Exhibitions
Collection Galleries
Exhibitions: Archived
Vision and Communism
September 29, 2011 – January 22, 2012
The Soviet artist and designer Viktor Koretsky (1909–1998) created aggressive, emotionally charged images that articulated a Communist vision of the world utterly unlike that of conventional propaganda.... more »
Process and Artistry in the Soviet Vanguard
August 30, 2011 – January 22, 2012
This intimate exhibition offers a rare glimpse at the experimental creative processes that generated iconic Soviet propaganda in the 1920s and 1930s. Featuring works by Gustav Klucis and Valentina Kulagina, it traces classic compositions from preparatory drawings and collage studies to approved designs to posters and other mass-produced print material.... more »
Go Figure
June 30 – September 4, 2011
The human form has endured as a powerful subject throughout the history of art. This episodic exhibition illustrates pivotal moments in figurative art of the last sixty years through the work of nine exceptional artists: Nick Cave, Leon Golub, Yun-Fei Ji, Kerry James Marshall, Christina Ramberg, Martín Ramírez, Ravinder Reddy,... more »
Warhol at Work: Portrait Snapshots, 1973-1986
May 10 – August 21, 2011
Over the course of his career, Pop Art pioneer Andy Warhol took thousands of photographs that were never intended to be seen by the public.... more »
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.... more »
The Tragic Muse: Art and Emotion, 1700-1900
February 10 – June 5, 2011
Art is often appreciated for its ability to delight our eyes and refresh our minds. But it can also serve as a powerful vehicle for exploring darker emotions, such as fear, sadness, and grief. And while these themes have a history dating back to the ancients, the ways in which... more »
David Wojnarowicz: A Fire in My Belly
January 4 - February 6, 2011
A leading artist of the 1980s, David Wojnarowicz is known for the richly aesthetic and strongly activist works that he made in response to the AIDS crisis. The artist's 1986–87 film A Fire in My Belly is a poetic, unfinished work that was created in part as a tribute... more »
Bingyi: Cascade
November 18, 2010 - December 11, 2011
The Chinese-born artist Bingyi inaugurates the Threshold series with the specially commissioned Cascade, an enormous painting that fills the central wall in the Smart’s reception hall.... more »
Echoes of the Past: The Buddhist Cave Temples of Xiangtangshan
September 30, 2010 – January 16, 2011
Carved into the mountains of northern China, the Buddhist cave temples of Xiangtangshan (響堂山, pronounced “shahng-tahng-shahn”) were the crowning cultural achievement of the sixth-century Northern Qi dynasty. Once home to a magnificent array of sculptures—monumental Buddhas, elaborate attendant figures, and crouching monsters framed by floral motifs—the limestone caves were severely... more »
Anna Kunz: Eidolon
September 10, 2010 - August 2011
The first art-banner commission in the Smart Museum's Threshold series is Ediolon, a large vinyl collage by Chicago-based artist Anna Kunz.... more »
Darkness Revisited: A Collection of Private Pleasures
September 7 – December 5, 2010
Organized by University of Chicago students, this intimate exhibition of prints from the Smart Museum's collection revisits the themes of The Darker Side of Light: Arts of Privacy, 1850–1900 and offers a new look at the shadowed interiors and private introspections of late nineteenth-century art.... more »
Mid-Century: "Good Design" in Europe and America, 1850-1950
July 8 – September 5, 2010
Between 1850 and 1950, progressive artists, designers, and architects decisively reshaped the everyday world of objects. Advocating for design reform—and by extension, social reform—they promoted a host of competing ideologies that embraced aesthetic revolution and technical innovation.... more »
"People Wasn't Made to Burn": Ben Shahn and the Hickman Story
May 11 – August 29, 2010
In early 1947, a fire ripped through the one-room attic of a tenement building on Chicago’s West Side, killing four children. Stricken by grief, the father of the victims, James Hickman, subsequently shot and killed the building’s landlord, who had threatened to burn the property down.... more »
The Darker Side of Light: Arts of Privacy, 1850-1900
February 11 – June 13, 2010
In the second half of the nineteenth century, Paris reigned as the city of light and Impressionism captured the bustle of its lively streets and cafés. But there is another dimension to the period, one captured by less well known, sometimes enigmatic, and often melancholy imagery.... more »
Sites to Behold: Travels in Eighteenth-Century Rome
November 3, 2009 – April 11, 2010
Rome has long been a leading tourist destination. Many of the "must-see" sites were codified centuries ago as part of the Grand Tour, a journey undertaken by young aristocrats to complete their education and give them experience of the world. But by the late eighteenth century, the once-exclusive Grand Tour... more »
