Past Exhibitions: 2006
February 2 – May 7, 2006 | Richard and Mary L. Gray Gallery for Special Exhibitions
One/Many: Western American Survey Photographs by Bell and O'Sullivan
William Bell and Timothy H. O'Sullivan, two photographers who joined survey expeditions in the 1860s and 1870s, helped open the eyes of nineteenth-century Americans to the western frontier. Their sweeping and dramatic landscape photographs emerged from government-sponsored geological surveys documenting the western territories. These "Great Surveys" explored huge swaths of land encompassing Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and California. Yet in this wilderness, Bell and O'Sullivan captured striking, technically complicated images that are now some of the most celebrated in early American photography. Particularly impressive are their large-scale panoramic views, which have rarely been seen. The exhibition reconstructed these panoramas from individual albumen prints for the first time since the nineteenth century. Featuring over 60 vintage prints, One/Many highlighted the Smart's acquisition of a substantial body of work by Bell and O'Sullivan, presenting it in the context of the geographic surveys and the larger cultural and artistic traditions that helped define the American West.
Curator: Joel Snyder, University of Chicago Professor of Art History, in consultation with Anne Leonard, Smart Museum Mellon Curator.
Exhibition Catalogue will be available at the Smart Museum Shop, 773.702.0528.
The exhibition, catalogue, and related programs were generously supported in part by the Smart Family Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Rhoades Foundation, the Elizabeth F. Cheney Foundation, and the Franke Institute for the Humanities, University of Chicago. Lead corporate sponsorship was generously provided by LaSalle Bank.
March 18 – June 11, 2006 | Joel and Carole Bernstein Gallery for Works on Paper
GRAPHIKÉ Writing/Drawing in the Ancient World
In art of the ancient world, the physical form of words incorporated into works of art relates closely to the artistic design of the object. A painted, incised, or sculpted word may comment on the object in many different ways. It can name the figures represented, provide the artist's signature, suggest an interpretive context, or even be a nonsense word masquerading as a real one to add an aura of culture and refinement for an illiterate clientele. The inclusion of words in works of art may even recall the hieroglyphs and pictographs of earlier Near Eastern writing systems, which maintained a direct pictorial correspondence between a word and the object it represented. Even after Greek and Roman alphabets abandoned this direct correspondence, the important relationship between word and image continued to be seen in Greek and Roman art. This exhibition of more than a dozen Greco-Roman objects from the Smart Museum also included several comparative Egyptian objects from the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Curator: Glenn Most, University of Chicago Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the Departments of Classics and Comparative Literature; and Richard Neer, University of Chicago Associate Professor of Art History; in consultation with Anne Leonard, Smart Museum Mellon Curator.
May 9 – November 5, 2006 | Edward A. Maser Gallery for Art Before 1900
Revisions: Modernist Sculptures by Rodin, Lipchitz, and Moore
Auguste Rodin, Jacques Lipchitz and Henry Moore each championed sculptural innovations in European modernism and challenged notions of representation that had informed Western art since the Renaissance. From the last quarter of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century, they reinvigorated the figurative academic tradition. At the same time, each also developed individual styles that addressed broader artistic movements of the period: the realism of Rodin, the cubism of Lipchitz, and the surrealism of Moore. While demonstrating important changes in style from one artist to the other, Revisions also focused on the subjects and themes shared by all three. This exhibition was drawn from the Smart Museum’s rich holdings of bronzes as well as sculptures in other materials by these leading European masters of early modernism.
Curator: Richard A. Born, Smart Museum Senior Curator.
May 25 – September 17, 2006 | Richard and Mary L. Gray Gallery for Special Exhibitions
The Colors of Identity: Polish Art at Home and Abroad, 1890 - 1939
By 1890, a century of occupation and several failed uprisings had impacted Polish culture profoundly, engendering a broad search for a national identity in the arts. Driven by the Mloda Polska (Young Poland) movement, Polish art, literature, architecture, and music flourished even as the country remained partitioned under the foreign rule of Russia, Germany, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Inspired by encounters with foreign art practices, the work of Polish artists responded to the Symbolism and Synthetism of the 1890s, the Cubism of the teens, and the Neo-Classicism of the 1920s. Though disparate in the styles they practiced, the artists united in their pursuit to create a modern art from a uniquely Polish perspective. Some Polish painters and sculptors remained in their native land, including members of Krakow's influential group, Sztuka (Art). Others – some forced into exile but most leaving by choice – worked abroad, residing in Paris, Munich, and other artistic centers across Europe. These developments inspired a lively international exchange and resulted in a Polish modernist art movement that was remarkably diverse. With more than sixty paintings, sculptures, and drawings, all on loan from the private collection of Tom Podl, The Colors of Identity traced the complex expression of national identity and international perspective that define this critical period of Polish modern art.
Curator: Artur Tanikowski, an art historian at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, and Anna Król, Curator at the Manggha Centre of Japanese Art and Technology in Krakow and former vice-director and former curator at the National Museum in Krakow, in consultation with Richard A. Born, Smart Museum Senior Curator.
The exhibition was organized by the Smart Museum of Art and featured selections from the collection of Tom Podl, Sammamish, Washington. The exhibition and related programs were supported in part by LOT Polish Airlines and the Center for East European and Russian/Eurasian Studies, University of Chicago.
