LGBT history from the mid-1980s to the present.
City in a Garden: Queer Art and Activism in Chicago is an intergenerational group exhibition that highlights Chicago’s essential, yet often under-acknowledged, role in the story of queer art and activism.
The exhibition includes a display of THING magazine as it examines LGBTQ history from the mid-1980s, when activists radically mobilized in response to the US government’s disastrous handling of the AIDS crisis.
In this moment of change, activists reclaimed the historically pejorative epithet “queer” as a liberatory term, encompassing all who purposefully deviate from heteronormative society. Drawn from the MCA’s collection and other local collections, City in a Garden follows this paradigm shift in LGBTQ+ history by bringing together work from over 30 artists and collectives working in Chicago from the 1980s to the present.
These artists address queerness through diverse media and methods: documenting clandestine queer spaces in photographs, creating sculptures that challenge normative depictions of gender and sexuality, and exploring queer intimacy through drawings, paintings, and videos.
The exhibition takes its title from Chicago’s official motto, Urbs in Horto, which translates to “city in a garden.” In the context of this presentation, this motto speaks to the exhibited artists’ and activists’ utopian visions of a metropolitan sanctuary for people of all races, genders, and sexualities. As queer people continue to fight for their lives and livelihoods under ongoing and renewed political threats, these visions remain as urgent today as ever.
The exhibition will be on display in the Sylvia Neil & Daniel Fischel Galleries from July 5, 2025 through May 31, 2026.
The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago is located downtown at 220 E. Chicago Ave. Find more details about the exhibit at visit.mcachicago.org/exhibitions/city-in-a-garden-queer-art-and-activism-in-chicago.