Smart Museum of Art University of Chicago

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After the Readymade

December 14, 2010 - May 1, 2011

This intimate exhibition charts the history of the readymade, a particular strain of twentieth- and twenty-first-century art that takes manufactured objects as primary material.

The works on view exploit commodities of varying origin, texture, scale, and color—including chocolate, comic and coloring books, shopping bags, sweaters, and wallpaper. Nearly a hundred years after Marcel Duchamp constructed the first readymade, the exhibition enables us to reconsider old notions of materiality and to reassess the now-ubiquitous use of non-traditional materials in art. After the Readymade coincides with, and serves as a primary source for, the University of Chicago graduate course Materialities of Modern Art. Students from this class will produce the individual object labels over the course of their study.

Curators

Emily Capper, Smart Museum Mellon Foundation curatorial intern and PhD student at the University of Chicago, in consultation with Christine Mehring, Associate Professor of Art History, and Jessica Moss, Smart Museum Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art.

Credits

This exhibition is one in a series of projects at the Smart Museum of Art supported by an endowment from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that fosters interdisciplinary use of the Museum’s collections by University of Chicago faculty and students in both courses and special exhibitions.

Presented in the Joel and Carole Bernstein Gallery for Works on Paper.

Above: Installation view of After the Readymade.