Past Exhibitions: 2000
March 14 – September 11, 2000 | Joel and Carole Bernstein Gallery
Pious Journeys: Christian Devotional Art and Practice in the Later Middle Ages and Renaissance
This exploration of medieval and Renaissance devotional practices featured a wide range of objects, including painted altarpieces, portable shrines, reliquaries, liturgical furnishings, and illuminated manuscripts. Drawn from the museum's permanent collection and several public collections, Pious Journeys investigated the critical role played by material culture in early devotion. Like The Theatrical Baroque, Pious Journeys was one of an ongoing series of special projects developed in collaboration among university faculty, students, and the museum.
Curator: Linda Seidel, University of Chicago Professor of Art History, and Elizabeth Rodini, Smart Museum Mellon Projects Curator.
This exhibition was made possible by a multi-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
April 14 – June 11, 2000 | Richard and Mary L. Gray Special Exhibition Gallery
Transforming Images: The Art of Silver Horn and His Successors
This groundbreaking exhibition of Native American art featured ledger book drawings, an illustrated diary and calendar, and hide and muslin paintings made by Kiowa artist Silver Horn (1860-1940). Silver Horn's life spanned the tumultuous shift in traditional Plains Indian life and culture at the end of the century. He recorded Kiowa history and culture with depictions of warfare, daily life, ceremonies, and myths, documenting a vanishing Southern Plains culture for both native and white American audiences. Drawn from collections around the country, the exhibition contextualized Silver Horn's artistic legacy with ledger drawings by contemporary nineteenth-century Kiowa artists, mid-twentieth-century paintings by the Kiowa Five, and works by contemporary Kiowa artists.
Curator: Robert G. Donnelley, a Ph.D. candidate in art history at the University of Chicago, in coordination with Richard A. Born, Smart Museum Senior Curator.
July 6 – August 27, 2000 | Richard and Mary L. Gray Special Exhibition Gallery
Ecologies: Mark Dion, Peter Fend, Dan Peterman
Over the past three decades many artists have incorporated ecological concerns into their work. Their projects – which include land art, community-based projects, ephemeral actions, and installations – often have required new strategies of art-making and have activated unconventional sites. To explore some current manifestations of these interests, the Smart Museum commissioned new projects from Mark Dion (born 1961), Peter Fend (born 1950), and Dan Peterman (born 1960). The three interdisciplinary projects – Dion's Roundup: An Entomological Endeavor for the Smart Museum of Art, Fend's China Basin Plans: The River Dragon Breathes Fire, and Peterman's Excerpts from the Universal Lab – each explored interrelationships between organisms and their surroundings. By addressing specific sites – a museum building, a river landscape, a university campus – these projects evoked the varied scales – microscopic, global, local – at which human actions affect our surroundings.
Curator: Stephanie Smith, Smart Museum Associate Curator.
September 10 – November 5, 2000 | Richard and Mary L. Gray Special Exhibition Gallery
Martin Kippenberger: Hotel Drawings and The Happy End of Franz Kafka's "America"
Martin Kippenberger (1953-1997) was one of the most complex and prolific German artists of his generation. Kippenberger took the artists, the art world, contemporary society, and the self for subject matter, and his work offers contradictory impressions of these subjects: at once absurd, hopeful, tragic, charming and bleak. In a special collaboration, the Smart Museum of Art and the Renaissance Society presented two distinct facets of his work: a series of drawings on hotel stationery and a huge, complex sculptural installation. The Smart Museum gathered approximately 200 of Kippenberger's "hotel drawings" (1987-1997) from private collections in Europe and the United States. Called an "autobiography in sketches," this series of drawings on hotel stationery includes doodle-like drawings on hotel stationery includes doodle-like drawings, highly finished compositions, and sketches that relate to his paintings, sculptures, and installations.
Curator: Stephanie Smith, Smart Museum Associate Curator, and Susanne Ghez, Director of the Renaissance Society.
The Smart Museum's presentation was supported by Dr. Paul and Dorie Sternberg.
September 12 – December 10, 2000 | Joel and Carole Bernstein Gallery
Early Modernist German Drawings and Watercolors
This intimate exhibition presented master drawings and watercolors by some of the leading German modernists of the first three decades of the twentieth century. Drawn from the Smart Museum's collection and selected loans, these works by Lovis Corinth, George Groxz, Erich Heckel, Kähe Kollwitz, and Emil Nolde, among others, exemplify a number of the major art movements of the period including Expressionism before World War I and New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) in the 1920s. The themes and subjects of the works on view documented some of the shifting art theories, social concerns, and political ideologies that characterized art in Germany during a period of rapid change.
Curator: Richard A. Born, Smart Museum Senior Curator.
September 26 – December 17, 2000 | Richard and Mary L. Gray Special Exhibition Gallery
Ages of Bronze: European Sculpture 1500 – 1900
This exhibition investigated the uses of bronze and bronze casting in Europe across four centuries. Drawn from the Smart Museum's collection, the works on view explored three principal themes: the Italian Renaissance interest in ancient Greek and Roman bronzes, the production of copies that flourished in the baroque age with the support of a growing industry in travel and collecting, and the influence of bronze casting on a new middleclass market for the visual arts in nineteenth-century France.
Curator: Richard A. Born, Smart Museum Senior Curator, and Elizabeth Rodini, Mellon Projects Curator.
November 19, 2000 – January 7, 2001 | Richard and Mary L. Gray Special Exhibition Gallery
"Canceled": Exhibiting Experimental Art in China
"Canceled" was an unconventional exhibition. Its subject was not an artists or a group of art works, but another exhibition that was never realized: It's Me (Beijing, 1998), a group show curated by Leng Lin that was canceled by Chinese officials the day before its scheduled opening. Through a striking installation developed by exhibition curator Wu Hung in close collaboration with visual artists Song Dong, documentary filmmaker Wu Wenguang, and the Smart Museum, "Canceled" guided the viewer into the milieu of contemporary Chinese artists, fostering the (re)discovery of this aborted show and calling attention to the implication of its cancellation. The project raised questions about artistic freedom, censorship, and the relationship between experimental art and society at large.
Curator: Wu Hung, University of Chicago Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor in Chinese Art History, in coordination with Stephanie Smith, Smart Museum Associate Curator.
The exhibition was made possible by the Smart Family Foundation and Nuveen Investments. Additional support was provided by the Office of the Provost, the Cultural Policy Program, the Adelyn Russell Bogert Fund of the Franke Institute for the Humanities, the Center for East Asian Studies, Center for International Studies, University of Chicago, and John Bransten.
December 16, 2000 – April 1, 2001 | Joel and Carole Bernstein Gallery
Bernard Meadows: Drawings from the Lazarof Collection
This intimate exhibition highlighted the 1999 gift of over a dozen drawings and related sculptures by the modern British artist Bernard Meadows (born 1915) form the collection of Janice and Henri Lazarof. Meadows emerged after World War II as a member of the vanguard of British art, and his post-war work may express the existential challenge of coping with life during the Cold War. His ongoing investigation of cycles of life and death in the natural world took expressive form in both drawn studies and finished bronze sculptures. Deriving from the later half of Meadows' career, the drawings in this exhibition focused on notions of organic growth, fecundity, and maternal protection.
Curator: Richard A. Born, Smart Museum Senior Curator.