Past Exhibitions: 2002
January 24 – March 31, 2002 | Richard and Mary L. Gray Special Exhibition Gallery
The Art of Mu Xin: Landscape Paintings and Prison Notes
This exhibition explored the work of contemporary Chinese artist Mu Xin (born 1927), revealing his distinctive personal and artistic responses to tumultuous changes within twentieth-century China. This exhibition featured a suite of thirty-three landscape paintings (1977-1978) created through a unique synthesis of Western and traditional Chinese paintings styles, and sixty-six pages of Mu Xin's Prison Notes, written while in solitary confinement from 1970 to 1973.
Curator: Jointly organized and circulated by the Smart Museum of Art and the Yale University Art Gallery and co-curated by Wu Hung, Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor in Chinese Art History at the University of Chicago, and Alexandra Munroe, Director of the Japan Society Gallery, New York. The Smart Museum presentation was coordinated by Stephanie Smith, Smart Museum Assistant Curator.
The exhibition was made possible by a grant from the Rosenkrantz Foundation. Additional support for the Smart Museum's presentation was provided by Richard and Gail M. Elden.
Catalogue out of print
March 30 – June 16, 2002 | Joel and Carole Bernstein Gallery
Performative Images
During the 1960s and 1970s, photography became an indispensable tool for many artists. This exhibition linked two key trends: the use of photography to document performances or projects, and the use of other media – including newspapers, magazines, and film – to circulate work. Performative Images included work by Robert Heinecken, Adrian Piper, Robert Smithson, and Francesca Woodman. This was the third in a series of exhibitions highlighting recent photography acquisitions.
Curator: Stephanie Smith, Smart Museum Assistant Curator.
April 25 – June 23, 2002 | Richard and Mary L. Gray Special Exhibition Gallery
Critical Mass
Critical Mass featured new commissions by Laurie Palmer, Robert Peters, Gregory Sholette, and Temporary Services (a four-member collective; Brett Bloom, Salem Collo-Julin, and Marc Fischer participated here). They represented several generations of Chicago-based artists who apply activist intentions, conceptual strategies, and experimental artistic approaches to complex social issues; they epitomize a larger "critical mass" of peers who have sustained and invigorated this kind of critical art practice in Chicago. This collaborative, experimental project included installations in and around the museum – many of which involved active audience participation – a resource area, a hotline visitors could use to reach participating artists and key museum staff, and public programs. Brett Bloom and Gregory Sholette taught related courses at the University of Chicago and the School of the Art Institute, respectively, and their students helped plan and present public events.
Curator: Stephanie Smith, Smart Museum Assistant Curator, conceived the project and its components were developed and refined through ongoing discussions among the participating artists, Smith, and Education Director Jacqueline Terrassa.
This exhibition program was supported by the Division of the Humanities, a grant from UChicagoArts through the Arts Planning Council, and the Cultural Policy Center, University of Chicago.
May 14 – October 6, 2002 | Art Before 1900 Gallery
Nature, Myth, Allegory: Imagining Reality in the Nineteenth Century
Drawing from the Smart's permanent collection, this intimate exhibition explored how nineteenth-century artists and their audiences drew on views of the natural world, classical imagery, allegory and historical subjects to construct a meaningful understanding of the rapidly changing present. Works by Adolf Braun, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Emile René Ménard, Benjamin West, and others offered views into such important themes as the longing for nature in an industrialized world, the molding of history to contemporary needs, and the nostalgic yearning for a mythologized past.
Curator: Richard A. Born, Smart Museum Senior Curator; Elizabeth Rodini, Smart Museum Mellon Projects Curator; and Stephanie Smith, Smart Museum Assistant Curator.
June 22 – September 8, 2002 | Joel and Carole Bernstein Gallery
Face Off: Works by Chicago Photographers in the Smart Museum Collection
The photographs in this exhibition shared a complex relationship with the human face. By exploring the camera's ability to create and unmask illusions (sometimes simultaneously), Face Off proposed that the viewer's role in discovering such obfuscation is an integral part of the work of art. Featured artists included Jonas Dovydenas, Carole Harmel, Jesse Hickman, Nathan Lerner, Laura Letinsky, Natacha Robert-Falda, Charles Swedlund, Devid Teplica, and Roger Vail.
Curator: Whitney Rugg, Smart Museum Curatorial Intern and University of Chicago graduate student.
July 11 – September 15, 2002 | Joel and Carole Bernstein Gallery
Outside In: Self-Taught Artists and Chicago
Organized from the Smart Museum's permanent collection and selected loans, this exhibition included works in a variety of media by Chicago self-taught artists Henry Darger, Bonnie Harris, Aldobrando Piacenza, Pauline Simon, and Joseph Yoakum, as well as Jesse Howard, Martin Ramirez and others who did not live in Chicago but were influential and collected here. Outside In examined such issues as the ever shifting, and sometimes controversial, definitions of what outsider art is as well as its impact on the broader cultural life of the city.
