Past Exhibitions
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
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.
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: 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.
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](https://d3qi0qp55mx5f5.cloudfront.net/smartmuseum/i/artwork/2008_11_4.jpg?mtime=1449631105)
“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.
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
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.