Free and open to the public
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.
This exhibition highlighted recent gifts of Gandharan sculpture from the Manilow collection and included a selection of sculpture from the Smart Museum's collection of classical Greek and Roman antiquities and later East Asian Buddhist paintings and sculpture.
Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945) is perhaps best known for majestic paintings from the 1980s and early 1990s that evoked Germany's contested history through charred landscapes and mythic symbolism.This exhibition, drawn from the Manilow collection, used a few choice works to call attention to other aspects of Kiefer's practice.
This exhibition, organized by the Harvard University Art Museums, presented the photographic work of the celebrated American social realist artist Ben Shahn (1898–1969).
Landscapes of Retrospection invited us to reflect on the role of landscape representation, antiquarianism, and topographical description as Britain envisioned itself simultaneously as a country with a rich history and as a modern, imperial nation-state.
The Theatrical Baroque investigated the incorporation of theatrical devices into visual representation, the role of the baroque audience, and the dynamics of social performance as presented in imagery. Like Pious Journeys: Christian Devotional Art and Practice in the Later Middle Ages and Renaissance, this exhibition was one of a series of special projects developed in collaboration among University faculty, students, and the Museum.
In a special collaboration, the Smart Museum of Art and the Renaissance Society presented two distinct facets of his work: a series of drawings on hotel stationery and a huge, complex sculptural installation. The Smart Museum gathered approximately 200 of Kippenberger's "hotel drawings" from private collections in Europe and the United States. This series of drawings on hotel stationery includes doodle-like drawings on hotel stationery, highly finished compositions, and sketches that relate to his paintings, sculptures, and installations.
This intimate exhibition presented master drawings and watercolors by some of the leading German modernists of the first three decades of the twentieth century, including Lovis Corinth, George Groxz, Erich Heckel, Kähe Kollwitz, and Emil Nolde, among others.
"Canceled" was an unconventional exhibition. Its subject was not an artist or a group of art works, but another exhibition that was never realized: It's Me (Beijing, 1998), a group show curated by Leng Lin that was canceled by Chinese officials the day before its scheduled opening.