Heartland
October 1, 2009 – January 17, 2010
Throughout the vast interior of the United States, contemporary artists are responding to the world around them and reshaping it in unexpected ways. Organized by the Smart Museum of Art and the Van Abbemuseum, one of Europe’s premier contemporary art institutions, this exhibition offers an idiosyncratic look at the... more »
Joseph Yoakum: Line and Landscape
September 8, 2009 – May 2, 2010
During the last decade of his life, self-taught artist and South Side resident Joseph Yoakum (1890–1972) began drawing almost full time. He produced several thousand works in this short period, mostly of highly stylized landscapes.... more »
Malleable Likeness and the Photographic Portrait
May 19 – August 30, 2009
Although portraits have been produced for centuries in a variety of media, photography has played a pivotal role in the genre's history. To a large extent, the photographic portrait's popularity stemmed from the medium's capacity to quickly and inexpensively reproduce a sitter's appearance with an unprecedented degree of mimetic... more »
The Scholar's Studio: Selections from the Edward A. and Inge Maser Collection
May 5 – October 18, 2009
Edward A. Maser was the first director of the Smart Museum and a scholar of the baroque. A professor of art history at the University of Chicago, he shaped the early years of the Museum, guiding the development of its artistic and academic character through judicious acquisitions of medieval,... more »
Your Pal, Cliff: Selections from the H. C. Westermann Study Collection
April 2 – September 6, 2009
Horace Clifford (H. C.) Westermann (1922–1981) created a meticulously crafted and highly personal body of work that defies easy categorization.... more »
Aaron Siskind: The Thing Itself
January 13 – May 10, 2009
Aaron Siskind (1903–1991) is best known for his abstract photographs, often of natural forms or architectural features that were manipulated in order to produce unfamiliar images.... more »
The 'Writing' of Modern Life: The Etching Revival in France, Britain, and the U.S., 1850-1940
November 18, 2008 – April 19, 2009
This exhibition examines 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... more »
Displacement: The Three Gorges Dam and Contemporary Chinese Art
October 2, 2008 – January 25, 2009
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.... more »
The Brutal Line: Drawing Death, Being, and Becoming
September 16, 2008 – January 4, 2009
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.... more »
Street Level: Modern Photography from the Smart Museum Collection
June 17 – September 7, 2008
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... more »
Seeing the City: Sloan's New York
May 22 – September 14, 2008
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,... more »
Idol Anxiety
April 8 – November 2, 2008
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.... more »
Sol LeWitt: Color and Line, Reproduced
March 25, 2008 – June 8, 2008
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... more »
Adaptation: Video Installations by Ben-Ner, Herrera, Sullivan, and Sussman & The Rufus Corporation
January 31 – May 4, 2008
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.... more »
Drawn from the Home of Henry Darger
December 22, 2007 – March 16, 2008
For forty years, the self-taught artist Henry Darger lived and worked in a cluttered one-bedroom apartment on Chicago’s North Side. Teeming with objects of all sorts—from balls of string and Pepto Bismol bottles to coloring books and art supplies—the room revealed Darger’s treasured collections and aesthetic sensibility. In the... more »
Looking and Listening in Nineteenth-Century France
November 6, 2007 – March 23, 2008
Audiences in different eras look at art and listen to music in dramatically different ways. The experience of looking or listening is not historically constant, but rather varies with social settings, technologies, and trends. During the nineteenth century, the habits and fashions associated with looking and listening changed rapidly.... more »
Master Drawings from the Yale University Art Gallery
October 4, 2007 – January 6, 2008
Whether made as preparatory studies or stand-alone works, drawings offer an intimate glimpse at an artist's personality and talents. They reward close examination for their insight into the various stages of the creative process. This exhibition, organized by the Yale University Art Gallery and traveling to the Smart Museum... more »
Objects of Inquiry: The Buckley Collection of Japanese Art
September 15 – December 16, 2007
Between 1886 and 1892, Edmund Buckley assembled an extensive collection of Japanese religious objects and artworks while teaching in Kyoto. The collection formed the basis for Buckley’s doctoral work at the University of Chicago and was exhibited on campus in one of the first systematic displays of Japanese religious objects... more »
