Go Figure

June 30 – September 4, 2011

Sylvia Sleigh, Nancy Spero, Leon Golub and Sons Stephen, Phillip and Paul, 1973, Oil on canvas. Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, Gift of Leon Golub and Nancy Spero, 1988.6. © Estate of Sylvia Sleigh Alloway.

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, Clare Rojas, and Sylvia Sleigh. 

Despite their varied approaches to media and subject, these artists are bound by their sustained engagement with the human figure and by their use of pattern as a visual strategy to enhance, entice, or complicate our viewing experience. 

Go Figure brings together exemplary paintings, drawings, and sculpture from the Smart Museum and other collections throughout Chicago. Together, these works explore issues of identity, personal history, and social change and, in doing so, reveal the versatile capacity of art to capture the diversity and complexity of contemporary human experience.

Related Programs

Smart Readings:
Bodies Among Other Things, Part 1
July 24, 2011

Curator Tour
July 28, 2011

Lunch-hour Talk: "The Straw Man of Figuration"
August 5, 2011

Smart Readings: 
Bodies Among Other Things, Part 2
August 14, 2011

Mixed Media Workshop
August 20, 2011

Art Afternoons

Join us every Wednesday afternoon in July to see the many different ways art can be made from the body through a series of fun interactive workshops and hands-on art activities.

Face it, You're an Artist
July 6, 2011

Hands up, Hands on
July 13, 2011

Family Snapshots
July 20, 2011

Art from Head to Toe
July 27, 2011