Citation, Documentation of Sources

Q. Hi! How would you cite an art exhibition in notes-bibliography style? I can’t find it in CMOS.

A. Because they’re events rather than published sources, there’s no standard citation format for exhibitions. Your only requirements in Chicago style are to italicize the name of the exhibition (see CMOS 8.201) and to include enough details about the event to allow readers to identify it.

For example, you might refer in your text to Grain of a Hand: Drawings with Graphite, an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago that began on July 17, 2021, and is scheduled to run through April 3, 2022. Such a reference could be made entirely in the text (as here), or you could put it in a note—or a note might be used to supplement a mention in the text.

But there’s usually no point in trying to list the exhibition in a standard bibliography, where the expectation is that readers might be able to retrieve the sources for themselves. If you quote or refer to an exhibition catalog, however, you would add that source to the list (see CMOS 14.236).

[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]