Expanding the 50th: Shared Stories
March 25, 2025 – July 13, 2025
Expanding the 50th: Shared Stories offers an updated presentation of the institution’s anniversary exhibition to explore the histories that have made up the Smart Museum over the last five decades. Drawn entirely from the permanent collection—which has grown from nearly 2,500 works in 1974, when the Smart opened its doors, to over 17,000 objects today—the exhibition is organized loosely chronologically to illuminate how the institution, its mission, and collection, have continued to change.
In honor of its anniversary, the Smart has commissioned four artists to create new works as interventions in the Museum’s and our collective histories. These new works by Andrea Carlson, Bethany Collins, Caroline Kent, and Mary Mattingly, will be presented during Expanding the 50th and serve as models for the way the Museum can continue to elevate new voices and engage a variety of stories.
To that prompt, through a newly designed gallery space, Expanding the 50th also asks what it would mean to change a museum’s approach to storytelling, the way it narrates art to be meaningful, and the way we all communicate about the role of art within the world at large. Inspired by the work of the Smart’s Feitler Center for Academic Inquiry, which was established in 2018 to develop a deeper relationship with university life in and outside the classroom, the exhibition’s interactive gallery features a selection of the Museum’s recent acquisitions and invites all visitors to participate and suggest their ideas for how we should share stories.
Andrea Carlson is a multidisciplinary artist of Grand Portage Ojibwe and European descent and is based in northern Minnesota and Chicago. Through her intricate and complex imagery, she interrogates the legacies of the landscape genre as well as notions of decolonization narratives, Indigenous futurisms, and assimilation metaphors.
Bethany Collins is an Alabama-born, Chicago-based conceptual artist. Drawing from extensive archival research and grounded in a text-based artistic practice, Collins’s work offers a critical lens on American history and the nuance of racial and national identities.
Caroline Kent is a Chicago-based visual artist, who builds on personal experiences and cultural background to explore the relationship between and limits of language, translation, and abstraction through an expanded painting practice.
Mary Mattingly is a New York-based artist whose research-based practice blurs boundaries between fact and fiction, present and future, as a way to center pressing issues related to climate change, survival, and endurance in the face of ecological degradation and violence.
Image: Abdolreza Aminlari, in collaboration with Dieu Donné, Untitled (21.039), 2021, 24K gold thread on handmade abaca and cotton paper. Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, Gift of Dieu Donné, New York, 2023.16. © Abdolreza Aminlari.
