Free and open to the public
As western "Jazz Age" mores and styles jostled with traditional Japanese values of tranquility and harmony, the reign of Emperor Taisho (1912–1926) was an era of transition in Japan when the vastly different cultures of the native past and the seemingly foreign future emerged in stark contrast.
Active in England and France, the American-born painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) is one of the giants of nineteenth-century printmaking. This exhibition featured a selection of the 25 prints by Whistler donated to the Smart Museum in 2001. Included are early, middle, and late period etchings and drypoints.
Drawing principally on the Smart Museum's permanent collection, The Uses of Art in Renaissance Italy considered the daily life of strikingly diverse objects: a silver reliquary, a marble tabernacle, an embroidered chasuble, a birth bowl—as well as altarpieces, works on paper and a selection of important medals.
This exhibition examined three distinct moments in which American artists devised innovative ways to use this elemental, immaterial medium; including works by Charles Biederman, Dan Flavin, Robert Irwin, James Turrell and a major commission by Stephen Hendee.
Principally drawn from materials gathered in Japan in the 1890s by Edmund Buckley, a professor of Comparative Religion at the University of Chicago, this exhibition included prints and photographic views of temples and cities, as well as images of religious objects, ceremonies, and deities.
A mantra is broadly understood as a type of chant used to focus attention in Buddhist practice, but visual representations were also employed in these rituals. This exhibition examined these contemplative and meditative images in traditional Japanese culture.
In 1995 after years of lobbying for permission, Hiroshi Sugimoto was allowed to photograph inside Kyoto's famed thirteenth-century Buddhist temple, Sanjusangendo (Hall of Thirty-Three Bays). Working at daybreak, he captured the dawn light illuminating the 1,000 statues of the bodhisattva Kannon, an enlightened being of boundless compassion. Sea of Buddha featured these meditative images which were complemented by a selection of both Sugimoto’s familiar and rarely-seen works.
Around 1940, as avant-garde art and artists increasingly flooded into the United States from war-torn Europe, American artists forged a new movement: Abstract Expressionism. This exhibition of eleven master drawings, watercolors, and collages looked at this critical period in the adoption of European modernist styles and subjects and their transformation into a new aesthetic free of traditional landscape, still life, or figural images.
Exhibition of small-scale terracotta maquettes reveals Arneson's evolution as an artist and the development of his freewheeling creativity and prodigious imagination.
Presented in conjunction with the major touring exhibition Big Idea: The Maquettes of Robert Arneson, this exhibition featured the less well-known prints of this pre-eminent California ceramic sculptor and master draftsman.