The World Writ Small: Early Northern European Prints
June 16 – September 8, 2007
The diminutive engravings and woodcuts made by northern European artists in the first half of the sixteenth century may not be monumental in scale, but they contributed to nothing less than a revolution in printmaking. This flowering of activity, close on the heels of Johann Gutenberg's invention of printing... more »
Living Modern: German and Austrian Art and Design, 1890-1933
June 7 – September 16, 2007
Modernism was not only an innovative aesthetic recognized by its crisp forms and progressive use of materials, but it was also a way of thinking about contemporary life. Amid a backdrop of industrialization, urbanization, world war, and reconstruction, many progressive German and Austrian artists and designers dreamed of a... more »
Majestic Nature/Golden History: German Romantic Art from the Crawford Collection and the Smart Museum of Art
April 24 – October 21, 2007
While the German-speaking lands in nineteenth-century Europe remained divided into a host of sovereign political entities, their artists and writers championed cultural unity by reviving and celebrating the art of their past. The nascent Romantic and Nazarene movements stood in contrast to the Neoclassicism of an earlier generation. Rejecting the... more »
Exported Visions: Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Woodblock Print
March 17 – June 10, 2007
When the traditional art of the Japanese color woodblock print was pushed near extinction at the turn of the twentieth century, a few enterprising young artists and publishers revived the old-fashioned art form. These shin hanga or "new prints" maintained traditional methods and depicted traditional birds, flowers, and landscapes,... more »
Cosmophilia: Islamic Art from the David Collection, Copenhagen
February 1 – May 20, 2007
Cosmophilia—literally "love of ornament"—examined one of the most characteristic and attractive features of Islamic art. Covering a millennium of Islamic history in regions extending from Spain to India, this comprehensive exhibition surveyed the extraordinary range and visual virtuosity of one of the world's great artistic traditions. Organized visually by... more »
Robert Heinecken: Magazines
December 16, 2006 – March 11, 2007
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... more »
The Image as Homage: Portrait of the Artist
November 21, 2006 – April 8, 2007
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... more »
Drawing as Process in Contemporary Art
October 5 2006 – January 14, 2007
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... more »
Adrian Piper: The Mythic Being
September 16 – December 10, 2006
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... more »
Mark Turbyfill: Works on Paper
June 17 – September 10, 2006
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),... more »
The Colors of Identity: Polish Art at Home and Abroad, 1890-1939
May 25 – September 17, 2006
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... more »
Revisions: Modernist Sculptures by Rodin, Lipchitz, and Moore
May 9 – November 5, 2006
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... more »
GRAPHIKÉ: Writing/Drawing in the Ancient World
March 18 – June 11, 2006
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... more »
One/Many: Western American Survey Photographs by Bell and O'Sullivan
February 2 – May 7, 2006
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... more »
Collecting for the Cause: Activist Art in the 1960s and '70s
December 17, 2005 – March 12, 2006
In the 1960s and early '70s, many American artists actively questioned the artist's role and responsibility in the public sphere. As they sought political relevance for their work, the relatively easy duplication and dissemination of works on paper made printmaking a choice medium. Selections from two portfolios of prints—one... more »
Whose Land?: European and American Landscapes, 1600-1900
November 22, 2005 – April 23, 2006
Nothing could be more fundamental to a country's identity than the territory it occupies. Accordingly, artists' renderings of landscape highlight recognizable sites, distinctive topography, or natural beauty. However, landscape styles have never stayed within geographic boundaries. For example, Rome, as the unrivaled center for artistic training over several centuries,... more »
Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art
October 6, 2005 – January 15, 2006
Sustainable design attempts to meet the needs of the present without compromising those of future generations. Balancing environmental, social, economic, and aesthetic concerns, sustainable design has the potential to transform everyday life and is being enacted around the world in large and small ways not only by architects and... more »
