Initiatives
The Smart’s Initiative for Art, Science, and Interdisciplinary Thinking reflects the University of Chicago’s commitment to inquiry across fields, and explores what is possible when art serves as a catalyst for interdisciplinary thinking. By bringing together close looking, material investigation, embodied experience, and visual analysis into dialogue with scientific and technological research, the Initiative advocates for the museum as a place where art can foster new conversations between artists, scientists, scholars, students, and the public.
This Initiative builds on the Smart’s work over the past few years through its Feitler Center for Academic Inquiry. This work has resulted in expanded engagement and innovative teaching collaborations with and across many academic disciplines, including the sciences such as computer science, biology, chemistry, and astrophysics, among others. The Smart has also recently fostered new partnerships with the University of Chicago’s Prtizker School of Medicine and UChicago Medicine Comer Children’s Hospital.
This interdisciplinary approach and the work of the Initiative informs the Smart’s forthcoming exhibitions that explore urgent questions around technology, climate, perception, and the future of human experience as well as public programs, which bring artists, scientists, and scholars into conversation with each other. Together, these efforts position the Smart as a space where art advances interdisciplinary inquiry and opens new ways of understanding the world.
Left to right: Astronaut Nicole Stott in conversation with artists Sarah and Joseph Belknap, 2026. Smart Museum of Art, the University of Chicago; Installation view, UChicago and Space, 2026. Smart Museum of Art, the University of Chicago. Photo by Michael Tropea. Spring exhibition opening, featuring an installation view from Beyond Boundaries: Three Decades of Contemporary Chinese Art at the Smart, 2026. Photo by Jason Smith. Installation view, Expanding the 50th: Shared Stories, 2025. Smart Museum of Art, the University of Chicago. Photo by Michael Tropea.
The Smart Museum of Art’s Provenance of Religious Objects Initiative, supported by a grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. and undertaken in partnership with the Martin Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion at the University of Chicago Divinity School, addresses an important but understudied area of museum practice: provenance of sacred objects.
While provenance research has increasingly focused on artworks displaced through war, colonialism, and other modes of dispossession, less attention has been paid to religious objects whose significance extends beyond their histories of ownership to encompass often ongoing spiritual, ritual, and communal meanings. Recognizing that many sacred objects remain vital embodiments of faith and cultural identity, the Smart’s initiative seeks to understand how museums can more thoughtfully steward, interpret, and provide access to these works. Through provenance research and in dialogue with religious communities and traditions from which they originate, the Museum aims to develop more responsive and inclusive approaches to the care and interpretation of sacred cultural heritage.