Closed for Installation

The Smart will be closed July 14 - September 22

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Past Exhibitions

Exhibition installation view

After the Readymade

December 14, 2010 - May 1, 2011

This intimate exhibition charts the history of the readymade, a particular strain of twentieth- and twenty-first-century art that takes manufactured objects as primary material.

Bingyi, Cascade, Ink, household cleaners, and water on paper. Commissioned by the Smart Museum of Art. Courtesy the artist.

Bingyi: Cascade

November 18, 2010 - December 11, 2011

The Chinese-born artist Bingyi inaugurates the Threshold series with the specially commissioned Cascade, an enormous painting that fills the central wall in the Smart’s reception hall.

Still from the

Echoes of the Past: The Buddhist Cave Temples of Xiangtangshan

September 30, 2010 – January 16, 2011

Carved into the mountains of northern China, the Buddhist cave temples of Xiangtangshan were the crowning cultural achievement of the sixth-century Northern Qi dynasty.

Anna Kunz, digital sketch of Eidolon, 2010. Courtesy of the artist.

Anna Kunz: Eidolon

September 10, 2010 – August 2011

The first art-banner commission in the Smart Museum's Threshold series is Ediolon, a large vinyl collage by Chicago-based artist Anna Kunz.

Darkness Revisited: A Collection of Private Pleasures

September 7 – December 5, 2010

Organized by University of Chicago students, this intimate exhibition offers a look at the shadowed interiors and private introspections of late nineteenth-century art.

Charles and Ray Eames, Dining Chair, 1946, Molded and bent (birch?) plywood and rubber shock mounts. Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, Gift of Barry Friedman, 1984.23.

Mid-Century: “Good Design” in Europe and America, 1850-1950

July 8 – September 5, 2010

Between 1850 and 1950, progressive artists, designers, and architects decisively reshaped the everyday world of objects. 

Ben Shahn, Studies of the Hickman Murder Case [She was born in June and she was beautiful.], 1948, Pen and ink on wove paper, reworked with white pigment. Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, Gift of Marian and Leon Despres, 2008.11.4. Art © Estat

“People Wasn’t Made to Burn”: Ben Shahn and the Hickman Story

May 11 – August 29, 2010

An exhibition of sixteen drawings by Ben Shahn poignantly record the story and trial of a deadly fire and murder trial in Chicago. 

Eugène Carrière, Sleep, 1897, Lithograph. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Rosenwald Collection

The Darker Side of Light: Arts of Privacy, 1850-1900

February 11 – June 13, 2010

Organized by the National Gallery of Art, this exhibition reveals the private worlds of late nineteenth-century Europe through prints and other works meant for quiet contemplation. 

Sites to Behold: Travels in Eighteenth-Century Rome

November 3, 2009 – April 11, 2010

This exhibition presents etchings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, gouache drawings by Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Lallemand, and other works depicting Rome and nearby Tivoli

Installation view of Heartland

Heartland

October 1, 2009 – January 17, 2010

Organized by the Smart Museum of Art and the Van Abbemuseum, this exhibition offers an idiosyncratic look at the innovative forms of artistic creation taking place in the American Heartland.