Image: MCA Chicago
The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago is presenting 'City in a Garden: Queer Art and Activism in Chicago', an intergenerational group exhibition that draws attention to the city’s long, often underacknowledged role in queer art and activism. The exhibition opened on July 5, 2025, and is scheduled to remain on view through August 16, 2026, in the Sylvia Neil and Daniel Fischel Galleries at MCA Chicago.
According to the museum, the exhibition brings together work by more than 30 artists and collectives from Chicago spanning the 1980s to the present. It is drawn from the MCA’s collection and other local collections, and it traces a history shaped in part by the mid-1980s, when activists responded to the U.S. government’s handling of the AIDS crisis. The exhibition frames that period as a moment when the word “queer” was reclaimed as a liberatory term that could encompass all who deliberately deviate from heteronormative society.
The exhibition’s organizing idea is as much social and political as it is artistic. MCA says the artists included in 'City in a Garden' address queerness through a range of media and methods: documenting clandestine queer spaces in photographs, creating sculptures that challenge normative ideas of gender and sexuality, and exploring queer intimacy through drawings, paintings, and videos. Archival materials are also part of the presentation, including materials related to groups that combine artistic practice with activism.
The show takes its title from Chicago’s official motto, Urbs in Horto, or “city in a garden.” In the context of the exhibition, the museum says that motto points to utopian visions of a metropolitan sanctuary for people of all races, genders and sexualities. The exhibition text explicitly connects those visions to the present, noting that queer people continue to fight for their lives and livelihoods under ongoing and renewed political threats.
MCA Chicago identifies Jack Schneider, Assistant Curator, and Korina Hernandez, Curatorial Assistant, as the exhibition’s curators. The museum’s exhibition page also notes related programming and associated content, including a curatorial essay, an audio feature with select artists, and transcripts of select sound-based works in English and Spanish.
The exhibition’s installation images and object list underscore its range across media and generations. Among the works highlighted on the exhibition page are Nick Cave’s 'Soundsuit' (2008), Robert Lostutter’s 'Forktailed Wood Nymph and Ruby-Topaz Hummingbird' (1982), and Roger Brown’s 'Steve With The Head of Goliath' (1985). Together with the broader checklist of artists and collectives, those works situate 'City in a Garden' as a survey of Chicago-based queer expression and organizing that spans nearly four decades, with the exhibition continuing at MCA Chicago through August 16, 2026.
