Expo Chicago spotlight

Chicago’s art fair is inside Navy Pier, but the real flex this week is that visitors are being told to leave it. ARTnews published a six-stop after-hours map through museums and galleries across the city just as Expo Chicago opened on April 9 and runs through April 12. (artnews.com) (expochicago.com) That says something about the fair itself. Expo Chicago is back for its 2026 edition at Navy Pier with more than 130 galleries, and local coverage says the floor is smaller than last year’s nearly 200-booth version after Frieze bought the fair in 2023 and new director Kate Sierzputowski reshaped it. (choosechicago.com) (chicago.suntimes.com) The off-site list starts with a show that does not even open until April 14. The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s “Dancing the Revolution: From Dancehall to Reggaetón” brings together more than 40 artists and treats Caribbean music scenes as political history, not nightclub wallpaper. (artnews.com) (mcachicago.org) Another stop is GRAY’s Roger Brown show, “Weathervane,” which runs in Chicago through June 13. Brown was one of the best-known Chicago Imagists, and GRAY says the exhibition pulls together 11 paintings from the 1980s and 1990s where city skylines and storm systems feel like they are arguing with each other. (artnews.com) (richardgraygallery.com) The university museums are in the mix too. The Smart Museum of Art is currently showing “Composing Color: Paintings by Alma Thomas,” on view from March 24 through July 5, while the Renaissance Society’s current exhibition, Leah Ke Yi Zheng’s “Change, I Ching (64 Paintings),” runs through April 12. (smartmuseum.uchicago.edu) (renaissancesociety.org) That spread matters because Expo week in Chicago works less like a convention and more like a citywide relay race. ARTnews framed its picks around stops from the Art Institute of Chicago to the Museum of Contemporary Art and university spaces, while local guides are also steering visitors into neighborhood galleries far from the fair floor. (artnews.com) (blockclubchicago.org) The fair is also giving collectors easy booth-level talking points. Arcadia Contemporary is showing Aron Wiesenfeld’s 2023 painting “Sheltered,” an oil on panel measuring 24 by 35 inches, and Adegbola Gallery’s Expo presentation revisits the Zaria Art Society, the Nigerian group founded in 1958 that pushed back against colonial art-school models. (arcadiacontemporary.com) (adegbola.com) Chicago has been trying to turn that booth traffic into something bigger than four days of sales. More than 35,000 people attended the 2025 edition, and 2026 programming includes an Obama Presidential Center tie-in called “Embodiment,” curated by the center’s museum director Louise Bernard before the center’s anticipated opening later this year. (artnews.com) (chicagogallerynews.com) So the pitch to visiting collectors is simple: do the laps at Navy Pier, then get in a car. In Chicago this week, the fair is the lobby, and the city is the main exhibition. (expochicago.com) (artnews.com)