Oct 3, 2026–Mar 14, 2027

Exhibition

Tony Cokes works with appropriated text from various sources, including popular music, mass media, and historical and theoretical writing, and remixes it into video, signs, lightboxes, and billboards.

Composed of vibrant colors and often set to music, Cokes’s work subverts the language that shapes contemporary life and culture to draw out new meanings and sensations. 

For his first public outdoor presentation in Chicago, Cokes presents a two-part installation on the Art Institute’s Bluhm Family Terrace. The terrace windows facing Millennium Park become a billboard—viewable from across the street and the park below—with the phrase “Let yourself be free,” drawn from Aretha Franklin’s 1968 recording of “Think.” Franklin frequently visited and sang in Chicago with her father, a prominent pastor and civil rights leader, and it was here that she earned her lifelong title, the Queen of Soul, originally coined by Chicago DJ Pervis Spann at the Regal Theater in Bronzeville in May 1964.

The presentation also includes one of Cokes’s freestanding signs, reading “We don’t have the freedom to be bored anymore,” and “There’s a set of forces that want us to be permanently anxious.” Both sentences are from the English cultural theorist Mark Fisher. Together, they question the meaning of freedom in a present defined by rapid technological change and the erosion of private life.

Music is central to Cokes’s practice, and the installation is accordingly accompanied by a soundtrack of songs Cokes chose to resonate with Chicago and the theme of freedom and is audible on the terrace during museum hours.

Despite these themes and sources, Cokes’s works resist settling into a single interpretation. As he has said, “I try to take that exploratory relation to the materials that I’m working with, and I also expect viewers to, I suppose. I hope viewers can do the same as opposed to feeling like they have something to figure out.” Rather than directing viewers toward a fixed conclusion, Cokes creates spaces in which words, music, color, and cultural memory can remain in motion.

Tony Cokes: On Boredom is curated by Giampaolo Bianconi, Dittmer Associate Curator, Modern and Contemporary Art.

Sponsors

This exhibition is organized by the Art Institute of Chicago with major funding from the Bluhm Family Endowment Fund, which supports exhibitions of modern and contemporary sculpture.