Past Exhibitions
Syncopation: André Lhote, Louis Marcoussis, and the Cubist Print
June 18 – September 11, 2005
This exhibition featured two cycles of Cubist prints by André Lhote, Louis Marcoussis in the Smart Museum collection.
Centers and Edges: Modern Ceramic Design and Sculpture, 1880-1980
June 2 – September 18, 2005
This exhibition examined how American and European artists reimagined the potential of clay as an artistic medium.
Quiet Revolutions: Modernizing Traditional Art in East Asia
May 10 – November 6, 2005
The twentieth century was a period of extraordinary social and political transformation throughout East Asia.
Objects of History: The Boone Collection of Japanese Art
April 9 – June 12, 2005
This intimate exhibition drew from more than 3,500 Japanese objects in the Boone Collection of the Field Museum in Chicago—traditionally a place for "material culture"—and brought scroll paintings, woodblock prints, and decorative arts objects from the later Edo to Taisho periods (18th–20th centuries) to an art museum context.
Jacques Callot and the Etched Series
February 8 – April 3, 2005
The endlessly inventive etchings of Jacques Callot (1592–1635) make him one of the most important printmakers of the early seventeenth century, or indeed of any period.
Paper Museums: The Reproductive Print in Europe, 1500-1800
February 3 – May 15, 2005
As relatively inexpensive, transportable, and storable objects, prints had an important place in the culture of Renaissance and Baroque Europe.
Shepherds and Plowhands: Work and Leisure in the Nineteenth Century
January 18 – April 24, 2005
The collection-based exhibition gathered scenes of rural labor and leisure by various nineteenth-century French artists: Charles Daubigny, Charles Jacque, Jean-Fransçois Millet, Féix Buhot, Alphonse Legros, Camille Pissarro, Maximilien Luce and others.
Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China
October 2, 2004 – January 16, 2005
This exhibition was the first to comprehensively consider the outpouring of photo-based art that has taken place in China since the mid-1990s. Ambitious in scale and experimental in nature, the photographic works included in this groundbreaking project offered a range of highly individual responses to the unprecedented changes in China's economic, social, and cultural life in the past decade.
Medieval Art and Medievalisms
September 7, 2004 – January 2, 2005
From the Early Christian material culture of Egypt and the Eastern Roman empire and the devotional art of Gothic Europe to the Celtic revival of the nineteenth century, medieval art shifted from iconic religious image to historical tribute.
Smart Collecting: A Thirtieth Anniversary Celebration
July 8 – September 5, 2004
For thirty years the Smart Museum has been a focal point for the visual arts at the University of Chicago and in the city.