See It Now The Many Hats Of Ralph Arnold

   There’s still time to catch “The Many Hats of Ralph Arnold: Art, Identity & Politics” at Columbia College’s Museum of Contemporary Photography. But not a lot of time: the show of seldom-seen work by this black gay artist and educator whose collages captured the social upheavals of the 1960s and ’70s closes December 21.

Unfinished Collage, in the first of the two galleries the exhibit occupies, is unmissable, in part because it’s a suspended triptych. Included in a 1968 show about violence at the upstart Museum of Contemporary Art (founded the previous year), it’s a three-sided chronicle of the lives and deaths of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr.  Each side is covered with documentary photos, and there’s a framed  nameplate for each of the three men slapped over them. The photos are resonant, but the real impact of the piece comes from a fourth, red-framed plate that’s starkly blank, leaving the piece open-ended, awaiting the next victim.

“The Many Hats of Ralph Arnold: Art, Identity & Politics.” Through 12/21: Mon-Sat 10 AM-5 PM, Sun noon-5 PM, Museum of Contemporary Photography, 600 S. Michigan, 312-663-5554, mocp.org. F