With over fifty built projects across the world, David Adjaye is rapidly emerging as a major international figure in architecture and design. Capturing a significant moment in Adjaye's career, this exhibition spans projects from furniture and housing to public buildings and master plans, and features drawings, sketches, models, and building mock-ups. In addition, a specially commissioned film featuring interviews with Adjaye's collaborators—including an international roster of artists, the exhibition curators, and other influential figures in the art world—helps bring the projects alive and makes clear the important role that Adjaye plays in contemporary architecture today.

Zoë Ryan is the John H. Bryan Chair and curator of architecture and design at the Art Institute of Chicago. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to her work, Ryan's recent exhibitions include Building: Inside Studio Gang Architects (2012), the first survey exhibition of the Chicago-based architecture practice; Fashioning the Object: Bless, Boudicca, and Sandra Backlund (2012), which investigates the construction of narratives in fashion design; Bertrand Goldberg: Architecture of Invention (2011), a major retrospective of the iconic Chicago architect; Hyperlinks: Architecture and Design (2010), an international survey exploring interdisciplinary practices in architecture and design; Konstantin Grcic: Decisive Design (2009), the first solo exhibition of the work of this important industrial designer; and Graphic Thought Facility: Resourceful Design (2008), the first solo show of the work of the eponymous London-based studio. In 2014, Ryan was curator of the Istanbul Design Biennial, The Future is Not What it Used to Be.

Born in Nigeria in 1963, Okwui Enwezor is a curator, art critic, editor, and writer; since 2011 he has been the director of the Haus der Kunst in Munich. He was artistic director of the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale in South Africa (1996–98), documenta 11 in Kassel, Germany (1998–2002), the Bienal Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo de Sevilla in Spain (2005–07), the 7th Gwangju Biennale in South Korea (2008), and of the Triennal d’Art Contemporain of Paris at the Palais de Tokyo (2012). Enwezor’s wide-ranging practice spans the world of international exhibitions, museums, academia, and publishing. In 1994 he founded NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art published by Duke University Press. He is the author of Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art (Steidl/ICP, 2008) and numerous other books and essays.

Founded in 1879, the Art Institute of Chicago collects, preserves, and interprets works of art of the highest quality, representing the world's diverse artistic traditions, for the inspiration and education of the public and in accordance with our profession's highest ethical standards and practices.