“The Contest,” Clotilde Jiménez’s first solo exhibition at Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, featured eleven prodigiously sized collages and a quartet of bronze busts. Jiménez’s robust figurative oeuvre has consistently highlighted the intersectionality of queerness, blackness, class, religion, and Hispanic heritage. This show continued such investigations, but they were sifted through a more personal narrative: The artist described his presentation as an “open letter” to his formerly estranged father.

For the collages, Jiménez assembled a range of materials—including fabric, plastic, charcoal, and acrylic

This boldly maximalist group exhibition curated by Nigerian-born British fashion designer Duro Olowu was the first show at the museum organized by a noninstitutional curator. It included more than three hundred pieces by more than 250 artists (exceeding the number of works in the 2019 Venice Biennale), borrowed from more than sixty private and institutional Chicago-area collections. Installed salon style and organized into six loosely thematic sections, the show was broadly international in scope, with a focus on postwar and contemporary African and African-diasporic artists, most of them female