“I just really want to tell you this one thing” is the misleading title of Alberto Aguilar’s solo exhibition at the Cultural Center. One of the most reliably delightful artists on the Chicago scene for the past two decades, Aguilar actually has a lot to say about games and rules and translation and collaboration and signs. It’s fun to listen, and even more to figure out ways of playing along.
The show features art from two totally distinct periods in Aguilar’s career. Works made between 1997 and 2002 are conventional paintings. Work made between 2020 and 2026, like everything Aguilar has done since he gave up being a painter, is anything but.
It really doesn’t matter that his old canvases look mostly Picassoid and mediocre; they’re not here to be appreciated but as the first volley in a match of collaborative artmaking, which is how Aguilar now rolls. The game began when Aguilar invited 11 artists of his acquaintance to choose one of his old compositions and freely remake it. Standouts include Maria Burundarena’s disco photostatic twist on a quartet of blobby abstractions; Jooeun Kim’s exuberant explosion of a somewhat fussy found object construction and cubistic picture; and Cecilia Beaven’s animation of my favorite Aguilar, a Magrittesque kitchen scene rendered sketchy and tenebrous in Beaven’s impish hands.
A contribution from Jonas Mikosch Müller-Ahlheim not only plays the interpretation game well but also jazzes up a decidedly ponderous space. The Cultural Center’s 4th floor Exhibit Hall stands grand and dull; Müller-Ahlheim’s riff on Aguilar’s “Conversation” blows its cartoon eyes up into two giant paintings, hung high on either side of the gallery. This echoes a pair of permanent broken clock reliefs and, even better, turns the gallery into a monumental smiley face, the main entrance a mouth through which visitors stream like so much chatter.
Aguilar himself challenges the Exhibit Hall in ways that take their sweet time being noticed. Five hundred and forty-eight inches of grey felted rope, purchased at an estate sale, trace the entire perimeter of the gallery, following moldings, looping around doorways, climbing over temporary walls, and ending in an overlarge ball begging to be batted around. Sculptures whimsically assembled from chairs, lamps, and a filing cabinet pulled from Cultural Center storage get roped off by floor tape that cleverly extends the artworks themselves, upending standard museum practice while also sticking to it. Diagonals assert themselves everywhere, including a mural-size line of deconstructed hand-painted party hats picked up on a trip to Cuba.
The overall tone harmonizes with that of Aguilar’s practice generally: embrace goofiness and the stuff of daily life, go analog, work with who and what you’ve got, be smart and diligent but not too self-serious.
Aguilar’s many collaborations bear out these principles. A project undertaken during the COVID-19 quarantine consisted of him instructing his four kids to draw Dad from memory in one go, no retakes, and him doing the same, but with the added constraint that he sketch each child in the number of minutes equivalent to their age. Limits often add intrigue for makers.
Other portraits in the exhibition proceed alternately. Some emerge anonymously, like a wall filled with self-portraits left behind by students at the end of the semester at the college where Aguilar teaches; their enhanced interest arises from accumulation and rearrangement. Everything about “Instant Youth Mural (After Asco)” is knowing: at Centro Romero in Edgewater, Aguilar showed a group of teens the historic work of Asco and they decided to pose their own version of the Los Angeles Chicano collective’s most iconic piece — so they duct-taped themselves to a brick wall.
Work for hire fits here too. For “Familiar Forms,” Aguilar contracted Southwest Signs, a family-owned business near Midway Airport, to repaint his designs for faces composed of apostrophes, exclamation marks, zeros and other elements common to the handmade grocery store posters that are their specialty. Also created with Southwest Signs is a joint take on a trio of Mark Rothko color field paintings in the collection of the Art Institute. The result would not be out of place in a produce shop window, with the addition of the sale price for apples.
The Rothko remakes are instructive: Aguilar, unlike his predecessor, doesn’t do transcendence. He stays grounded firmly in everyday life but determines to somehow improve it. One means of doing so is figuring out how to make art daily, a useful approach being rules, common materials and brevity. “Hand-held works,” from a six-week period at the end of 2024, consists of 36 photographs of the artist’s left hand endlessly modified: with plant leaves, pairs of scissors, a badminton racket, an orange peel, coins, a ballpoint pen, etc. “Drawing in Passing,” from a one-month period in 2025, comprises super-simple drawings on white and yellow mini legal pad paper with pen, pencil, tape and scissors. These sometimes include their own instructions: MEASURE/ CUT/ ROTATE reads a sheet to which Aguilar has done just that.
Aguilar has been inventing these sorts of basic, accessible, potentially endless series for years. Like most of what he does, they display little virtuosity, but it turns out that virtuosity comes in forms sometimes unrecognizable from past eras of art history. Newer skillsets, of Aguilar’s mastery, help turn art into life and life into art, all of it the better for it. If Aguilar really wants to tell us one thing, I’d vote for that.
Lori Waxman is a freelance critic.
If you go
“Alberto Aguilar: I just really want to tell you this one thing” runs through Aug. 23 at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington St., free, 312-744-5000, chicago.gov