Free and open to the public
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).