Past Exhibitions: 2004
January 22 – April 4, 2004 | Richard and Mary L. Gray Special Exhibition Gallery
Illuminations: Sculpting with Light
This exhibition examined three distinct moments in which American artists devised innovative ways to use this elemental, immaterial medium. Beginning in the middle of the last century with Charles Biederman's classic modern construction #9, New York, 1940, one of the first known sculptures to incorporate artificial light (acquired by the Smart in 2001), this exhibition continued with key works from the 1960s when artists such as Dan Flavin, Robert Irwin, and James Turrell began to use light to create sublimely minimal sculptures. It concluded with a major commission from emerging artist Stephen Hendee, who uses scrappy everyday materials – translucent plastic sheeting, electrical tape, and colored lights – to create temporary installations that allow viewers to walk through crystalline, glowing environments that recall the fantastic architecture of virtual reality. The exhibition combined visually stunning works with extensive documentation for each piece to illuminate the ways that the artists' uses of light reflect individual experimentations as refracted through broader cultural currents of the 1940s, the 1960s, and now.
Curator: Richard A. Born, Smart Museum Senior Curator, and Stephanie Smith, Smart Museum Curator.
March 9 – August 22, 2004 | Art Before 1900 Gallery
The Uses of Art in Renaissance Italy
Colorfully decorated earthenware, ornately cast bronze, and masterfully painted wood panels from Renaissance Italy still catch the attention of modern museum visitors many years after they were made. While each artifact was certainly created with a keen eye and an artist's hand, many factors, beyond beauty, influenced its form and decoration. The original settings for these objects – the church, the home, and the public palace – reveal a great deal about why they were initially produced and admired. Drawing principally on the Smart Museum's permanent collection, The Uses of Art in Renaissance Italy considered the daily life of strikingly diverse objects: a silver reliquary, a marble tabernacle, an embroidered chasuble, a birth bowl—as well as altarpieces, works on paper and a selection of important medals. By focusing on original sites of display, engagement, and interaction, the exhibition called attention to the rich interplay of form and function in early modern material culture and situates the contemporary notion of "art" within its historical context.
Curator: Elizabeth Rodini, former Smart Museum Mellon Projects Curator. The Smart Museum installation was coordinated by Anne Leonard, Smart Museum Mellon Projects Curator.
April 2 – June 13, 2004 | Joel and Carole Bernstein Gallery
Incisive Vision: The Prints of James Abbott McNeill Whistler
Active in England and France, the American-born painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) is one of the giants of nineteenth-century printmaking. He was a leader in the revival of etching at this time. This exhibition featured a selection of the 25 prints by Whistler donated to the Smart Museum in 2001. Included are early, middle, and late period etchings and drypoints. These exhibit different stylistic modes – from earlier works influenced by seventeenth-century Dutch art to later orientalizing graphics inspired by Japanese art. Included are individual prints from some of the artist's most important cycles, including Twelve Etchings from Nature and The French Set. The exhibition also displayed a wide range of Whistler's preferred subjects, including Thames River views of London, scenes of Venice, portraits, and urban genre scenes.
Curator: Richard A. Born, Smart Museum Senior Curator.
April 22 – June 20, 2004 | Richard and Mary L. Gray Special Exhibition Gallery
Taisho Chic: Japanese Modernity, Nostalgia, and Deco
As western "Jazz Age" mores and styles jostled with traditional Japanese values of tranquility and harmony, the reign of Emperor Taisho (1912-1926) was an era of transition in Japan when the vastly different cultures of the native past and the seemingly foreign future emerged in stark contrast. Japanese designers of all kinds faced a choice between adapting old forms and motifs now reified as tradition, or embracing the new Western techniques and patterns identified with progress. Artists depicted these cultural oppositions in traditional panel paintings on silk and folding screens displaying Japanese landscapes, birds, and flowers – motifs also adopted by western designers such as Frank Lloyd Wright. Over sixty scroll paintings, folding screens, woodblock prints, textiles, and other decorative art pieces represented the broad spectrum of Taisho culture with particular reference to objects associated with women, whose fashions, behavior, and household roles exemplify the simultaneous clash and embrace of modernity and tradition in Japan in the 1920s and 30s.
Curator: This exhibition was organized by the Honolulu Academy of Arts. The Smart Museum presentation was coordinated by Richard A. Born, Smart Museum Senior Curator.
