The natural inclination for anyone writing about 2016 is to frame the year around Donald Trump and the presidential election. Yet even given a circus as noisy, unsettling, and dreadful as Trumpmania, my views on the year that was are relatively ambivalent, since I experienced so much else, materially and emotionally, particularly with regard to visual arts.

It might sound like I’m being hard on Chicago’s most famous museums, but in fact both the Art Institute and the MCA this year hosted their most daring and superb shows in recent memory. This past fall, the former exhibited “Future Present,” a wide-ranging retrospective of the work of Laszló Moholy­Nagy, who founded the New Bauhaus in Chicago, while the MCA put on “Mastry,” a powerful overview of Chicago painter Kerry James Marshall’s oeuvre that’s likely to be numbered among the institution’s most significant productions. “Mastry” in particular felt like a timely, overt response to the country’s racial conflict. As Geffen wrote in her review, “Marshall’s work acknowledges the systemic violence that has killed black Americans for decades, yet it subverts the ways in which the black body is identified as an object marked for death.”