Past Exhibitions: 2001
January 9 – April 22, 2001 | Art Before 1900 Gallery
The Theatrical Baroque
This exhibition of baroque paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings, taken primarily from the museum's permanent collection, explored the interaction between the visual arts and the theater of the seventeenth century. The exhibition investigated the incorporation of theatrical devices into visual representation, the role of the baroque audience, and the dynamics of social performance as presented in imagery. Like Pious Journeys: Christian Devotional Art and Practice in the Later Middle Ages and Renaissance, The Theatrical Baroque was one of a series of special projects developed in collaboration among university faculty, students, and the museum.
Curator: Larry F. Norman, University of Chicago Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, and Elizabeth Rodini, Smart Museum Mellon Projects Curator.
This exhibition was made possible by a multi-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
January 25 – March 25, 2001 | Richard and Mary L. Gray Special Exhibition Gallery
Landscapes of Retrospection: The Magoon Collection of British Drawings and Prints, 1739 – 1854
The works in the Magoon Collection – part of the permanent holdings of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College – illustrate the tremendous social and economic transformation of Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The collection consists of prints, drawings, and watercolors by leading artists and architects, and includes landscapes, architectural and garden studies, images of historic buildings, and scenes of everyday life in London and the countryside. Landscapes of Retrospection invited us to reflect on the role of landscape representation, antiquarianism, and topographical description as Britain envisioned itself simultaneously as a country with a rich history and as a modern, imperial nation-state.
Curator: Organized by Vassar College's Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Smart Museum presentation was coordinated by Kimerly Rorschach, Smart Museum Dana Feitler Director.
Program support was provided by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Nuveen Instruments, the Humanities Visiting Committee Fund of the Franke Institute for the Humanities, the Regents Park/University of Chicago Fine Arts Partnership, and the University of Chicago's Departments of English Language and Literature and Art History.
April 10 – July 8, 2001 | Joel and Carole Bernstein Gallery
Anselm Kiefer: Painting, Woodcuts, Sculpture, Books
Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945) is perhaps best known for majestic paintings from the 1980s and early 1990s that evoked Germany's contested history through charred landscapes and mythic symbolism. This exhibition, drawn from the Manilow collection, used a few choice works to call attention to other aspects of Kiefer's practice. Two works signaled the artist's most recent preoccupations: Katarina (1999) from a grand series of sculptures about women of antiquity, and the monumental, meditative Lichtfalle (1999), one of several recent celestial-themed paintings. The exhibition also included several large-scale, unique woodcuts and artist's books, media that have long been crucial to Kiefer's practice.
Curator: Stephanie Smith, Smart Museum Associate Curator.
This exhibition was made possible by Susan and Lewis Manilow.
April 10 – June 10, 2001 | Richard and Mary L. Gray Special Exhibition Gallery
Ben Shahn's New York: The Photography of Modern Times
This exhibition, organized by the Harvard University Art Museums, presented the photographic work of the celebrated American social realist artist Ben Shahn (1898-1969). The exhibition explored the function and meaning of Shahn's experimental work in photography and his subsequent contribution to the emerging field of social documentary within the larger social and political climate of the 1930s and the Great Depression. Including over 150 photographs, ink drawings, easel paintings, mural studies and relevant ephemera, Ben Shahn's New York gave visitors the opportunity to view an important and little-examined body of Shahn's work, which was formative for the artist's photographic aesthetic and working process.
Curator: Organized by the Fogg Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Smart Museum presentation was coordinated by Stephanie Smith, Smart Museum Associate Curator.
This exhibition was made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Smart presentation was made possible by a grant from the Nathan Cummings Foundation, secured by Beatrice Cummings Mayer, and by the Regents Park/University of Chicago Fine Arts Partnership.
May 8 – October 7, 2001 | Art Before 1900 Gallery
Borders and Crossroads: The Buddhist Art of Ancient Gandhara
The Buddhist art of ancient Andhra (today encompassing parts of Afghanistan, Pakistan and northwest India) was a singular cultural achievement, one that co-mingled a Greco-Roman artistic vocabulary with indigenous Indian sculptural and religious traditions. As such, it is a fertile arena for examining artistic florescence along geographic and cultural borders, in which foreign and native traditions mingle, fuse, and transcend their origins as they coalesce into a new hybrid visual culture. This exhibition highlighted recent gifts of Gandharan sculpture from the Manilow collection and included a selection of sculpture from the Smart Museum's collection of classical Greek and Roman antiquities and later East Asian Buddhist paintings and sculpture.
Curator: Kris Imants Ercums and Matthew Canepa, University of Chicago graduate students.
This exhibition was made possible by Susan and Lewis Manilow.
