Closed for Installation

The Smart will be closed July 14 - September 22

Free and open to the public

 
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Past Exhibitions

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. In honor of its anniversary, the Smart has commissioned four artists to create new works as interventions in the Museum’s and our shared histories.

Robert Earl Paige: Give the Drummer Some!

September 24, 2024 - July 2025

For the Smart’s 50th anniversary, South Side artist Robert Earl Paige creates a multi-part pattern-based installation and sprawling public art project that invites communities into a collective experience of space.

Abstract painting by Joan Mitchell

The 50th: An Anniversary Exhibition

September 24, 2024 – March 2, 2025

Drawing from across the breadth and depth of the collection, this exhibition marks the Smart Museum of Art's 50th anniversary and explores what makes and defines a university art museum. 

A tall vase decorated with peacock feathers

Meiji Modern: Fifty Years of New Japan

March 21–June 9, 2024

This landmark exhibition takes a fresh look at the art of Japan’s Meiji era (1868–1912), four remarkable decades that propelled the country into the modern era.

A porcelain wall sculpture

Ruth Duckworth: Life as a Unity

September 21, 2023–February 4, 2024

This exhibition positions Ruth Duckworth as an innovative Chicago sculptor, deeply engaged in the natural world and responding to artistic developments in the U.S. in the 1960s and 70s. 

Smart to the Core: Poetry is Everything

September 21, 2023–February 4, 2024

This exhibition examines the practice of poetry as a form of communication, linguistic innovation, political performance, and embodied presence—considering how poetry can be a lens for understanding humanity. 

A red abstract painting in a polygon shape

Ted Stamm: In Transit

June 27–August 6, 2023

This small, focused exhibition celebrates the work of Ted Stamm (1944–1984), an artist whose gregarious practice expanded abstract painting into his everyday life.

Painting of a veiled figure speaking on an ornate telephone

Calling on the Past: Selections from the Collection

March 21, 2023–February 4, 2024

Calling on the Past invites visitors to experience the Smart Museum’s collection anew, through a sensory exploration of color, texture, and form.

A black and white photograph of two people dancing close together, their heads almost touching, the man in a suit and shoes and the woman in a dress and barefoot.

not all realisms

February 23–June 4, 2023

not all realisms addresses photography in the context of Africa’s long 1960s—amid resistance, revolution, new nationalist and transnational movements, and the stuff of daily life therein.

An abstract terracotta-colored image

The Metropol Drama

February 23–July 9, 2023

The Metropol Drama proposes another way of looking at our aesthetic, economic, and emotional history—an amalgam we call “cosmopolitanism.”