From the Center: Looking at Lucy Lippard at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago turns the institution’s stairwell galleries into a survey of one of the most influential critical voices in postwar art. On view from August 1, 2026, to July 11, 2027, the three-floor installation traces how Lucy Lippard’s writing, exhibitions and activism shaped contemporary art across more than six decades.
Lippard’s impact reaches far beyond criticism. Her landmark publications, including Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art, Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory and Mixed Blessings: New Art in Multicultural America, helped define debates around Conceptual art, feminism, land art and the politics of representation. Her exhibitions, among them Eccentric Abstraction, Twenty-Six Contemporary Women Artists and the “Numbers” series, became reference points for later curators and artists alike.
The MCA exhibition draws primarily from the museum’s collection and organizes its material around themes that recur in Lippard’s work: women artists and Minimalism, cultural work and activism, and land, borders and territory. The structure gives the show a clear argumentative line while also reflecting the range of artists she studied, championed or helped bring into view. Names such as Howardena Pindell, Adrian Piper, Barbara Kruger, Ana Mendieta, Zarina Bhimji, Dawoud Bey and Sky Hopinka point to the breadth of that influence.
What gives the exhibition its force is the way it treats Lippard not as a single historical figure, but as a force inside multiple histories at once. Her writing linked art to politics without reducing either to slogans, and her curatorial work helped widen institutional space for women artists and artists of color. Installed across the museum’s second, third and fourth floors, the exhibition reads as both archive and argument, showing how ideas move through exhibitions, publications and generations.
Organized by Jamillah James and Korina Hernandez, the presentation places Lippard’s legacy at the center of a larger conversation about who gets written into art history, and who changes its terms.
Image: Ana Mendieta, Untitled: Silueta Series, Mexico, 1973/1991. Silver dye-bleach print; sheet for parts 1, 6, 9, 10: 15 7/8 × 19 7/8 in. (40.3 × 50.5 cm); sheet for parts 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 11, 12: 19 7/8 × 15 7/8 in. (50.5 × 40.3 cm). Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Gift from The Howard and Donna Stone Collection, 2002.46.7. © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection. Courtesy of Galerie Lelong, New York. Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago.
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