Exhibitions Archived in: 2003

Symbol & Substance: The Elaine Ehrenkranz Collection of Japanese Lacquer Boxes

January 23 – April 6, 2003

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... more »

The Painted Text: Picturing Narrative in European Art

April 1 – September 14, 2003

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... more »

Group Portrait

April 5 – June 15, 2003

As part of the artist residency Dawoud Bey: The Chicago Project, the twelve 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... more »

Dawoud Bey: The Chicago Project

April 24 – June 15, 2003

As part of an intensive twelve-week artist residency that began in November 2002, acclaimed Chicago-based photographer Dawoud Bey led twelve 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... more »

Material Identity: Prints by Robert Arneson

June 21 – September 7, 2003

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... more »

Big Idea: The Maquettes of Robert Arneson

July 10 – September 14, 2003

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... more »

Mid-Century American Abstraction: Master Works on Paper

September 13 – December 7, 2003

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... more »

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Sea of Buddha

October 2, 2003 – January 4, 2004

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... more »

Visual Mantras: Meditative Traditions in Japanese Buddhist Art

October 2, 2003 – February 22, 2004

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... more »

Mapping the Sacred: Nineteenth-Century Japanese Buddhist Prints

December 13, 2003 – March 28, 2004

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... more »

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