Past Exhibitions: 2003
January 23 – April 6, 2003 | Richard and Mary L. Gray Special Exhibition Gallery
Symbol & Substance: The Elaine Ehrenkranz Collection of Japanese Lacquer Boxes
Japan has long been credited with bringing the art of lacquer to its highest technical and aesthetic development. This exhibition of fifty-six lacquer boxes – ranging in date from the Muromachi (1392–1568) and Momoyama (1568–1615) to Edo (1615–1868) periods – featured one of the most elegant and diverse assemblages of such pieces outside Japan. The exhibition examined not only the aesthetic refinement and intricate symbolism of Japanese lacquers, but also the intricate planning, painstaking labor, and supreme artistry that determined their construction and elaborate decoration. With a rich arsenal of lacquer techniques at their disposal, Japanese artists produced bold, harmonious designs of great precision and beauty in a shifting panoply of styles representing five centuries of Japanese design.
Curator: Organized by the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, in Cambridge, Massachusetts and curated by Anne Rose Kitagawa, Assistant Curator of Japanese Art in the Department of Asian Art. The Smart Museum presentation was coordinated by Richard A. Born, Smart Museum Senior Curator.
This exhibition and related programs were made possible by Elizabeth and Harvey Plotnick.
April 1 – September 14, 2003 | Art Before 1900 Gallery
The Painted Text: Picturing Narrative in European Art
From the heroic tales of the Greeks to the lyric poetry of Ovid, the stories of the ancients were among the most important sources and inspirations for European artists of the early modern period. Beginning in the Renaissance, painters, and sculptors turned with increasing frequency to ancient myths and epic narratives that offered both a wealth of intriguing subjects and the formidable challenge of transforming stories into compelling images. Featuring painting, sculpture, and works on paper from the Smart Museum's permanent collection as well as select loans, The Painted Text juxtaposed images from the 16th to 19th centuries with their literary sources in order to investigate how artists interpreted and transformed the stories that inspired them.
Curator: Frederick A. de Armas, University of Chicago Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, and Elizabeth Rodini, Smart Museum Mellon Projects Curator.
This exhibition was made possible in part by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; the Smart Family Foundation; the Eloise W. Martin Fund; the Rhoades Foundation; and the Franke Institute for the Humanities, the Special Collections Research Center, and the Office of the Provost, University of Chicago.
April 5 – June 15, 2003 | Joel and Carole Bernstein Gallery
Group Portrait
As part of the artist residency Dawoud Bey: The Chicago Project, the 12 Chicago teenage participants curated this exhibition, featuring photographic portraits from the Smart Museum's collection as well as works on loan from a private collection. In a series of discussions, hands-on activities, and meetings with Dawoud Bey and museums staff, the teenagers explored ideas about identity and representation. In an unusual installation including graffiti on the walls, the students responded to the residency topics and to the photographs that they selected by Dieter Appelt, Morrie Camhi, Robert Doisneau, Walker Evans, Susan Fenton, Laura Letinsky, Helen Levitt, Danny Lyon, Sally Mann, Adrian Piper, Man Ray, Ben Shahn, David Teplica, James Van Der Zee, and Francesca Woodman.
Curator: Participating high school students were De Marco Anderson, Sara Azarmi, Theresa Bailey, Devin Brown, Simone Bullen, Isabel Gabel, Julia Halpern, Kenneth Roberson, Christopher Robinson, Steven Sinclair, Leah Walsh, and Carolyn Yates.
The exhibition and related programs were generously sponsored in part by the MetLife Foundation Museum Connections Program; the National Endowment for the Arts; the Smart Family Foundation; the Sara Lee Foundation; Nuveen Investments; the Nathan Cummings Foundation; and the Cultural Policy Center at the University of Chicago.
