Museums matter, but what happens outside of the museum arguably matters a lot more. Art for the people, by the people, where the people are is the Guiding force of the present. The fourth edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennale, “The Available City”, recognized this by dispersing its interventions throughout the city, mainly in the southern and western neighborhoods, by organizing workshops and exhibitions in the same places. where his ideas on redesigning public space are supposed to impact. Meanwhile, monuments, works of art that traditionally occupy parks and squares, continued to be a flashpoint. A pair of fabulous feminist history frescoes commissioned for the Wabash Arts Corridor were due to be installed this year; one was blocked by a parking lot owner who refused to rent the spaces needed to access the paint wall because he did not approve of the design, a colorful take on the vice president’s famous replica Kamala Harris: “I speak”. At the Cultural Center, artist Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford unveiled a series of witty new memorials, in homage to the clumsiness of smartphones in trouser pockets and the heavy monstrosity of contemporary navigation. The National Monument Audit, released this fall, provided solid searchable data on the predominantly white, male, martial, and distorted nature of the American memorial landscape. This can only benefit the ongoing debates among communities, activists, academics, artists and politicians – including at the Chicago Monuments Project, a panel of advisers assembled to examine the city’s public sculptures and recommend all solutions. needed, a program that was supposed to end last year. but necessarily extended by Mayor Lori Lightfoot.