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 15 – 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 Ph.D. candidate in Art History, in consultation with Stephanie Smith, Smart Museum Director of Collections and Exhibitions and Curator of Contemporary Art.