April 24 – June 15, 2003 | Richard and Mary L. Gray Special Exhibition Gallery
Dawoud Bey: The Chicago Project
As part of an intensive 12-week artist residency that began in November 2002, acclaimed Chicago-based photographer Dawoud Bey led 12 teenagers through a creative and critical investigation of the ways that identity is shaped, portrayed, and expressed in contemporary culture. Bey had previously undertaken short-term projects that bring young people and museums together, but this was his most ambitious residency to date and the first conducted within his home community. For this exhibition, Bey created large color portraits of the 12 students from Kenwood High School, South Shore Small School of Entrepreneurship and Small School of the Arts, and the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. Each photograph was accompanied by an audio portrait by award-winning radio documentary producers Dan Collison and Elizabeth Meister, and by a written statement and photograph that the teenagers have chosen to represent themselves. As a whole, the exhibition design – developed in collaboration with Garofalo Architects, Chicago – presented a multifaceted and fluid composite of teenage identity.
Curator: Conceived of by Dawoud Bey, the exhibition was organized and executed by Dawoud Bey, Dan Collison, Elizabeth Meister, Stephanie Smith, and Jacqueline Terrassa.
The exhibition and related programs were generously sponsored in part by the MetLife Foundation Museum Connections Program; the National Endowment for the Arts; the Smart Family Foundation; the Sara Lee Foundation; Nuveen Investments; the Nathan Cummings Foundation; and the Cultural Policy Center at the University of Chicago.
June 21 – September 7, 2003 | Joel and Carole Bernstein Gallery
Material Identity: Prints by Robert Arneson
Presented in conjunction with the major touring exhibition Big Idea: The Maquettes of Robert Arneson, this exhibition featured the less well-known prints of this pre-eminent California ceramic sculptor and master draftsman. Robert Arneson (1930–1992) transformed American ceramic practice through his integration of sculpture and painting. As presented in this intimate exhibition featuring ten works from the Smart Museum's collection, Arneson's prints frequently reflect imagery and themes that are central features of his sculptural pieces. For example, "Brick Suite" (1975) – comprised of four color etchings and lithographs, each depicting a lone brick in states of wholeness and decay – refers not only to Arneson's all-important activity as a sculptor of clay but also acts as a metaphorical image of the artist himself. Works such as his 1980 and 1981 color lithographs present larger-than-life self-portraits, each featuring expressively distorted facial features that as two-dimensional images recall Arneson's inventive, often satirical, sculptures that comment on contemporary American society and on the artist's sense of his own identity and art world persona.
Curator: Richard A. Born, Smart Museum Senior Curator.
July 10 – September 14, 2003 | Richard and Mary L. Gray Special Exhibition Gallery
Big Idea: The Maquettes of Robert Arneson
One of the most original sculptors, Robert Arneson (1930–1992) reinvented American figurative ceramics through the integration of sculpture and painting in his large-scale, often satirical, and even iconoclastic pieces. This was the first exhibition devoted to the terracotta maquettes – small-scale, three dimensional sketches – that Arneson left in his studio. These pieces, generally less than a foot tall, display the vibrantly glazed surfaces that anticipate the expressive coloration of Arneson's signature large ceramic sculptures. Produced over a quarter of a century beginning in 1964, the maquettes offer a unique view into the sculptor's creative process: some illustrate the origins of compositions for monumental works, while others document ideas not realized ultimately in large scale or provide fascinating examples of early sculptural ideas that underwent significant transformation as they emerged as full-scale sculptures in the exhibition chronicle Arneson's evolution as an artist and the development of his freewheeling creativity and prodigious imagination.
Curator: This exhibition was organized by the Palo Alto Art Center in Palo Alto, California. The Smart Museum presentation was coordinated by Richard A. Born, Smart Museum Senior Curator.
