CHICAGO, IL.- The Art Institute of Chicago announces Jane Alexander: Infantry with beast on view November 15, 2025 through January 12, 2026. This powerful installation has never been seen in Chicago and is making its first appearance in the United States in more than a dozen years.

Infantry (2008-10) consists of 27 dog-headed human-like figures, diminutively sized at under five feet tall. The fearsome figures form a mottled grey phalanx marching with placid menace along a parade carpet of military red. In a feature unique to the Art Institute presentation, this carpet stretches 90 feet long and suggests an immense show of force. The formation advances toward beast (2003), a smaller creature crouched at the far end of the carpet and hunched in an expectant snarl.

The dog-headed Infantry figures all gaze blankly upward and to the right, appearing to be awaiting orders. Visitors will encounter the piece from behind and then walk past the marching Infantry on the right-hand side, positioning them as the unseen commander.

“With great artistry, Jane Alexander pulls us into scenes and situations we might otherwise not want to think about, let alone encounter firsthand,” said Matthew Witkovsky, Richard and Ellen Sandor Chair and Curator, Photography and Media, and vice president for strategic art initiatives. “Through her impeccable sense of placement and allegory, Alexander helps us to see our own relationship to difficult human relations more clearly and ask better questions of ourselves and one another.”

Jane Alexander came to prominence in 1991 with Butcher Boys, an iconic response to apartheid in South Africa. For decades her unsettling, lifelike sculpture installations have dramatized human experiences around coercion, violence, and widespread suffering. In a sweeping essay on Alexander’s work, written in 2013 just at the time that Infantry with beast was first exhibited in its present arrangement, art historian and writer Kobena Mercer used the perceptive term “humanimals” to underscore the uniquely disturbing qualities of Alexander’s creations, which act simultaneously to captivate and confound.

Jane Alexander: Infantry with beast is organized by Matthew Witkovsky, Richard and Ellen Sandor Chair and Curator, Photography and Media, and vice president for strategic art initiatives.