The Poetry of Shijo Surimono
September 17 – December 11, 2005
Celebrating the sophisticated literary and artistic culture of nineteenth-century Japan, the social elite of the day commissioned artists and publishers to create costly and intricate prints called surimono. While the Shijo surimono made in Kyoto and Osaka have not received nearly the attention and examination of their Edo (modern... more »
Syncopation: André Lhote, Louis Marcoussis, and the Cubist Print
June 18 – September 11, 2005
Following the innovative years before World War I when Pablo Picasso and George Braque introduced the Cubist pictorial language into graphic media, Cubist prints became less experimental and more elaborate in design and execution. Frequently, these later prints emphasize sophisticated techniques and subtleties of printing. Less studied than the... more »
Centers and Edges: Modern Ceramic Design and Sculpture, 1880-1980
June 2 – September 18, 2005
Humble in origin, clay is one of the oldest and most enduring of all artistic mediums. Starting in the late 19th century, American and European artists—inspired by non-Western traditions and framed by the context of social reform—reimagined the potential of this simple material. Over the next 100 years studio... more »
Quiet Revolutions: Modernizing Traditional Art in East Asia
May 10 – November 6, 2005
The twentieth century was a period of extraordinary social and political transformation throughout East Asia. In the wake of an intense period of foreign domination and Western influence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many artists throughout East Asia struggled to reconcile the mounting tension between time honored... more »
Objects of History: The Boone Collection of Japanese Art
April 9 – June 12, 2005
Often in exhibitions of cultural and historical materials some objects are designated as "art" (e.g. paintings and prints) and others as "material culture" (e.g. textiles and shoes). This intimate exhibition drew from more than 3,500 Japanese objects in the Boone Collection of the Field Museum in Chicago—traditionally a place... more »
Jacques Callot and the Etched Series
February 8 – April 3, 2005
The endlessly inventive etchings of Jacques Callot (1592–1635) make him one of the most important printmakers of the early seventeenth century, or indeed of any period. Whether turning his eye and hand to the devastating wars that plagued his era or to more picturesque and fanciful subjects, he produced... more »
Paper Museums: The Reproductive Print in Europe, 1500-1800
February 3 – May 15, 2005
As relatively inexpensive, transportable, and storable objects, prints had an important place in the culture of Renaissance and Baroque Europe. Well before the era of photography and digital images, a variety of print techniques revolutionized the ways in which images could be reproduced and circulated. Reproductive prints—prints that reproduce... more »
Shepherds and Plowhands: Work and Leisure in the Nineteenth Century
January 18 – April 24, 2005
The vast economic and social changes of the Industrial Revolution dramatically transformed the long-held ways of country and village life: centralizing resources in city environments, changing people's occupations, and ultimately refacing the bucolic landscape. Whether documenting true habits of rural life or nostalgically returning to pastoral themes of an... more »
Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China
October 2, 2004 – January 16, 2005
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... more »
Medieval Art and Medievalisms
September 7, 2004 – January 2, 2005
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... more »
Smart Collecting: A Thirtieth Anniversary Celebration
July 8 – September 5, 2004
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... more »
Taisho Chic: Japanese Modernity, Nostalgia, and Deco
April 22 – June 20, 2004
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... more »
Incisive Vision: The Prints of James Abbott McNeill Whistler
April 2 – June 13, 2004
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... more »
The Uses of Art in Renaissance Italy
March 9 – August 22, 2004
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... more »
Illuminations: Sculpting with Light
January 22 – April 4, 2004
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... 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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
Reflections of Beauty: Late Nineteenth-Century Japanese Prints in the Smart Museum Collection
December 15, 2002 – March 23, 2003
Widespread societal transformation, engendered by Japan's new openness to the outside world during the nineteenth century, greatly impacted the print culture known as Ukiyo-e that flourished in the theater and courtesan quarters of Edo (modern Tokyo). The three artists featured in this exhibition—Kunisada (1786–1865), Kunishika (1835–1900), and Chikenobu (1838–1912)—represent a... more »
