saturday, Jun 27, 2026–Sunday, Jun 20, 2027
The MCA’s Atrium Project invites artists from all points in their careers to respond to the museum’s bright, two-story entrance through a new large-scale work. In the latest iteration of the series, painter Celeste Rapone presents Sideline (After Ben Shahn) (2025).
Rapone is an artist whose work centers intimacy, nostalgia, and the anxieties of daily life in the contemporary world, particularly as experienced by women. Several visual hallmarks of her work, such as the flattening of space and figure and the use of muted color palettes, allow her to accentuate the psychological complexity of her figures and hint at their connections to art historical approaches to representing the female body. Sideline (After Ben Shahn) cites another painting, Men on a Bench (1940) by the social realist painter Ben Shahn (b. 1898, Kaunas, Lithuania; d. 1969, New York, NY), an artist who depicted scenes of American life from the Great Depression on. Rapone’s revisiting of the painting features a languid, seated group of four women, their oversized limbs entwined and indistinguishable, their faces gazing out in plaintive resignation. The viewer joins these four women, anticipating something which never reveals itself.
Kenzi Shiokava, Saturday, Jun 27, 2026–Sunday, Jan 31, 2027
For 50 years, Kenzi Shiokava’s sculptural practice revolved around a central preoccupation: the recovery and transformation of castoff materials. His studio—a cavernous warehouse in Compton and an artwork in and of itself—brimmed with items salvaged from secondhand stores, the street, and the shore: action figures, telephone poles, and driftwood among them, all awaiting reincarnation as wooden totems and assemblage. Through intuitive acts of carving and arranging, the artist unearthed what he described as the “inner movement” of everyday objects, revealing their spiritual vitality and reinvigorating them with life.
Kenzi Shiokava is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition, gathering over 50 sculptures made across five decades, from the 1970s to the 2010s. The presentation is anchored by two core bodies of work: abstract totems meticulously carved from wood and enigmatic box installations animated by toys, dried plants, and stones. The exhibition underscores the transcultural nature of Shiokava’s practice, which melds the aesthetic sensibilities of wood carving in Japan, assemblage in South Los Angeles, and multiple belief systems, including Candomblé, Catholicism, and Zen Buddhism. Deeply attuned to his materials, Shiokava allowed them to guide his sculptural process, which he compared to archeology—both patient practices of excavation, recovery, and revelation.
From the Center: Looking at Lucy Lippard, Saturday, Aug 01, 2026–Sunday, Jul 11, 2027
Spanning three floors, From the Center: Looking at Lucy Lippard explores the far-reaching impact of art historian, critic, and curator Lucy Lippard’s (b. 1937, New York, NY; lives in Galisteo, NM) writings, exhibitions, and activism on contemporary art over six decades. Her work has shaped major movements including Pop, Conceptual, feminist, and Land art, as well as the institutional representation of women artists and artists of color and consistently centered the intersection of art and politics. Her influence remains foundational for subsequent generations of curators, critics, and artists. Publications such as Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966–1972 (1973), which grew out of her earlier writing on Conceptual Art; From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art (1976); Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory (1983); and Mixed Blessings: New Art in Multicultural America (1990); as well as her exhibitions Eccentric Abstraction (1966), Twenty-Six Contemporary Women Artists (1971), and her “Numbers” series of exhibitions (1969–74) are considered landmark contributions to the field of contemporary art.
Organized primarily with works from the MCA Collection, each floor of the exhibition is inspired by select themes considered in her writings and history of exhibitions—women artists and the aesthetics of Minimalism and Conceptualism; cultural work and activism; and land, borders, and territory—featuring artists she curated, studied, or championed and later artists whose work engages with each theme.
Slow Dance, Saturday, Sep 12, 2026–Sunday, Mar 21, 2027
Slow Dance features six artists who use performance to reclaim forms of slowness that resist the contemporary demand to constantly perform, whether in the public sphere, on social media, or in the workplace.
The exhibition approaches performance in two registers: as an artistic medium rooted in the live presence of bodies, and as an economic imperative characterized by the pervasive demand for productivity, speed, and efficiency. At any given moment, we might respond to this imperative differently—it may inspire and motivate us, spur optimism or provoke anxiety, induce fatigue or provide fuel to keep going in spite of it all. Through gestures of suspension, inaction, and stillness, the artists in Slow Dance investigate the politics of the body’s labor and maintenance in the face of such incessant pressure.
Featuring works by Brendan Fernandes, Gordon Hall, Geumhyung Jeong, Carolyn Lazard, Melanie McLain, and Cally Spooner, this multidisciplinary exhibition includes painting, sculpture, video, and live performance. Focused on how bodies wear away and how they endure, these artists contend with the protracted economies of waiting, the near-constant obligation to compete in labor markets, and fatigue’s latent potential as a form of resistance. While exploring conditions of failure, breakdown, or exhaustion, these artists model new modes of reciprocity, intimacy, and connection that challenge the weathering effects of our contemporary imperative to perform.
