Upcoming Exhibitions
February 11 – June 13, 2010 | Richard and Mary L. Gray Gallery for Special Exhibitions
The Darker Side of Light: Arts of Privacy, 1850–1900
Paris in the 1800s was the city of light, and Impressionism captured the bustle of its lively streets and cafés. But through the medium of prints, artists like Whistler, Zorn, Meryon and others probed the social and psychological depths of the period. The inherently discrete method of storing prints between the covers of portfolios—which were then typically kept in the privacy of a study room or cabinet—freed artists to explore subject matter that ranged from the prurient to the exotic. While unsuitable for more public display, such prints were avidly collected. Organized by the National Gallery of Art, this exhibition presents over one hundred of these beautiful, often startling works—primarily prints, but also illustrated books, drawings, and small sculptures—within the milieu of a nineteenth-century art collector’s study. In this intimate setting, The Darker Side of Light evokes the shadowed interiors and private introspections that tell a far less familiar story of late nineteenth-century art.
Curator: Peter Parshall, Curator of Old Master Prints at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. The Smart Museum presentation is overseen by Anne Leonard, Smart Museum Curator and Mellon Program Coordinator.
Tour: Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, California, April 5 – June 28, 2009; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, October 1, 2009 – January 18, 2010.
July 8 – September 5, 2010 | Richard and Mary L. Gray Gallery for Special Exhibitions
Mid-Century Design: European and American Modernisms, 1850–1950
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. This exhibition examines the complex, ever-shifting course of modern design theory and its application in Europe and the United States. Mounted entirely from the Smart Museum’s collection, the exhibition offers close readings of masterworks such as Edmond Johnson’s facsimiles of medieval treasures made for the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, furniture and leaded windows designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for the historic Robie House, and Marianne Brandt’s rare modernist silver tea service, which was fabricated by hand in the metal workshop of the famed Bauhaus. Together, these and other works in a variety of media give insight into the interweaving history and iconic forms that defined the domestic world of modernism during the fertile one-hundred-year period between the mid centuries.
Curator: Richard A. Born, Smart Museum Senior Curator.
October 2011 – January 2012 | Richard and Mary L. Gray Gallery for Special Exhibitions
Feast: Radical Hospitality and Contemporary Art
The act of sharing food and drink with others is a basic human pleasure and an enduring source of aesthetic inspiration. Today, the shared meal has become a compelling artistic medium: a surprising number of artists are using meals to advance aesthetic goals and foster critical engagement with our current culture. These artist-orchestrated meals can offer a radical form of hospitality that punctures everyday experience, using food as a means to spark encounters and perceptions that aren't otherwise possible within our fast-moving and overly segmented society. Feast surveys these practices for the first time. Through a series of new art commissions in public spaces and a presentation within the Smart Museum, the exhibition will introduce new artists and contextualize their work in relation to some of the most influential artists of the last century, from the Italian Futurists to Gordon Matta-Clark and Rirkrit Tirvanija. Feast addresses the radical hospitality embodied by these artists and the social, commercial, and political structures that surround the experience of the shared meal.
Curator: Stephanie Smith, Director of Collections and Exhibitions and Curator of Contemporary Art at the Smart Museum of Art.
Read Stephanie's curatorial research blog at blogs.uchicago.edu/feast
This exhibition is made possible by an Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award.
The Smart Museum's general operating funds have been provided in part by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and by the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency. The Museum's exhibitions and related programs are generously supported by the Smart Family Foundation; the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; the Alsdorf Foundation; Tom and Janis McCormick; Nuveen Investments; the Eloise W. Martin Fund; the Office of the Provost and the Visiting Committee on the Visual Arts, University of Chicago; and the members and friends of the Smart Museum. Education programs are supported by the Polk Bros. Foundation.