June 28 – September 9, 2001 | Richard and Mary L. Gray Special Exhibition Gallery
"See America First": Prints by H.C. Westermann
"See America First" is the first retrospective exhibition of the prints of the American sculptor, painter, draftsman and printmaker H.C. Westermann (1922 - 1981), a central figure in American art of the post-war period. The Smart Museum mounted an exhibition of lithographs, linoleum cuts, woodblock prints, and related drawings and ephemera by this artist who was highly influential in Figurative and Pop Art trends, as well as in the locally based Chicago Imagist movement. The exhibition was organized to complement the Museum of Contemporary Art's concurrent exhibition of H.C. Westermann's sculptures, providing an unparalleled opportunity to compare the relationships in style, subject, and theme between the prints and the sculptural objects of this important artist.
Curator: Dennis Adrian and Richard A. Born, Smart Museum Senior Curator.
Tour: University of Virginia Art Museum, Charlottesville, Virginia, January 26 – March 31, 2002; Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, California, April 28 - July 7, 2002; and Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Texas, October 4 – December 1, 2002.
This exhibition, catalogue, and teachers' website were made possible by funds from Robert and Joan Feitler, Raymond Smart, and the Smart Family Foundation. The exhibition was also supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
July 14 – September 2, 2001 | Joel and Carole Bernstein Gallery
Recollections and Observations: The Prints of Roger Brown
Roger Brown (1941-1997) was one of the foremost Chicago Imagist artists. Best known for his paintings, he was also a prolific printmaker, who worked in a range of graphic media – lithography, silkscreen, intaglio, woodcut and commercial printing processes for which he made original drawings. This exhibition presented for the first time a selection of the twenty-three prints and artist-designed posters donated to the Smart Museum by the artist shortly before his untimely death. These works offered a broad chronological and technical overview of Brown's considerable achievements as a printmaker.
Curator: Richard A. Born, Smart Museum Senior Curator.
September 8 – December 16, 2001 | Joel and Carole Bernstein Gallery
Crossing Borders: Modern Photographs from Central Europe
This exhibition was the first in a series highlighting new photography acquisitions. Supplemented by key loans, it featured the Smart Museum's growing collection of modernist Central European photographs made between the two world wars. This exhibition explored the internationalism of this work, expressed in part though the stylistic synthesis of pictorial and modernist styles, and included works by Frantesek Drtikol, Jaromír Funke, Imre Kinski, Jaroslav Rösler, and Joseph Sudek, among others.
Curator: Richard A. Born, Smart Museum Senior Curator, and Stephanie Smith, Smart Museum Associate Curator.
October 4 – December 30, 2001 | Richard and Mary L. Gray Special Exhibition Gallery
Dreams and Disillusion: Karel Teige and the Czech Avant-Garde
A leading figure of the avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s, Karel Teige (1900-1951) produced paintings, collages, photomontages, book covers, and film scripts throughout his career. Teige also edited some of the most influential avant-garde journals on Czech and international cultural affairs and wrote profoundly original books and essays on art and architecture. This exhibition covered the entire range of Teige's varied and influential career, from 1920 until his untimely death in 1951, and included items never before displayed outside Europe.
Curator: Organized by the Wolfsonian – Florida International University, Miami Beach, Florida. The Smart Museum presentation was coordinated by Richard A. Born, Smart Museum Senior Curator.
This exhibition was made possible through the support of Mary and Roy Cullen.
October 23, 2001 – April 28, 2002 | Art Before 1900 Gallery
A Well-Fashioned Image: Clothing and Costumes in European Art, 1500–1850
Fashion – or the question of what to wear and how to wear it – is a centuries-old obsession. Beyond superficial concerns with personal appearance, the history of dress points to deep preoccupations surrounding the social order, national identity, and moral decency. A Well-Fashioned Image drew on the Smart Museum's collection and a number of loaned works to investigate the symbolic role played by dress in European art from the Renaissance to the mid-nineteenth century. A range of materials, including Renaissance costume books, portraits of nobles and clergy, and images of foreign peoples in exotic garb, revealed the central role costume played in fashioning and advertising the social order.
Curator: Elizabeth Rodini, Smart Museum Mellon Projects Curator, and Elissa B. Weaver, Professor of Italian in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Chicago.
This exhibition was funded by an endowment from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
December 22, 2001 – March 24, 2002 | Joel and Carole Bernstein Gallery and Robert and Joan Feitler Gallery
Exposure: Recent Chinese Photography from the Smart Museum Collection
Experimental art from mainland China has become recognized as an especially vibrant area of contemporary art, one that the Smart Museum has supported through acquisitions as well as exhibitions. The four artists presented in Exposure – Qiu Zhijie, Rong Rong, Song Dong, and Wang Wei – were born during the Cultural Revolution (1966 – 1976) and matured as artists during a time of rapid change in China. They use photography as well as other means to document, explore, and represent carried responses to China's contemporary culture. Like their peers around the world, they make photography an integral part of their practices and make dramatic use of new technologies to create large-scale prints, glowing transparencies, and photo-based installations. They exploit the camera's ability to capture fleeting moments, spaces, or performative actions so that traces remain visible to others. This was the second in a series of exhibitions highlighting recent photography acquisitions; it offered a counterpoint to the museum's presentation of The Art of Mu Xin.
Curator: Stephanie Smith, Smart Museum Associate Curator.