A new exhibition, sponsored by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, explores art inspired by the city's most famous recent resident. "Officially Unofficial: Inspired Art for Obama" is a multi-media display of prints, posters, photographs and videos that surfaced during the campaign—the artistic reaction to Obama's candidacy.

The show—curated by Chicago designer Scott Thomas, former Design Director of the Obama Campaign; Chicago artist Ray Noland; and Nathan Mason, Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs—will feature both materials designed officially for the campaign as well as the independent work created by artists and designers from across the country, including Ray Noland’s “GoTellMama!” poster series and Shepard Fairey’s controversial “Hope” poster.

The show opens April 1 at the Chicago Tourism Center, 72 E. Randolph Street, and runs through May 15. For more information, visit www.explorechicago.org.

The exhibition poster, "Officially Unofficial," above, was designed by exhibition co-curator Ray Noland.

Spring Break in New York City always sounds like a good idea, but now there's further encouragement for anyone who needs it: The Metropolitan Museum of Art's current exhibition "Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors." This is the first exhibition to focus entirely on the interiors and still lifes of the artist's later years, which he spent in Le Cannet, a village overlooking the Mediterranean Sea.

Featuring 80 paintings, drawings and watercolors, the show (on display through April 19) demonstrates the artist's position not so much as "the last Impressionist" as he once called himself, but as an early Modernist. From the museum's website: "... Bonnard transformed the rooms and objects that surrounded him into iridescent subjects, remarkable in color, light, and vision. Compelling metaphors for a range of sensations, the late paintings convey a disquieting effect. It is these luminous late interiors that define Bonnard’s modernism and prompt a reappraisal of his reputation in the history of 20th-century art."

According to Roberta Smith in her review in The New York Times: "While the Met show is a bit too uneven to make the case, it contains plenty of wonderful paintings that reveal the artist meditating on the nature of time, perception, memory and the ways and means of painting, while reviewing the glories of early modernism and tying up some of its loose ends. In addition, he brought back to Western painting a radiance of color little seen since the Sienese." Read the full review here.

Find out more about the exhibition and view an online gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's website.

[above] Pierre Bonnard (French, 1867-1947), The Table (1925, oil on canvas, 102.9 x 74.3 cm) Tate. Presented by the Courtauld Fund Trustees 1926. © Tate, London 2008
© 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris