The Art Institute of Chicago has given its Bluhm Family Terrace over to Tony Cokes, opening a two-part installation titled "On Boredom" on October 3, 2026. It marks the artist's first public outdoor presentation in Chicago and runs through March 14, 2027. Cokes builds his practice from borrowed language, rearranging sentences taken from music, news, history and theory into videos, signs, lightboxes and billboards. Here the terrace's park-facing windows do the largest share of the talking: they now operate as a billboard readable from the street and from Millennium Park below. The centerpiece text is "Let yourself be free," a line Cokes lifts from Aretha Franklin's 1968 recording of "Think." Franklin sang often in Chicago with her father, the pastor and civil-rights leader C.L. Franklin, and it was Chicago DJ Pervis Spann who first called her the Queen of Soul at the Regal Theater in 1964. A second element complicates the optimism. One of Cokes's freestanding signs carries two sentences from the British cultural theorist Mark Fisher: one about losing the freedom to be bored, the other about unseen forces pushing people toward permanent anxiety. Set against the Franklin line, the pairing turns the terrace into a quiet argument about what freedom means when technology is shrinking private life. Music is treated as part of the architecture rather than accompaniment. Cokes selected a soundtrack of songs tied to Chicago and to the show's theme of freedom, and it plays on the terrace throughout museum hours. The museum issued a press release on October 8 confirming the installation.