Sacred Fragments: Magic, Mystery, and Religion in the Ancient World
October 22, 2002 – March 16, 2003
Greek, Roman, and Early Christian antiquities from the Smart Museum's permanent collection and loans of prints and illustrated books from Renaissance and Baroque Europe focused on the religious practices of the ancient Mediterranean world an the modern challenges in piecing together an accurate picture of classical religion from surviving material... more »
Confronting Identities in German Art: Myths, Reactions, Reflections
October 3, 2002 – January 5, 2003
Drawing on the museum's rich holdings of German art and a number of important loans, this exhibition examined how artists and artworks defined or responded to individual, social and national identities over the course of the last two centuries. A chronological presentation framed several critical themes, including the relationship between... more »
The Virtuous Image: Korean Painting and Calligraphy from the Late Choson Dynasty in the Smart Museum Collection
September 14 – December 15, 2002
Korean scholar or "literati" painting flourished during the Choson dynasty (1392–1910), where members of the wealthy scholar-gentry class and civil officials alike brushed scroll paintings and albums of lyrical poetry, idealized landscapes, austere bamboo, and other refined subjects. Although based on classical Chinese themes, such works reveal a specific Korean... more »
Outside In: Self-Taught Artists and Chicago
July 11 – September 15, 2002
Organized from the Smart Museum's permanent collection and selected loans, this exhibition included works in a variety of media by Chicago self-taught artists Henry Darger, Bonnie Harris, Aldobrando Piacenza, Pauline Simon, and Joseph Yoakum, as well as Jesse Howard, Martin Ramirez and others who did not live in Chicago but... more »
Face Off: Works by Chicago Photographers in the Smart Museum Collection
June 22 – September 8, 2002
The photographs in this exhibition shared a complex relationship with the human face. By exploring the camera's ability to create and unmask illusions (sometimes simultaneously), Face Off proposed that the viewer's role in discovering such obfuscation is an integral part of the work of art. Featured artists included Jonas Dovydenas,... more »
Nature, Myth, Allegory: Imagining Reality in the Nineteenth Century
May 14 – October 6, 2002
Drawing from the Smart's permanent collection, this intimate exhibition explored how nineteenth-century artists and their audiences drew on views of the natural world, classical imagery, allegory and historical subjects to construct a meaningful understanding of the rapidly changing present. Works by Adolf Braun, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Emile René Ménard, Benjamin West,... more »
Critical Mass
April 25 – June 23, 2002
Critical Mass featured new commissions by Laurie Palmer, Robert Peters, Gregory Sholette, and Temporary Services (a four-member collective; Brett Bloom, Salem Collo-Julin, and Marc Fischer participated here). They represented several generations of Chicago-based artists who apply activist intentions, conceptual strategies, and experimental artistic approaches to complex social issues; they epitomize... more »
Performative Images
March 30 – June 16, 2002
During the 1960s and 1970s, photography became an indispensable tool for many artists. This exhibition linked two key trends: the use of photography to document performances or projects, and the use of other media—including newspapers, magazines, and film—to circulate work. Performative Images included work by Robert Heinecken, Adrian Piper, Robert... more »
The Art of Mu Xin: Landscape Paintings and Prison Notes
January 24 – March 31, 2002
This exhibition explored the work of contemporary Chinese artist Mu Xin (born 1927), revealing his distinctive personal and artistic responses to tumultuous changes within twentieth-century China. This exhibition featured a suite of thirty-three landscape paintings (1977–1978) created through a unique synthesis of Western and traditional Chinese paintings styles, and sixty-six... more »
Exposure: Recent Chinese Photography from the Smart Museum Collection
December 22, 2001 – March 24, 2002
Experimental art from mainland China has become recognized as an especially vibrant area of contemporary art, one that the Smart Museum has supported through acquisitions as well as exhibitions. The four artists presented in Exposure —Qiu Zhijie, Rong Rong, Song Dong, and Wang Wei—were born during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976)... more »
Crossing Borders: Modern Photographs from Central Europe
September 8 – December 16, 2001
