Whenever I’ve been lucky enough to see Ruby Sky Stiler’s work in person, I’ve come away thinking about the idea of the material metaphor. By this I mean something like the collapse of subject and content into form and expression; a mode in which the meaning of a work inheres in the material itself and how it is used by the artist, as opposed to one in which material is subservient to expression.

Philosophers’ Clambake brings together 14 paintings by Katherine Bradford, all made over the past 12 years.

Neither symbolic nor literal, Shore’s emerald forms seem to hover outside of time and space, occupying an elusive realm where illusionism and geometric abstraction merge in a dynamic but uneasy tension.

Aguiñiga is a staunch advocate for the power of interdisciplinary artmaking to facilitate the exchange of ideas about the borderlands and challenge zeitgeist narratives.

With delicate ceramic body fragments on armatures of steel and stone, Phillips beckons viewers into an ambiguous physical and psychological space, where agency and desire meet subjugation and violence.

In the more than 70 works by Tetsuya Ishida now on view at Chicago’s Wrightwood 659, the late Japanese artist offers anxious visions of the individual within consumer capitalism. The haunting, darkly fantastical paintings depict men flayed, devoured, and exploited by industrial manufacturing and the fruits of its production.

A disquieting energy pulses with low-grade intensity throughout Liz Magor’s exhibition Blowout, co-organized by the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard and on view at the University of Chicago’s Renaissance Society.

The scale, calm, and quietude of Daniel G. Baird's second solo exhibition at PATRON Gallery are befitting of its title: murmur. Indeed, the prevailing features of the installation are its dimness and the burbling hum of tiny fountains.

The Codex Fejérváry-Mayer, a pre-Columbian manuscript depicting the tōnalpōhualli, is currently held by the World Museum, Liverpool. Drawing inspiration from this rare, lushly detailed and hand-colored document, Castillo Deball has orchestrated a material and spatial reinstantiation of the tōnalpōhualli.

In part of Postcommodity’s takeover of Art in General’s new Dumbo space, a single photograph hangs at the end of a long gallery, spotlit and seemingly suspended in darkness.

Beverly Buchanan isn’t exactly an art world unknown. In 1981, the Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta included three of Buchanan’s cast concrete sculptures in Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States at the all-female cooperative A.I.R. Gallery.