June 17 – September 10, 2006 | Joel and Carole Bernstein Gallery for Works on Paper
Mark Turbyfill: Works on Paper
Although remembered today mainly for his contributions to the worlds of avant-garde poetry (in 1926 the vanguard magazine Poetry devoted an entire issue to his writings) and dance (in the 1920s and '30s, he was a principal dancer with Allied Artists and partnered with legendary Chicago choreographer Ruth Page), Mark Turbyfill was also an accomplished visual artist. Seeing continuity in all his creative endeavors, Turbyfill at times utilized texts lifted from his own poetry in his figurative and abstract paintings and drawings. With evocative titles such as Yellow Calligraphic Poem, Green Oracle, and Sibylline Head, his visual work also gestures toward a mythic literary past. This intimate exhibition featured representative works on paper from the 1950s to the mid-1960s drawn from the Smart Museum's permanent collection.
Curator: Richard A. Born, Smart Museum Senior Curator.
September 16 – December 10, 2006 | Joel and Carole Bernstein Gallery for Works on Paper
Adrian Piper: The Mythic Being
In 1973, Adrian Piper created an alter-ego, the Mythic Being, who became the basis of a pioneering series of performances and photo-based works. Piper—a light-skinned woman of mixed racial heritage—transformed herself into the Mythic Being by donning an Afro wig, sunglasses, and mustache and adopting behavior conventionally identified as masculine. She then explored how she and others responded to the Mythic Being. In the process, she transformed the conceptual art practices common in the period, infusing them with strong personal and political content. This exhibition gathered together works from all facets of the Mythic Being project, including major work from the Smart Museum's collection and selections from the Adrian Piper Research Archive, some of which document private performances of the Mythic Being never before publicly presented.
Curator: Stephanie Smith, Smart Museum Director of Collections and Exhibitions and Curator of Contemporary Art.
October 5 2006 – January 14, 2007 | Richard and Mary L. Gray Gallery for Special Exhibitions
Drawing as Process in Contemporary Art
Since at least the Renaissance, drawing has been a familiar part of the creative process in Western art. Traditionally, printmakers, painters, and sculptors might dash off sketches to practice technique, keep notebooks as a way to gather and organize ideas, or draft formal renderings. Today, the styles, materials, and forms of art have expanded, and drawing has become a vital and self-sufficient art form. However, artists continue to use drawing to brainstorm and experiment, to explore ideas, and to propose, hone, circulate, and chronicle their works in other media. Sketches and formal compositions still inform the practices of painting and sculpture, and now artists might also draw layouts for installation art, storyboards for performances, or instructions that are acted out by viewers. Organized as a series of case studies of artists with connections to the Smart Museum's collections and commissions, this exhibition offered a behind-the-scenes look at the working process of some of today’s leading artists: Mark Dion, Julia Fish, Carol Jackson, Kerry James Marshall, Richard Rezac, Erwin Wurm, and Zhang Huan.
Curator: Stephanie Smith, Smart Museum Director of Collections and Exhibitions and Curator of Contemporary Art.
This exhibition and related programs were supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support for related programs was provided by the Division of Humanities and the Department of Visual Arts, University of Chicago, and by Critical Inquiry.
November 21, 2006 – April 8, 2007 | Edward A. Maser Gallery for Art Before 1900
The Image as Homage: Portrait of the Artist
In the nineteenth century, the Romantic myth of creative genius endowed artists—painters, sculptors, writers, and musicians—with almost godlike status. Portraits of such artists often amounted to hymns of praise that stood, like the artist's own work, as permanent sites of remembrance and veneration, even after the artist's death. At times affectionate, servile, or even satirical, the spirit of such portraits varied greatly. So too did the form. Some examples presented in this exhibition evoked the portrayed artist's own style, while others focused on the artist's hands and working tools, or even substituted the artist's home in lieu of direct portraiture. Highlighting European and American works on paper and two sculptures from the Smart Museum's collection, Image as Homage considered the challenges that arise when one artist tries to commemorate another, and the many forms such portraits take.
Curator: Anne Leonard, Smart Museum Mellon Curator.
December 16, 2006 – March 11, 2007 | Joel and Carole Bernstein Gallery for Works on Paper
Robert Heinecken: Magazines
For over four decades, the late Robert Heinecken was a trenchant observer of social and sexual politics. Although he rarely used the camera himself, he made innovative use of photography by combining found photojournalistic and advertising images into new works. In the 1960s, he put this strategy to provocative use with a series of reconfigured magazines laden with highly charged content, which he then sometimes put surreptitiously back into circulation. For example, in his series Periodical #5, made at the height of the Vietnam War, Heinecken took magazines such as Glamour and overprinted the images of fashion models with horrific images of young Vietnamese soldiers, much to the surprise of newsstand consumers who had purchased his disruptive juxtapositions of pop culture and politics. This exhibition gathered a rich selection of these and other magazine-based works, including works from the Smart Museum's collection and the artist's archive.
Curator: Stephanie Smith, Smart Museum Director of Collections and Exhibitions and Curator of Contemporary Art.