Past Exhibitions: 2008
January 31 – May 4, 2008 | Richard and Mary L. Gray Gallery for Special Exhibitions
Adaptation: Video Installations by Ben-Ner, Herrera, Sullivan, and Sussman & The Rufus Corporation
While adaptation is a common practice in popular culture, it is perhaps less well known as a practice in contemporary art. This exhibition looked at the use of adaptation in the work of four leading artists: Guy Ben-Ner, Arturo Herrera, Catherine Sullivan, and Eve Sussman & The Rufus Corporation. These artists transformed source material to make their own adapted works of art, re-envisioning classic literature, painting, film, ballet, and even e-mail as video installations. For example, Ben-Ner condensed Herman Melville's Moby Dick into a brief silent video made almost entirely in the artist's kitchen, while Sussman's The Rape of the Sabine Women, a feature-length contemporary retelling of the Roman myth, drew inspiration from an eighteenth-century painting. In six video installations adapted from source material, the exhibition addressed questions of fidelity and creativity while generating new understandings of the use of adaptation as a practice in contemporary art. The exhibition included the United States museum premieres of The Rape of the Sabine Women and Les Noces, Herrera's first video installation.
Online Exhibition Catalogue accessible at http://adaptation.uchicago.edu.
Tour Dates: Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, November 22, 2008 – March 22, 2009; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, Indiana, May 8 – August 16, 2009; Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma, October 17, 2010 – January 9, 2011.
Curator: Stephanie Smith, Smart Museum Director of Collections and Exhibitions and Curator of Contemporary Art.
This exhibition was supported by the Office of the Provost and the Arts Council, University of Chicago, the Feitler Family Fund, Marilyn and Larry Fields, Susan and Lewis Manilow, Dirk Denison, and the members and friends of the Smart Museum.
March 25, 2008 – June 8, 2008 | Joel and Carole Bernstein Gallery for Works on Paper
Sol LeWitt: Color and Line, Reproduced
In the 1960s and 1970s, Sol LeWitt was one of the first artists to use color and line as building blocks in a serial approach to art. This approach, pivotal to the development of Minimalist and Conceptual art during the 1960s and 1970s, not only freed color and line from their representational function, it also, according to LeWitt, helped reduce "the capricious" and "the subjective as much as possible." LeWitt had already serially used color and line in the early 1960s, but he assigned these building blocks a more predominant role once he began making artists' books, in 1966, and prints, in 1970. This exhibition, which featured a suite of lithographs and a sampling of artists' books created between 1968 and 1977, explored how LeWitt's serial use of color and line intersected with some of his early experiments with mechanical reproduction.
Curator: Michael Tymkiw, University of Chicago PhD candidate in Art History, in consultation with Stephanie Smith, Smart Museum Director of Collections and Exhibitions and Curator of Contemporary Art.
April 8 – November 2, 2008 | Edward A. Maser Gallery for Art Before 1900
Idol Anxiety
Idols are worrisome objects. From ancient times to the present day, theological traditions have reflected on idolatry and questioned the transcendence, significance, and power of objects. Different anxieties have produced different artistic practices. This exhibition navigates a variety of theological and secular perspectives in order to explore the complex relationships between objects of worship, their makers, and their audiences. For example, in ancient Mesopotamia, a cult statue was installed in the temple only after an elaborate ritual in which artisans proclaimed not to have made the idol while presenting their hands to be symbolically chopped off. Finding such ritual denials ineffective, the Bible's second commandment—make no graven images—deemed all object worship idolatrous. Alternatively, some Christian theologians embraced representations of Christ and contended that such images were valid because Christ himself was the word made flesh. By juxtaposing Mesopotamian cult figures with Classical antiquities and Renaissance paintings, Idol Anxiety examines how objects become idols and offers insight into the sometimes uneasy relationship between people and things.
Curator: Aaron Tugendhaft, Ph.D. candidate in Hebrew Bible, New York University, and an alumnus of the University of Chicago, in consultation with Jessica Moss, Smart Museum Curatorial Assistant.
May 22 – September 14, 2008 | Richard and Mary L. Gray Gallery for Special Exhibitions
Seeing the City: Sloan's New York
John Sloan's images of New York helped define the city in the popular imagination. In gritty depictions of urban life, Sloan celebrated the metropolis of New York by focusing on street scenes, elevated trains, public spaces, and the lives of ordinary Americans. Yet Sloan's vision was a subjective one, tied to his particular observations of the neighborhoods in which he lived and the individuals he encountered. More than a series of distinct locations, Sloan's images of New York reflect the artist’s own movement through and experience of the city. Organized by the Delaware Art Museum, this exhibition gathered together a wealth of material in all media from 1900 to the 1930s—on loan from various public and private collections—in order to demonstrate the correlation between where Sloan created his art and what he depicted. Seeing the City mapped Sloan's New York, locating precisely the sites portrayed in his work and examining the personal meaning tied to the places he chose to depict again and again.
Curators: Joyce K. Schiller, Curator, and Heather Campbell Coyle, Associate Curator, Delaware Art Museum. The Smart Museum presentation was overseen by Anne Leonard, Smart Museum Curator and Mellon Program Coordinator.
Seeing the City: Sloan's New York was organized by the Delaware Art Museum. The exhibition received generous support from the Henry Luce Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Helen Farr Sloan Trust.
