Free and open to the public
Drawing from the Smart's permanent collection, this intimate exhibition explored how nineteenth-century artists and their audiences drew on views of the natural world, classical imagery, allegory and historical subjects to construct a meaningful understanding of the rapidly changing present.
Critical Mass featured new commissions by Laurie Palmer, Robert Peters, Gregory Sholette, and Temporary Services (a four-member collective; Brett Bloom, Salem Collo-Julin, and Marc Fischer participated here).
Performative Images included work by Robert Heinecken, Adrian Piper, Robert Smithson, and Francesca Woodman. This was the third in a series of exhibitions highlighting recent photography acquisitions.
This exhibition featured a suite of thirty-three landscape paintings (1977–1978) created through a unique synthesis of Western and traditional Chinese paintings styles, and sixty-six pages of Mu Xin's Prison Notes, written while in solitary confinement from 1970 to 1973.
Exposure was the second in a series of exhibitions highlighting recent photography acquisitions; it offered a counterpoint to the museum's presentation of The Art of Mu Xin.
This exhibition explored the internationalism of this work, expressed in part though the stylistic synthesis of pictorial and modernist styles, and included works by Frantesek Drtikol, Jaromír Funke, Imre Kinski, Jaroslav Rösler, and Joseph Sudek, among others.
A Well-Fashioned Image drew on the Smart Museum's collection and a number of loaned works to investigate the symbolic role played by dress in European art from the Renaissance to the mid-nineteenth century.
This exhibition covered the entire range of Karel Teige's varied and influential career, from 1920 until his untimely death in 1951, and included items never before displayed outside Europe.
Roger Brown (1941–1997) was one of the foremost Chicago Imagist artists. Best known for his paintings, he was also a prolific printmaker, who worked in a range of graphic media—lithography, silkscreen, intaglio, woodcut, and commercial printing processes for which he made original drawings.
"See America First" is the first retrospective exhibition of the prints of the American sculptor, painter, draftsman, and printmaker H. C. Westermann (1922–1981), a central figure in American art of the post-war period.