CHICAGO, IL.- The Art Institute of Chicago announced Charles Gaines: Night/Crimes, on view August 9, 2025 through February 1, 2026. The exhibition focuses on a series of works Charles Gaines created from 1994 to 1997, in which he paired archival photographs of violent crime scenes, victims, and indicted murderers with images of constellations that could have been seen in the night sky when the crimes occurred. This is the first museum exhibition of the Night/Crimes series since it was first shown thirty years ago.

Since the 1970s, Gaines has worked with numeric systems and repeating visual structures to investigate representation. His areas of focus have ranged from race theory and language theory to objects in the natural world.

Each pair of photographs in this exhibition has a location and date of the crime written on the Plexiglass covering. The works also include the astronomical position of the pictured constellation, and a date 50 years after the date of the crime. The future dates Gaines etched into each of the works have mostly passed, inviting a new consideration of the 50-year arc of history that the series addresses. Gaines is also revisiting the series and has made two new Night/Crimes works for this presentation that focus on Chicago.

“Viewers will be challenged to think critically about how narratives are formed based on the images we consume. By pairing images of the aftermath of violence with the night sky, the works invite a consideration of lofty topics such as justice and fate, without providing easy conclusions,” said Grace Deveney, David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg Associate Curator, Photography and Media. “Gaines’ works are truly complex, and put the viewer in the position of making meaning and posing questions about the relationship between chaos and order, as well as violence and history.

On Sept. 18, in conjunction with this exhibition, the performance version of Gaines’s Manifestos 4 will be presented by an ensemble of seven musicians—a woodwind quintet, a pianist, and a tenor—in the museum’s Rubloff Auditorium, following a brief conversation between the artist and curator about this work and its connection to Night/Crimes.

Charles Gaines: Night/Crimes is curated by Grace Deveney, David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg Associate Curator, Photography and Media.