The Smart Museum's presentation of the exhibition was made possible by the generous support of the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Feitler Family Fund. Additional support was provided by the Terra Foundation on behalf of James Donnelley and Neil Harris.
The exhibition and related programs were presented as part of American Art American City, a Chicago-wide celebration of American Art.
June 17 – September 7, 2008 | Joel and Carole Bernstein Gallery for Works on Paper
Street Level: Modern Photography from the Smart Museum Collection
In the early twentieth century, a number of photographers turned their cameras to their immediate environment, finding subjects in the everyday imagery and visual clamor of the streets in modern cities like Chicago, Moscow, New York, and Paris. Presented as objective and mechanical representations of ordinary urban life, these "straight" or "pure" photographs were in fact often inflected with other aesthetic and social concerns. In capturing daily city life, some photographers produced abstract and dislocating views of vast urban architecture, while others depicted much more intimate, narrative scenes of abject poverty. With photographs by Walker Evans, Georgy Zelma, Nathan Lerner, and Paul Strand, among others, this exhibition of works from the Smart Museum collection looks at the modern city as seen from the street.
Curator: Rachel Furnari, Smart Museum curatorial intern and University of Chicago PhD candidate in Art History, in consultation with Richard A. Born, Smart Museum Senior Curator.
September 16, 2008 – January4, 2009 | Joel and Carole Bernstein Gallery for Works on Paper
The Brutal Line: Drawing Death, Being, and Becoming
Through focused comparisons between Italian masters and their modern and contemporary counterparts, The Brutal Line examines how artists have used drawn marks to express extreme physical or existential states. This focused selection combines exceptional drawings from the collections of Richard and Mary L. Gray and the Smart Museum of Art and ranges from the fifteenth century to the present. It provides a unique opportunity for close examination of classic drawings from the past and present.
Download the exhibition handout (PDF) with curator's essay and checklist.
Curator: David Schutter, Assistant Professor, Department of Visual Arts, University of Chicago, in consultation with Stephanie Smith, Smart Museum Curator of Contemporary Art.
October 2, 2008 – January 25, 2009 | Richard and Mary L. Gray Gallery for Special Exhibitions
Displacement: The Three Gorges Dam and Contemporary Chinese Art
The Three Gorges Dam on the Yangzi River in China is a massive project entwined in controversy. When finally completed, it will stand as the world’s largest generator of hydro-electric power, with a yearly output equal to that of fifty million tons of coal or fifteen nuclear power plants. However, the dam’s 375-mile reservoir has already displaced over one million people and submerged over one thousand towns and villages. This exhibition presents work that four leading contemporary Chinese artists—Chen Qiulin, Yun-Fei Ji, Liu Xiaodong, and Zhuang Hui—have created in response to the Three Gorges Dam. Despite differences in backgrounds and artistic practices, these artists have engaged with the theme of displacement, responding to the movement of people, the demolition of old towns and construction of new cities, and the astonishing changes the project is bringing to the local landscape. The powerful works on view represent four major branches of contemporary Chinese art: ink painting, realist oil painting, conceptual photography, and performance and new media art. Moving beyond any single medium or trend, Displacement offers nuanced, thought-provoking perspectives on a project of great social, environmental, and global concern.
Exhibition catalogue available in the Smart Museum Shop, 773.702.0528.
Exhibition Tour: Salt Lake Art Center, Salt Lake City, Utah, November 21, 2009 – February 28, 2010; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, March 25 – July 18, 2010.
Curator: Wu Hung, Smart Museum Consulting Curator, Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History, and Director of the Center for the Art of East Asia, University of Chicago, in consultation with Jessica Moss, Smart Museum Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art, and Stephanie Smith, Smart Museum Director of Collections and Exhibitions and Curator of Contemporary Art.
This exhibition and related programs have been supported by Dan Bo, the Elizabeth F. Cheney Foundation, and the Women's Board of the University of Chicago. The accompanying publication was made possible by a generous gift from Fred Eychaner and Tommy Yang Guo.
November 18, 2008 – April 19, 2009 | Edward A. Maser Gallery for Art Before 1900
The "Writing" of Modern Life: The Etching Revival in France, Britain, and the U.S., 1850–1940
This exhibition examined the intertwined arts of etching and writing, from the polemical beginnings of the Etching Revival in the 1850s to its twentieth-century afterlife. During this period, etching was reinvented as an original art form that—like writing—was uniquely fitted to expressions of an artist’s individual personality and the experience of modernity. Printmakers and critics redefined the medium, creating a new critical language that was entwined with literary discourse. They emphasized the signature qualities of the etched line, encouraging the idea that each print bore the touch of the artist, and rediscovered an expressive medium suitable for gritty modern subjects as well as classical pastoral themes. Showcasing etchings by European and American artists like Haden, Meryon, and Whistler, the exhibition offered a new interdisciplinary perspective on the Etching Revival.
Exhibition catalogue available in the Smart Museum Shop, 773.702.0528.
Curator: Elizabeth Helsinger, John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor of English Literature and Art History at the University of Chicago, in consultation with Anne Leonard, Smart Museum Curator and Mellon Program Coordinator.
This exhibition is one in a series of projects at the Smart Museum of Art that has been generously endowed by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The exhibition catalogue was made possible by the Feitler Family Fund.