This exhibition was the first in a series highlighting new photography acquisitions. Supplemented by key loans, it featured the Smart Museum's growing collection of modernist Central European photographs made between the two world wars. This exhibition explored the internationalism of this work, expressed in part though the stylistic synthesis of... more »
A Well-Fashioned Image: Clothing and Costumes in European Art, 1500-1850
October 23, 2001 – April 28, 2002
Fashion—or the question of what to wear and how to wear it—is a centuries-old obsession. Beyond superficial concerns with personal appearance, the history of dress points to deep preoccupations surrounding the social order, national identity, and moral decency. A Well-Fashioned Image drew on the Smart Museum's collection and a number... more »
Dreams and Disillusion: Karel Teige and the Czech Avant-Garde
October 4 – December 30, 2001
A leading figure of the avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s, Karel Teige (1900–1951) produced paintings, collages, photomontages, book covers, and film scripts throughout his career. Teige also edited some of the most influential avant-garde journals on Czech and international cultural affairs and wrote profoundly original books and essays on... more »
Recollections and Observations: The Prints of Roger Brown
July 14 – September 2, 2001
Roger Brown (1941–1997) was one of the foremost Chicago Imagist artists. Best known for his paintings, he was also a prolific printmaker, who worked in a range of graphic media—lithography, silkscreen, intaglio, woodcut and commercial printing processes for which he made original drawings. This exhibition presented for the first time... more »
"See America First": Prints by H. C. Westermann
June 28 – September 9, 2001
"See America First" is the first retrospective exhibition of the prints of the American sculptor, painter, draftsman and printmaker H. C. Westermann (1922–1981), a central figure in American art of the post-war period. The Smart Museum mounted an exhibition of lithographs, linoleum cuts, woodblock prints, and related drawings and ephemera... more »
Borders and Crossroads: The Buddhist Art of Ancient Gandhara
May 8 – October 7, 2001
The Buddhist art of ancient Andhra (today encompassing parts of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and northwest India) was a singular cultural achievement, one that co-mingled a Greco-Roman artistic vocabulary with indigenous Indian sculptural and religious traditions. As such, it is a fertile arena for examining artistic florescence along geographic and cultural borders,... more »
Ben Shahn's New York: The Photography of Modern Times
April 10 – June 10, 2001
This exhibition, organized by the Harvard University Art Museums, presented the photographic work of the celebrated American social realist artist Ben Shahn (1898–1969). The exhibition explored the function and meaning of Shahn's experimental work in photography and his subsequent contribution to the emerging field of social documentary within the larger... more »
Anselm Kiefer: Painting, Woodcuts, Sculpture, Books
April 10 – July 8, 2001
Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945) is perhaps best known for majestic paintings from the 1980s and early 1990s that evoked Germany's contested history through charred landscapes and mythic symbolism. This exhibition, drawn from the Manilow collection, used a few choice works to call attention to other aspects of Kiefer's practice. Two... more »
Landscapes of Retrospection: The Magoon Collection of British Drawings and Prints, 1739-1854
January 25 – March 25, 2001
The works in the Magoon Collection—part of the permanent holdings of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College—illustrate the tremendous social and economic transformation of Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The collection consists of prints, drawings, and watercolors by leading artists and architects, and... more »
The Theatrical Baroque
January 9 – April 22, 2001
This exhibition of baroque paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings, taken primarily from the Museum's permanent collection, explored the interaction between the visual arts and the theater of the seventeenth century. The exhibition investigated the incorporation of theatrical devices into visual representation, the role of the baroque audience, and the dynamics... more »
Bernard Meadows: Drawings from the Lazarof Collection
December 16, 2000 – April 1, 2001
This intimate exhibition highlighted the 1999 gift of over a dozen drawings and related sculptures by the modern British artist Bernard Meadows (born 1915) from the collection of Janice and Henri Lazarof. Meadows emerged after World War II as a member of the vanguard of British art, and his post-war... more »
Ages of Bronze: European Sculpture 1500-1900
September 26 – December 17, 2000
