Timing is everything.

“Elizabeth Catlett: ‘A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies,’” a remarkably bracing new exhibit stuffed with politics and activism and fascism and standing up for everyday laborers and educators, arrives at the Art Institute of Chicago in a cultural hailstorm. It’s been planned for years, and yet, it’s impossible to visit without immediately thinking about what is happening just beyond the building. It lands at a moment when museums themselves are face mandates to censor, rework and soften histories and politics. It arrives as Chicago itself stands in the sights of the White House.

It also comes directly from the Smithsonian’s National Gallery of Art, where, presumably, it was exhibit A of what President Trump hates in a museum exhibit. Catlett, who

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