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 grow. To affirm one another. To remember that we belong to something larger than ourselves. To be human is to create with intention and to shape the world.

There is a force within this exchange that cannot be measured, yet is unmistakably real. Like gravity of the spirit, love moves beyond dimension and distance. It connects what is separated and gives meaning to what we choose to create.

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.

The University of Illinois, Chicago’s Data Visualization Lab, under the direction of Daria Tsoupikova, Scientific visualization transforms complex data into images that reveal structure, motion, and meaning, allowing us to see phenomena that would otherwise remain hidden. Where Data Becomes Light celebrates the beauty of science with sweeping animations and vivid imagery, turning numbers and signals into images that illuminate how we understand the world. The experience opens a luminous window into discovery that reveals beauty in motion across cosmology, climate science, biomedical research, materials discovery, physics, chemistry, and artificial intelligence.

This project is a collaboration between Argonne National Laboratory and the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois Chicago, building on Chicago’s long-standing leadership in transforming complex scientific data into powerful visual experiences. The result is a journey that invites viewers to encounter science as a visual experience, revealing the hidden structures and patterns that shape our universe. https://udv.lab.uic.edu/

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

The Pride projection, on view annually, turns THE MART façade into a rainbow of colors and images to celebrate June, International Pride month.

Celebrate Independence Day on the Riverwalk with our red, white, and blue special display and soundtrack of classic American jazz, bandstand hits, and marches. The display airs Thursday, July 2 through Sunday, July 5 at 9pm.

The Joffrey Ballet’s
Nutcracker allows visitors along Chicago’s Riverwalk to experience scenes from the holiday classic set to Tchaikovsky’s famous score. Representing the innovation, ingenuity, and hope of Chicago, the production features the work of Tony Award-winning choreographer Christopher Wheeldon.

Nutcracker 26-27 Season