Utopia, as a notion, allows us to adopt perspectives outside of convention, to imagine alternate ways of being. A popular motif for such speculative worlds has been the garden, drawing parallels to the idyllic world humans first inhabited, Eden. Similarly, the garden has also been a popular symbol for imagining the possibilities of a queer world, like British artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage. For Jarman, the garden in Dungeness was inherently queer, for it took up space and thrived despite his terminal diagnosis of AIDS, asserting its presence in a world that refused to recognise his sexuality. Playing on this idea of the garden as a utopian space and a fertile place for queer possibilities, City in a Garden: Queer Art and Activism in Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA) dwells on the city's "essential yet often overlooked role in the stories of queer art and activism". The title itself, while playing on the image of the garden, is meant to draw on Chicago’s official motto, Urbs in Horto, meaning “city in a garden”.

The showcase hopes to highlight the political connotations of space, how queer bodies are often denied access to certain amenities or opportunities, how they continue to be rendered invisible by institutional barricades and political rhetoric. Dwelling on the spatial connotations of the showcase and emphasising its political dimensions, assistant curator at the museum, Jack Schneider, notes to STIR, "Throughout the exhibition we see how queer people in Chicago created a network of semi-clandestine spaces for themselves, amounting to a sort of parallel society within the city. This was, of course, done out of necessity, as a response to mainstream society being relatively inhospitable to queer people." These spaces are reflected in the five thematic sections for the exhibition: ’Garden’, ‘Club’, ‘Street’, ‘Cinema’ and ‘Utopia’.

The show takes the 1980s as its starting point because—as the curators note in the official release—it was around this time that political organisation and activism for LGBTQIA+ rights was most pronounced in public spaces (owing to the onset of the AIDS crisis). The showcase includes works from the MCA Collection and key loans from local collections, amounting to over 30 artists and collectives who address the show’s themes through diverse media and methods. “One throughline in the exhibition is artworks that address particular spaces and places in the city," Schneider notes, with works ranging from documentary photographs of clandestine queer spaces, sculptures that challenge normative depictions of gender and sexuality, drawings, paintings, and videos that explore the multiplicities of queerness, and archival materials depicting activist organisations.

The theme of reconfiguring and reimaging how space is understood and used, of asserting presence where it is denied, is critical, not only as a historical record of queer expression, but to remind audiences of the present moment in the US. The show offers notable critique to the present federal government and its zealous denial of the existence of queer bodies, in discontinuing funding to organisations that fight for the rights of marginalised communities and limiting access to healthcare. “Then, as now, healthcare is the bellwether of bigotry. In the 1980s, state and societal responses, or lack thereof, to HIV/AIDS plainly revealed the homophobia deeply entrenched throughout the US…In 2024, legislators across the country introduced 674 bills to limit trans people’s access to healthcare, legal recognition and ability to exist publicly. 2025 is set to far exceed this tally, with nearly 1000 such bills introduced so far this year," Schneider recounts to STIR, emphasising why cultural institutions like the MCA need to continue advocating for queer rights.

For the current showcase, which remains open to the public till May 31, 2026, the art museum commissioned the American artist Edie Fake to create a new mural, The Free Clinic for Gender Affirming Care, that reflects on the anti-trans political climate of the country. As Schneider describes in conversation, the work pictures the kaleidoscopic facade of an imaginary clinic for free transgender healthcare with overlapping architectural motifs. He also shares a quote from Fake about why the mural is so important to them, “In my own life, access to gender affirming care has been hard-won and life-changing . . . this mural is meant to meet the threat (and often reality) that has positioned gender affirming care as scarce, under-resourced, and underground with an aspirational and celebratory vision.”

Queerness has always had to assert itself surreptitiously in a built environment that has only considered heteronormative lives and is based on binary definitions of gender. As many queer artists have sought to show us, space is pluralistic and, in an inclusive world, cannot conform to rigid categories. For instance, Amina Ross’s video artwork Man’s Country (2021) portrays Chicago’s longest-running gay bathhouse, also called Man’s Country, which opened in 1973. While Ross lived on the same block as the bathhouse, they never entered due to its “men only” admission policy. Hence, Ross’ reconstruction of the space is based on photos and footage available online. The structure breaks down as the video progresses, reflecting the dissolution of its real-life counterpart, which shut down in 2018. We could put Ross’ film in dialogue with photographer Doug Ischar’s series Marginal Waters, in which he photographed people at the Belmont Rocks, a set of limestone slabs along the northside Lake Michigan shorefront that queer people collectively claimed as a gay beach from the 1960s through the 1990s.

Schneider reflects on how Ischar used his artwork to create durable documents of a queer scene he worried would cease to exist. And indeed, the Belmont Rocks were eventually destroyed as part of a shoreline revetment project in 2003. Queerness must often operate out of this condition of ephemerality. A sense of loss, especially given the show’s starting point with the AIDS crisis, pervades the galleries. Frederic Moffet’s film The Magic Hedge (2016) documents Montrose Point Bird Sanctuary—a Cold War–era missile facility intended to protect Chicago from Soviet nuclear attack that the city repurposed as a public park in the 1970s. This park would then be turned into a cruising spot colloquially known as “The Magic Hedge”. Moffet’s video addresses the park’s eclectic history while showing how forces of desire, passion, paranoia and violence unexpectedly mingle in this otherwise tranquil landscape.

While the more visible forms of activism, resistance and political campaigning are apparent in the sections that dwell on the Garden and the Street, what’s also worth noting is how the thematic sections like the Cinema or Club, or even Utopia, are synonymous with the idea of joy and pleasure. The ‘Street’ section, for instance, feels almost tactile, with posters, campaign slogans and photographs depicting different activist movements in the city over the years, such as paraphernalia from the ACT UP organisation in Chicago, or images by Diane Solis who photographed activists and even magazine covers of queer publications like Thing Magazine. To assert space for yourself is grimy work, but it also requires solidarity. It requires submitting to joy to be resolutely oneself. This is best depicted by the photographs of clandestine gay bars and pleasure clubs in the ‘Club’ section of the exhibition, for instance, the photographs of Luis Medina, which are on display. To put images of queer pleasure on display in an institution like the MCA is its own form of assertion.

In displaying both the sullied and the beautiful, the strenuous and the joyful, the exhibition makes a resolute claim to ephemeral realities which have always persisted. As Schneider highlights, "Throughout the exhibition, we see how artists and activists responded to the social, political, and at times existential challenges queer people faced…City in a Garden is not exclusively historical; it addresses our current moment, and, hopefully, provides inspiration for ways we can move forward together." The only way to continue being in this world that increasingly denies one’s queerness, it seems, is to make yourself visible.

‘City in a Garden: Queer Art and Activism in Chicago’ will be on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago from July 5, 2025 - May 31, 2026.