Past Exhibitions
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.
Taisho Chic: Japanese Modernity, Nostalgia, and Deco
April 22 – June 20, 2004
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.
Incisive Vision: The Prints of James Abbott McNeill Whistler
April 2 – June 13, 2004
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.
The Uses of Art in Renaissance Italy
March 9 – August 22, 2004
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.
Illuminations: Sculpting with Light
January 22 – April 4, 2004
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.
Mapping the Sacred: Nineteenth-Century Japanese Buddhist Prints
December 13, 2003 – March 28, 2004
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.
Visual Mantras: Meditative Traditions in Japanese Buddhist Art
October 2, 2003 – February 22, 2004
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.
Hiroshi Sugimoto: Sea of Buddha
October 2, 2003 – January 4, 2004
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.
Mid-Century American Abstraction: Master Works on Paper
September 13 – December 7, 2003
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.