Free and open to the public
As part of an intensive twelve-week artist residency that began in November 2002, acclaimed Chicago-based photographer Dawoud Bey led twelve teenagers through a creative and critical investigation of the ways that identity is shaped, portrayed, and expressed in contemporary culture.
As part of the artist residency Dawoud Bey: The Chicago Project, the twelve Chicago teenage participants curated this exhibition, featuring photographic portraits from the Smart Museum's collection as well as works on loan from a private collection.
Featuring painting, sculpture, and works on paper from the Smart Museum's permanent collection as well as select loans, The Painted Text juxtaposed images from the 16th to 19th centuries with their literary sources in order to investigate how artists interpreted and transformed the stories that inspired them.
Japan has long been credited with bringing the art of lacquer to its highest technical and aesthetic development. This exhibition of fifty-six lacquer boxes—ranging in date from the Muromachi (1392–1568) and Momoyama (1568–1615) to Edo (1615–1868) periods—featured one of the most elegant and diverse assemblages of such pieces outside Japan.
This exhibition addressed the widespread societal transformation, engendered by Japan's new openness to the outside world during the nineteenth century which greatly impacted the print culture known as Ukiyo-e that flourished in the theater and courtesan quarters of Edo (modern Tokyo).
Featuring Greek, Roman, and Early Christian antiquities from the Smart Museum's permanent collection and loans of prints and illustrated books from Renaissance and Baroque Europe, this exhibition examined the religious life of things, both in their ancient contexts and in modern attempts to interpret them.
Drawing on the museum's rich holdings of German art and a number of important loans, this exhibition examined how artists and artworks defined or responded to individual, social and national identities over the course of the last two centuries.
This was the first public presentation of the Smart Museum's small, but select collection of Korean scholar and Buddhist paintings and calligraphy, which date from the apogee of Korean court culture in the eighteenth century to the tumultuous end of royal rule at the beginning of twentieth century.
Organized from the Smart Museum's permanent collection and selected loans, this exhibition included works in a variety of media by Chicago self-taught artists Henry Darger, Bonnie Harris, Aldobrando Piacenza, Pauline Simon, and Joseph Yoakum, as well as Jesse Howard, Martin Ramirez and others who did not live in Chicago but were influential and collected here.
The photographs in this exhibition shared a complex relationship with the human face. By exploring the camera's ability to create and unmask illusions (sometimes simultaneously), Face Off proposed that the viewer's role in discovering such obfuscation is an integral part of the work of art.