September 13 – December 7, 2003 | Joel and Carole Bernstein Gallery
Mid-Century American Abstraction: Master Works on Paper
Around 1940, as avant-garde art and artists increasingly flooded into the United States from war-torn Europe, American artists forged a new movement: Abstract Expressionism. This exhibition of eleven master drawings, watercolors, and collages looked at this critical period in the adoption of European modernist styles and subjects and their transformation into a new aesthetic free of traditional landscape, still life, or figural images. Also called The New York School, this artistic movement dominated the American art scene though much of the 1950s. Included in the show were works by the painters Willem De Kooning, Franz Kline, Mark Tobey, and German émigré Hans Hoffman, and the sculptors Theodore Roszak and David Smith, among other artists working in New York City and elsewhere in the country during this decisive period. Drawn entirely from the Smart Museum's collection and featuring recent donations from the collection of Janice and Henri Lazarof, this intimate exhibition explored the stimulus of pre-World War II European modernism, especially German Expressionism and French Surrealism, and other sources including Asian art and philosophy on this fecund artistic activity.
Curator: Richard A. Born, Smart Museum Senior Curator.
October 2, 2003 – January 4, 2004 | Richard and Mary L. Gray Special Exhibition Gallery
Hiroshi Sugimoto: Sea of Buddha
In 1995 after years of lobbying for permission, Hiroshi Sugimoto was allowed to photograph inside Kyoto's famed thirteenth-century Buddhist temple Sanjusangendo (Hall of Thirty-Three Bays). Working at daybreak, a traditional time for meditation, he captured the dawn light illuminating 1,000 statues of the bodhisattva Kannon, an enlightened being of boundless compassion. Sugimoto's photographs – gorgeous, richly detailed black-and-white images – frame row upon row of Kannon's subtly varied faces, and when presented together, they immerse the viewer in what Sugimoto has called a "sea of Buddha." These meditative images were complemented by a selection of familiar and rarely-seen works including several of Sugimoto's famous "Seascapes" as well as artists' books, the video Accedlerated Buddha (1997), and the print portfolio In Praise of Shadows (1999). This exhibition was presented in conjunction with Visual Mantras: Meditative Traditions in Japanese Buddhist Art. Spawned by the international cultural planning group "Awake: Art, Buddhism, and the Dimensions of Consciousness," these are two of many projects presented nationally during 2003-2004.
Curator: Stephanie Smith, Smart Museum Curator.
October 2, 2003 – February 22, 2004 | Art Before 1900 Gallery
Visual Mantras: Meditative Traditions in Japanese Buddhist Art
A mantra is broadly understood as a type of chant used to focus attention in Buddhist practice, but visual representations were also employed in these rituals. This exhibition examined these contemplative and meditative images in traditional Japanese culture. From minimalist calligraphy created by Zen masters as part of the meditative practice itself to the vibrant Jodo paintings commissioned from professional artists in honor of significant deities, these works from the Smart Collection chronicled the changing significance of visual arts in the devotional practices of Japanese Buddhism from the 16th to the 20th century. This exhibition was presented in conjunction with the major exhibition Hiroshi Sugimoto: Sea of Buddha. Spawned by the international cultural planning group "Awake: Art, Buddhism, and the Dimensions of Consciousness," these are two of many projects presented nationally during 2003-2004.
Curator: Kris Imants Ercums, Smart Museum Curatorial Intern and University of Chicago graduate student.
December 13, 2003 – March 28, 2004 | Joel and Carole Bernstein Gallery
Mapping the Sacred: Nineteenth-Century Japanese Buddhist Prints
A map delineates and defines any number of spatial localities, ranging from geography to architecture, but it also illuminates a diversity of cultural and historical possibilities in its rendering of reality into pictorial form. The single, flattened image of a complex, three-dimensional world reflects the imagined vantage point and spatial conceptions of the artist. In nineteenth-century Japan, the pictorial mapping of both secular and sacred space underwent drastic changes. The varied reasons for this transformation of mapping strategies include the emergence of new concepts of spatial representation such as Western-style perspective, developments in printing technology, and a boom in tourism. Principally drawn from materials gathered in Japan in the 1890s by Edmund Buckley, a professor of Comparative Religion at the University of Chicago, the exhibition documented this transformation and included prints and photographic views of temples and cities, as well as images of religious objects, ceremonies, and deities.
Curator: Kris Imants Ercums, University of Chicago advanced graduate student of Chinese art history and Smart Museum Curatorial Intern.