“Big Picture: A New View of Painting in Chicago” at Chicago History Museum

The Chicago History Museum was an unlikely venue for hosting the best art exhibit this year, but the museum’s context hammered home the show’s theme—paintings can tell the history of Chicago, from urban planning and political satire, in styles realist, Imagist and all points in between. Curators John Corbett and Jim Dempsey dug deep into the historical archive, exhibiting such rarely seen gems as a mural from the glory-hole days at Gold Coast—one of the city’s earliest gay leather bars—and gave privileged views to the backs of some paintings, revealing secret inscriptions.

Audience choice:
Jeff Koons at MCA

Best of Chicago 2008

Jeff Koons at the MCA

This year’s Koons retrospective was a major coup for the MCA, generating attendance records while gaining the near-universal respect of the New York media, who had to travel to Chicago to see this important show, since it was not traveling. But it wowed more than the art cognoscenti, as visitors got to duck behind a warning sign to view a “peep show” of sorts in the brazenly graphic work Koons made for his “Made in Heaven” series, which featured the artist and his porn-star then-wife in various states of hard-core action.

Best of Chicago 2008