This exhibition investigated the uses of bronze and bronze casting in Europe across four centuries. Drawn from the Smart Museum's collection, the works on view explored three principal themes: the Italian Renaissance interest in ancient Greek and Roman bronzes, the production of copies that flourished in the baroque age with... more »
"Canceled": Exhibiting Experimental Art in China
November 19, 2000 – January 7, 2001
"Canceled" was an unconventional exhibition. Its subject was not an artists or a group of art works, but another exhibition that was never realized: It's Me (Beijing, 1998), a group show curated by Leng Lin that was canceled by Chinese officials the day before its scheduled opening. Through a striking... more »
Early Modernist German Drawings and Watercolors
September 12 – December 10, 2000
This intimate exhibition presented master drawings and watercolors by some of the leading German modernists of the first three decades of the twentieth century. Drawn from the Smart Museum's collection and selected loans, these works by Lovis Corinth, George Groxz, Erich Heckel, Kähe Kollwitz, and Emil Nolde, among others, exemplify... more »
Martin Kippenberger: Hotel Drawings and The Happy End of Franz Kafka's "America"
September 10 – November 5, 2000
Martin Kippenberger (1953–1997) was one of the most complex and prolific German artists of his generation. Kippenberger took the artists, the art world, contemporary society, and the self for subject matter, and his work offers contradictory impressions of these subjects: at once absurd, hopeful, tragic, charming and bleak. In a... more »
Ecologies: Mark Dion, Peter Fend, Dan Peterman
July 6 – August 27, 2000
Over the past three decades many artists have incorporated ecological concerns into their work. Their projects – which include land art, community-based projects, ephemeral actions, and installations – often have required new strategies of art-making and have activated unconventional sites. To explore some current manifestations of these interests, the Smart... more »
Transforming Images: The Art of Silver Horn and His Successors
April 14 – June 11, 2000
This groundbreaking exhibition of Native American art featured ledger book drawings, an illustrated diary and calendar, and hide and muslin paintings made by Kiowa artist Silver Horn (1860–1940). Silver Horn's life spanned the tumultuous shift in traditional Plains Indian life and culture at the end of the century. He recorded... more »
Pious Journeys: Christian Devotional Art and Practice in the Later Middle Ages and Renaissance
March 14 – September 11, 2000
This exploration of medieval and Renaissance devotional practices featured a wide range of objects, including painted altarpieces, portable shrines, reliquaries, liturgical furnishings, and illuminated manuscripts. Drawn from the Museum's permanent collection and several public collections, Pious Journeys investigated the critical role played by material culture in early devotion. Like The... more »
The Place of the Antique in Early Modern Europe
November 19, 1999 – February 29, 2000
This exhibition, the first to be held in the newly renovated Old Master Gallery and Joel and Carole Bernstein Gallery, explored the early modern impulse to find inspiration in the ancient past. This intimate exhibition presented paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, works on paper and books from fifteenth- to early nineteenth-century... more »
Surrealism in America During the 1930s and 1940s: Selections from the Penny and Elton Yasuna Collection
November 19, 1999 – March 12, 2000
This exhibition inaugurated the Smart Museum's new Richard and Mary L. Gray Gallery. Featuring artists such as Alexander Calder, Joseph Cornell, Man Ray Kay Sage, and Dorothea Tanning, Surrealism in America showed the pervasive influence of European surrealism in America while demonstrating artists' diverse responses to it. The early history... more »
Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century
February 18, 1999 - April 18, 1999
This groundbreaking exhibition documented major trends in current Chinese experimental art (shiyan meishu), which is characterized by a strong desire to explore new territories in artistic expression. The twenty-one featured artists come from different parts of mainland China or are living abroad in Europe and the United States, and their... more »
Space/Sight/Self
November 19, 1998 – January 10, 1999
This exhibition addressed contemporary portraiture as the nexus of three issues: visuality, location, and identity. It was the culmination of a University of Chicago interdisciplinary course in art, art history and gender studies that investigated the practices, paradigms and aesthetics of contemporary portraiture. The course also explored the role of... more »
Weimar Bodies: Fantasies About the Body in Weimar Art, Science and Medicine
November 4, 1998 – January 10, 1999
