CHICAGO, IL.- Two major exhibitions open today in Chicago at Wrightwood 659: Martin Wong: Chinatown USA, the first U.S. museum exhibition in nearly a decade devoted to the visionary artist Martin Wong (1946-1999); and Dispossessions in the Americas: The Extraction of Bodies, Land, and Heritage from La Conquista to the Present, an exhibition exploring the enduring legacy of colonization in the Americas. Both reflect Wrightwood 659’s mission to host exhibitions of socially engaged art and architecture that address issues facing LGBTQ+ communities, Asian art, and architecture. The exhibitions will be on view through July 18, 2026.



EXHIBITION OVERVIEWS

Martin Wong: Chinatown USA

The exhibition is the first to focus on Wong’s fascination with Asia through Chinatowns as personal, mythical cityscapes. Wong explored these spaces—filled with Asian art and architecture as adopted in the United States amid the explosion of street culture in San Francisco and New York in the late 20th century—as amalgams of memory, identity, and queer and pop-culture narratives.



Martin Wong: Chinatown USA is curated by Yasufumi Nakamori, PhD, with Ashley Janke, Assistant Curator, Wrightwood 659. The exhibition is presented by Halsted A&A Foundation.



The exhibition and its accompanying, fully illustrated publication take their title from the artist’s 1993 exhibition at the downtown Manhattan gallery P·P·O·W, which still represents the artist’s estate today. Only six years later, Wong died of an AIDS-related illness at the age of 53. Since then, his reputation has continued to grow as a queer painter and poet who traversed identities and sampled a dizzying array of cultural references. Critical attention, however, has largely focused on his paintings of the Lower East Side, and the artists, poets, and immigrants in this neighborhood. Far less recognized are the Chinatown- and Asia-inspired paintings, drawings, and sculptures he created throughout his career. Martin Wong: Chinatown USA positions these works as central to his hybrid practice.



Chinatown USA features more than 100 paintings, drawings, ceramic works, and photo collages, complemented by videos and artifacts, including pre-modern Asian objects collected by Wong. Several works reflect his interest in calligraphy, graffiti, and American Sign Language (ASL). A selection of works from his graffiti collection, on loan from the Museum of the City of New York, is also on view.



At the heart of the exhibition are paintings from Wong’s Chinatown USA series. Highlights include Chinese New Year’s Parade (1992-94), a near-psychedelic extravaganza depicting Wong as a small boy facing a tsunami of demons, a towering dragon, and Peking Opera performers. In Canal Street (1992), the pagoda-styled building at Canal and Centre Streets metamorphoses into a fantasia of calligraphed signs, red columns, green-tiled eaves, and an impossibly saturated blue sky.



A long-unseen painting, off view for nearly 40 years and on loan from The Broad Art Foundation in Los Angeles, will be featured in the exhibition. The 12-foot-wide Tai Ping Tien Kuo (Tai Ping Kuo) (1982) portrays the artist’s mother and stepfather—nude—in the center of a triptych echoing the format of a European religious altarpiece. The work exemplifies Wong’s practice of inserting himself, family members, and his friends into his art.



The accompanying 192-page hardcover publication, Martin Wong: Chinatown USA, is edited and introduced by Yasufumi Nakamori, and features six essays by Zully Adler, Margo Machida, Lydia Yee, Vivian Li, Lisa Hsiao Chen, and Mark Dean Johnson. The publication will be released on May 26, 2026, distributed by D.A.P. and published by Halsted A&A Foundation and Gregory R. Miller & Co. Retail: $55.



Dispossessions in the Americas: The Extraction of Bodies, Land, and Heritage from La Conquista to the Present

This exhibition brings together more than 40 works by 36 contemporary artists from across Latin America whose creative output broadly seeks to unsettle the long-standing politics of dispossession—the deprivation of land, culture, language, or all three. Featuring photographs, videos, installations, performances, sculptures, and paintings, all produced between 1960 and 2025, the exhibition examines the enduring legacies of colonialism, showing how dispossession continues to shape Indigenous, Afro-descendant, queer, and trans communities. Dispossessions in the Americas is curated by Jonathan D. Katz, Professor of Practice, History of Art and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, University of Pennsylvania (and curator of the recent blockbuster The First Homosexuals), and independent curator Eduardo Carrera R. The exhibition is presented by Alphawood Exhibitions.

From 2021 to 2024, 12 Latin American museums across 10 countries worked with local curators to present exhibitions as part of Dispossessions in the Americas, a transdisciplinary project combining research, teaching, and community engagement, led by the University of Pennsylvania with the support of the Mellon Foundation. The Wrightwood 659 exhibition is the final cumulative presentation of works from these exhibitions and includes bilingual text in English and Spanish.



Organized around three themes—territory, body, and cultural heritage—the exhibition explores how contemporary artists transform the substance and symbols of colonial power into practices of environmental care and embodied liberation. These works also present a new—and more accurate—relation to history, no longer told from the colonist’s perspective. They reveal hybrid connections among territory, gender, and ecology, with artists shaping interactions between bodies and the environment to rethink memory, identity, and relationships to the land.

Dispossessions in the Americas is accompanied by an off-site video art cycle, exploring how video art confronts the enmeshed histories of colonialism, ecological disruption, migration, and gendered resistance. Located just a few blocks from Wrightwood 659 at the Lincoln Park Presbyterian Church, this video cycle extends the exhibition beyond the gallery walls. On a bi-weekly schedule, beginning April 24, the program will run on Friday and Saturday afternoons. The purchase of a Wrightwood 659 exhibition ticket is necessary for admission. Artists in the video program include Las Nietas de Nono, Coco Fusco, Carolina Caycedo, Neyen Pailamilla, Arisleyda Dilone, Colectivo Tawna, Rio Parana, and Luiz Roque.

Featured exhibition artists include: Karina Aguilera Skvirsky, Archivo de la Memoria Trans, Carlos Arias, Felipe Baeza, Tania Bruguera, Saskia Calderón, Seba Calfuqueo, Javier Cardona Otero, Colectivo Ayllu, Colectivo Tawna, Wilson Díaz, Frau Diamanda / Héctor Acuña, Augusto Falconi, Regina José Galindo, Ani Ganzala, Frank Gaudlitz, Camilo Godoy, Thomas Locke Hobbs, Rember Yahuarcani, Deborah Anzinger, Madorilyn Crawford, Miguel Ángel Rojas, Lizette Nin, Ana Mendieta, Joiri Minaya, Lulu Molinares, Laryssa Machada, Cinthia Marcelle, Carlos Martiel, Purita Pelayo, Kiván Quiñones, Tania Bruguera, Deborah Thomas, Gihan Tubbeh, Javi Vargas Sotomayor, Antonio Wong Rengifo, and Luis Fernando Zapata.