For his exhibition here, Matthew Metzger covered the entire gallery floor with oriented strand board, or OSB. The feat was impressive, but not the first thing you noticed. What immediately drew attention were the soaring upper walls across from the entrance, which ascend at a steep incline to the gallery’s ceiling. On their surfaces, the artist had painted two large geometric shapes, parts of the red-and-white “diver down” symbol displayed on boats when a scuba diver is swimming nearby. Pitching forward as they rose, the shapes loomed imperiously over the viewer.

Metzger is a painter who toggles

Jeffrey Gibson’s “Sweet Bitter Love” no doubt unsettled some viewers’ preconceived notions about Native Americans. The show was part of “Toward Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and the MacArthur Fellows Program at 40,” a multivenue citywide celebration of the anniversary of the “genius grant,” which Gibson won in 2019 (the MacArthur Foundation is headquartered in Chicago). Visitors found a dozen small oil canvases from the Newberry Library’s permanent collection, skillfully painted between 1897 and 1901 by Elbridge Ayer Burbank, that portray indigenous Americans looking exactly as they are