Past Exhibitions : 2025
Expanding the 50th: Shared Stories
March 25, 2025 – July 13, 2025
Expanding the 50th: Shared Stories offers an updated presentation of the institution’s anniversary exhibition to explore the histories that have made up the Smart Museum over the last five decades. In honor of its anniversary, the Smart has commissioned four artists to create new works as interventions in the Museum’s and our shared histories.
Smart to the Core: Wise to Power
September 23, 2025 - July 5, 2026
Part I, September 23, 2025 - February 22, 2026
Part II, March 24, 2026 - July 5, 2026
Why and how do people form political communities? How does political society organize our economic lives - and vice versa? And how as individuals do we navigate society? Smart to the Core: Wise to Power examines these questions by integrating visual art with foundational texts of modern social and political thought spanning over three centuries.
Theaster Gates -
African Still Life #3: A Tribute to Patric McCoy and Marva Jolly
September 23, 2025 - July 5, 2026
Presented as an open-storage museum cabinet, African Still Life #3: A Tribute to Patric McCoy and Marva Jolly is a site-specific installation offered as part of the Museum's Threshold Lobby Series. Introduced in conjunction with the exhibition Theaster Gates: Unto Thee, this installation deepens Gates's ongoing investigation of rituals of accumulation, redemption, and relational aesthetics.