Curator: Richard A. Born, Smart Museum Senior Curator.
This exhibition was supported in part by the Donnelley Foundation.
September 14 – December 15, 2002 | Joel and Carole Bernstein Gallery
The Virtuous Image: Korean Painting and Calligraphy from the Late Choson Dynasty in the Smart Museum Collection
Korean scholar or "literati" painting flourished during the Choson dynasty (1392-1910), where members of the wealthy scholar-gentry class and civil officials alike brushed scroll paintings and albums of lyrical poetry, idealized landscapes, austere bamboo, and other refined subjects. Although based on classical Chinese themes, such works reveal a specific Korean sensibility within East Asian painting traditions. Scholars saw in such works elegant reflections of a uniquely Korean ordering of the world, founded in part on their own re-interpretations of venerable Chinese Confucian ideology. This was the first public presentation of the Smart Museum's small, but select collection of Korean scholar and Buddhist paintings and calligraphy, which date from the apogee of Korean court culture in the eighteenth century to the tumultuous end of royal rule at the beginning of twentieth century.
Curator: Kris Imants Ercums, Smart Museum Curatorial Intern and University of Chicago graduate student.
October 3, 2002 – January 5, 2003 | Richard and Mary L. Gray Special Exhibition Gallery
Confronting Identities in German Art: Myths, Reactions, Reflections
Drawing on the museum's rich holdings of German art and a number of important loans, this exhibition examined how artists and artworks defined or responded to individual, social and national identities over the course of the last two centuries. A chronological presentation framed several critical themes, including the relationship between portraiture and fantasy, the place of war as both idealized continuity and rupture, the city as a site of carnivalesque inversions, and the ongoing effort to identify how German art might look. Works by Max Klinger, Emil Nolde, Gabriele Münter, Max Beckman, Käthe Kollowitz, Erich Hechel, Joseph Beuys, Gerog Baselitz, and a group of contemporary artists from the former East Germany were among the highlights.
Curator: Reinhold Heller, University of Chicago Professor of Art History and Germanic Studies, in collaboration with Elizabeth Rodini, Smart Museum Mellon Projects Curator.
This exhibition and related programs were made possible by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Additional support was provided by the Smart Family Foundation; the Elizabeth F. Cheney Foundation; the Eloise W. Martin Fund; the Rhoades Foundation; the German Consulate General; Goethe-Institut Inter Nationes Chicago; the Office of the Provost, the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of German Literature and Culture, and Franke Institute for the Humanities, and the Department of Art History, University of Chicago.
October 22, 2002 – March 16, 2003 | Art Before 1900 Gallery
Sacred Fragments: Magic, Mystery, and Religion in the Ancient World
Greek, Roman, and Early Christian antiquities from the Smart Museum's permanent collection and loans of prints and illustrated books from Renaissance and Baroque Europe focused on the religious practices of the ancient Mediterranean world an the modern challenges in piecing together an accurate picture of classical religion from surviving material fragments. The exhibition examined the religious life of things, both in their ancient contexts and in modern attempts to interpret them.
Curator: Ian Moyer, PhD candidate in the Committee on the Ancient Mediterranean World at the University of Chicago, in collaboration with Richard A. Born, Smart Museum Senior Curator, and Elizabeth Rodini, Smart Museum Mellon Projects Curator.
This exhibition and related programs were made possible by an endowment by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; the Rhoades Foundation; and the Office of the Provost, University of Chicago.
December 15, 2002 – March 23, 2003 | Joel and Carole Bernstein Gallery
Reflections of Beauty: Late Nineteenth-Century Japanese Prints in the Smart Museum Collection
Widespread societal transformation, engendered by Japan's new openness to the outside world during the nineteenth century, greatly impacted the print culture known as Ukiyo-e that flourished in the theater and courtesan quarters of Edo (modern Tokyo). The three artists featured in this exhibition – Kunisada (1786-1865), Kunishika (1835-1900), and Chikenobu (1838-1912) – represent a line of teacher-student succession that traces different reactions to these changes: from initial fascination to eventual nostalgia. The lavishly printed bijinga or "beautiful women" prints and related theatrical woodblocks in this exhibition not only capture the ideal of fleeting beauty so highly esteemed by male audiences at the time, but also more broadly reflect longing for a traditional culture which was quickly vanishing due to the rapid, often disorienting tempo of Japan's Western-style modernization.
Curator: Kris Imants Ercums, Smart Museum Curatorial Intern and University of Chicago graduate student.