Chicago is alive with creativity – we pick three of the top design shows this summer.

Abigail Chang creates works informed by the interaction of material and detail. Her approach takes elements of material culture and the built environment to make conceptual statements that reflect on the current zeitgeist. Her recent ‘Skeuomorphic Screens’ installation explored the aperture-like qualities of screens as undervalued architectural components and her work has been shown at the Lisbon Architecture Triennale, the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism. Chang is currently visiting assistant professor at the University of Illinois Chicago College of Architecture, Design and the Arts, and this is her first show with the renowned Volume Gallery, which often works with architects developing object design.

“Jonathan Muecke’s rigorous practice and mind-bending objects challenge how we understand design as a creative discipline,” says Irene Sunwoo, Curator of Architecture and Design at the Art Institute of Chicago, “and at the same time encourages experimental display strategies that rethink what a design exhibition can be.” This exhibition surveys the designer’s most experimental pieces. Read the full Chicago Dispatch here.

The minimalist exhibition set-up adds a sense of mystery. The objects serve as invisible portals wherein one rethinks contemporary lives, challenging authenticity, values and the aesthetic and social aspects of material culture. Chang’s reflective surfaces affirm the viewer through their own reflection: When one moves, the reflection changes, pulling them into questions of perspective as they acknowledge the power to shape what we see. Turning the viewing process into a personal experience one cannot help but rethink issues of truth and illusion, beauty and vanity, confidence and skepticism—and ultimately the Self. Read the full review here.

Designer Jonathan Muecke thinks he is in the practice of making the same thing over and over again. It’s not true, of course, but his liminal objects — arcing textile sculptures that have no fixed function, chairs made from braided carbon tubes, a rock with holes — are unified by their oblique simplicity. Wyoming-born Muecke studied architecture at Iowa State University, interned at Herzog & de Meuron in Basel, Switzerland, and studied 3D design at the Cranbrook Academy of Art before establishing his own office in 2010. Most of his abstracted pieces are made entirely from one material, be it aluminum, carbon fiber, or stainless steel, and they’ve inspired a group of hyper-specific devotees. The 39-year-old currently shows with Maniera in Brussels and Volume Gallery in Chicago, not too far from the Art Institute of Chicago, which is currently staging his first major museum show until October 10, 2022. The exhibition consists of a selection of works that Muecke calls “open objects,” which investigate color’s shape, texture’s scale and the possibility of eliminating surfaces entirely. Read the full interview here.

Rising up from the atrium all the way to the third floor of the Wrightwood 659 gallery, “American Framing” fills the space with light-brown soft wood. The structure, previously by the U.S. Pavilion at the seventeenth International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2021), marks the first time this project will be seen in the United States. An exploration of the architecture of wood framing, the installation is a nod to the most common construction system in the States—a 2019 survey found wood is used in more than ninety-percent of new home construction, making it one of the country’s most important contributions to building practice. Read the full review of American Framing featuring Ania Jaworska and Norman Kelley here.