Reaching the midpoint of our 40th anniversary year, we turn to an exhibition that, like the recently closed Carved, Cast, Crumpled, encompasses the entire Museum and grows solely from the riches of the permanent collection and promised gifts. Yet the goal of Objects and Voices is quite different.

Overflowing with the passionate embrace of ideas stimulated by the extraordinary works in our collection, the exhibition celebrates the remarkable variety of partners with whom the Smart Museum works and the various perspectives they bring to the table. The resulting collaborations enrich all of our exhibitions and programs and give them their distinctive characters.

The exhibition is actually composed of 17 micro-exhibitions, each a testament to the power of works of art to inspire and energize, to foster creativity and encourage new thinking, to reshape our understanding of our world, and to make us think. The exhibition offers experiences not to be missed.

Our partners range from widely known scholars in a variety of fields to schoolchildren, from the University of Chicago students we train for museum careers to great artists. The group includes: two generations of alumni who revisit the works and moments that launched their museum careers; a professor who focuses on visual art for the first time; another professor who, after a decade of object-based teaching, continues to find new meaning in familiar works; and a graduate student who seized the opportunity to research the history, provenance, and attribution of a newly acquired painting attributed to Wassily Kandinsky. And this is only a sampling: see the full list of projects.

Where else can one find such a remarkable range of works and interpretive approaches? What other museum can offer access to so many brilliant partners and their extraordinary expertise? Come visit the Smart Museum again to take advantage of this rich 40th anniversary cornucopia.

This article was originally published in the Winter 2015 edition of At the Smart.