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Past Exhibitions : 2022

A bulbous ceramic sculpture made from vase fragments with gold joints

Porcelain: Material and Storytelling

February 15–March 6, 2022

Porcelain is an artistic medium as well as a material substance. It can be used to represent figures and to tell stories in two-dimensional and three-dimensional forms, and its own materiality can also be made into the subject of artistic expression.

Bob Thompson: This House Is Mine

February 15–May 15, 2022

Featuring more than 85 paintings and works on paper, This House Is Mine centers Bob Thompson’s brief but prolific transatlantic career within expansive art historical narratives and ongoing dialogues about the politics of representation, charting his enduring influence.

Unsettled Ground: Art and Environment from the Smart Museum Collection

March 22–June 26, 2022

How has the environment shaped artistic practice, and how can artistic form teach us to understand our local and planetary environment in new ways? Organized by the Feitler Center for Academic Inquiry, this exhibition speaks to a generative conversation between art and the environment across multiple scales of time and space.

Drawing of a male nude from side, posed looking over shoulder

Museum as Classroom

September 22, 2022–January 8, 2023

Organized by the Feitler Center for Academic Inquiry, this presentation features clusters of artworks that were selected for individual courses across disciplines at the University of Chicago—ranging from “Art and Feminism” to “Seeing Through Drawing.”

A grid of white blinds are suspended against a blue wall

Haegue Yang: Quasi-Legit

September 22, 2022–June 9, 2024

Haegue Yang’s newly commissioned artwork—the artist’s first large-scale installation in Chicago—dislodges venetian blinds from their typical function as window coverings to create a monumental white grid suspended in front of a soaring blue wall in the Smart Museum’s lobby.

Monochrome Multitudes

September 22, 2022–January 8, 2023

This exhibition traces “the monochrome” as a fundamental if surprisingly expansive artistic practice.