Weimar Bodies brought together art works and other kinds of images to explore the range of popular ideas about the human body in Weimar German and to provide a sense of how the short-lived Weimar Republic (1919–1933) saw itself. The exhibition placed images of the body within a broad cultural... more »
Blunt Object
September 11 - October 25, 1998
Blunt Object offered a humorous and fresh look at contemporary sculpture. The exhibition featured both well-known and emerging artists from Europe and the United States, and explored a recent shift in object making from the large-scale and heroic to the vernacular, spunky, and blatant. The exhibition included Aaron Baker, John... more »
Recent Acquisitions: Modern and Contemporary Art
August 25–18 October 1998
This intimate exhibition showcased twentieth-century works acquired by the Smart Museum since 1996. It featured paintings and sculpture by Robert Barnes, Robert Colescott, Joseph Goto, Red Grooms, Miyoko Ito, Edward Keinholz, and David Smith, many of which had not previously been on public view. The exhibition addressed the cultural, regional,... more »
Get Out: Nine Artists from Midway Studios, University of Chicago
July 16 – August 9, 1998
This exhibition presented work by nine students graduating from the University of Chicago’s Midway Studios. The culmination of two years as Master of Fine Arts students, Get Out represented a variety of concerns of the studio art department. It also reflected the pluralism of contemporary artistic practice: the use of... more »
Felix Nussbaum: Assimulation and Dissimulation
May 21 - August 30, 1998
This project was mounted by the Smart Museum as part of the Field Museum’s city-wide programming in conjunction with the exhibition Assignment: Rescue, the Story of Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee (organized by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.). The exhibition featured the Smart Museum’s rare,... more »
The Sublime and the Fantastic - African Art from the Faletti Family Collection
May 14 - June 28, 1998
This exhibition explored the range and depth of African artistic sensibility through 75 works of sub-Saharan art dating from the sixteenth to early twentieth centuries. Drawing on African concepts, the contemplative quality of the sublime was illustrated by emblems of leadership, divination materials, and masterworks of devotional worship made from... more »
Jerome Carlin: Autobiographical Paintings
April 9 - June 14, 1998
Part of the Smart Museum’s alumni artists series, this was an exhibition of paintings by Jerome Carlin (Ph.D. 156, Sociology). Carlin’s works focus on the experience of growing up in the upper-middle-class milieu of Chicago in the 1930s and 1940s.... more »
Archibald Knox (1864-1933), Liberty of London Designer and Master of British Art Nouveau
February 12 - April 19, 1998
Archibald Knox is one of the most influential designers in modern British history. Between 1897 and 1912, his blending of Celtic design with modern aesthetics and manufacturing processes cam to define British Art Nouveau. At the same time, Knox helped the Liberty and Co. department store, which marketed his designs,... more »
Still More Distant Journeys: The Artistic Emigrations of Lasar Segall
October 16, 1997 - January 4, 1998
Born in Vilna, Lithuania, Lasar Segall lived in Berlin and Dresden, where he was associated with the German Expressionist movement. He later emigrated to Brazil, where he lived and worked until his death. Celebrated in South America, his work is still little known in the U. S. Documenting the Diaspora... more »
Post-Pop, Post-Pictures
August 22 – September 21, 1997
Highlighting the work of eleven young abstract painters from Chicago, New York and Texas, this exhibition illustrated the current shift in abstraction away from the heroic brushwork and emotional concerns first expressed in the 1950s to painting that is more mundane and mediated because it is more self-consciously culturally informed.... more »
EXIT 7: Seven Artists from Midway Studios
July 10 - August 5, 1997
The work of Constance Bacon, Nicole Been, Mark Clarson, Katie Dowling, Michael Dreeben, Scott Marshall, and Jung Rhee Shim constituted the fourteenth annual Midway Studios graduate exhibition. Through the media of sculpture, painting and photography, these artists explored such issues as fetishism, revising modernism, the social construction of identity and... more »
In the Presence of the Gods: Art from Ancient Sumer in the Collection of the Oriental Institute Museum
July 1, 1997– March 8, 1998
This exhibition displayed over forty artifacts from ancient Sumer, one of the most important city-states of ancient Mesopotamia, located in present-day Iraq. Dating from the third millennium, B.C.E., these objects ranted from stone and metal statuettes of praying priests and worshippers to ritual vessels and ceremonial inlaid plaques. Once adorning... more »