This exhibition was funded in part by the Smart Family Foundation.
July 8 – September 5, 2004 | Richard and Mary L. Gray Special Exhibition Gallery and Joel and Carole Bernstein Gallery
Smart Collecting: A Thirtieth Anniversary Celebration
For thirty years the Smart Museum has been a focal point for the visual arts at the University of Chicago and in the city. Part of a year-long series of projects that celebrate the museum's anniversary, this exhibition highlighted outstanding additions to the Smart's collection. Provocative groupings displayed throughout the permanent collection and special exhibition galleries included, among many others, modern American and European artworks by Arthur Dove, Romare Bearden, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Josef Sudek; contemporary works by Kerry James Marshall, Bob Thompson, H.C. Westermann, and Sylvia Sleigh; and Asian works ranging from Korean ceramics and Japanese calligraphy to recent works by Toshio Shibata, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Ravinder Reddy.
Curator: The Smart Museum's entire curatorial staff contributed to this exhibition.
September 7, 2004 – January 2, 2005 | Art Before 1900 Gallery
Medieval Art and Medievalisms
From the Early Christian material culture of Egypt and the Eastern Roman empire and the devotional art of Gothic Europe to the Celtic revival of the nineteenth century, medieval art shifted from iconic religious image to historical tribute. Drawn from the Smart Museum's holdings, this exhibition looked at key moments in this thousand-year transformation of use and meaning. The trajectory of this appropriation is complex, and nineteenth-century paintings, sculptures, graphic works, and decorative objects, as well as imagery in the new medium of photography, frequently placed this hallowed past in the service of modern artistic, social, and nationalist ideologies. A highlight of the exhibition was the decorative pieces from the museum's important group of Celtic Revival metalwork, originally shown at one of the two Irish pavilions at the 1893 world's fair in Chicago.
Curator: Richard A. Born, Smart Museum Senior Curator.
October 2, 2004 – January 16, 2005 | Richard and Mary L. Gray Special Exhibition Gallery and Joel and Carole Bernstein Gallery
Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China
This exhibition was the first to comprehensively consider the outpouring of photo-based art that has taken place in China since the mid-1990s. Ambitious in scale and experimental in nature, the photographic works included in this groundbreaking project offered a range of highly individual responses to the unprecedented changes in China's economic, social, and cultural life in the past decade. Featuring approximately 130 works by 60 Chinese artists, many of whom had never exhibited in the United States, Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from Chinawas divided into four thematic sections: "History and Memory," "People and Place," "Performing the Self," and "Reimagining the Body." The exhibition fostered a new understanding of contemporary Chinese photography and video and provided unusual insights into the dynamics of Chinese culture in the 21st century. This exhibition was co-organized by the Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, and the International Center of Photography, New York, in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Asia Society, New York. In Chicago the exhibition was presented at two venues: the Smart Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and continued on an international tour.
Curator: Wu Hung, the Harrie A. Vanderstappen Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago and Consulting Curator at the Smart Museum, and Christopher Phillips, Curator at the International Center of Photography, New York. The Smart Museum presentation was overseen by Stephanie Smith, Smart Museum Curator.
Tour Dates: International Center of Photography, New York, and Asia Society, New York, June 11 – September 5, 2004; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington, February 10 – May 1, 2005; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, United Kingdom, September 12, 2005 – January 15, 2006; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany, March 23 – May 21, 2006; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California, June 24 – September 17, 2006; Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, October 19, 2006 – February 18, 2007.
This exhibition and related programs were generously supported in part by The Smart Family Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, The Henry Luce Foundation, W.L.S. Spencer Foundation, Jeffrey A. and Marjorie G. Rosen, Marilynn Alsdorf, American Center Foundation, The Elizabeth F. Cheney Foundation, Fred and Stephanie Shuman, Artur Walther, The Blakemore Foundation, Helen and Sam Zell, Salvatore Ferragamo Italia S.p.A., Richard and Mary L. Gray, Rosenkranz Charitable Foundation, Illinois Humanities Council, Jane K. Lombard, The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, Inc., Dorie Sternberg, Sarina Tang, Mrs. Catherine G. Curran, Joy of Giving Something, Inc., Jennifer McSweeney and Peter Reuss, and Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn.