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Past Exhibitions : 2002

The Art of Mu Xin: Landscape Paintings and Prison Notes

January 24 – March 31, 2002

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

March 30 – June 16, 2002

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

April 25 – June 23, 2002

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).

Nature, Myth, Allegory: Imagining Reality in the Nineteenth Century

May 14 – October 6, 2002

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. 

Face Off: Works by Chicago Photographers in the Smart Museum Collection

June 22 – September 8, 2002

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.

Outside In: Self-Taught Artists and Chicago

July 11 – September 15, 2002

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. 

The Virtuous Image: Korean Painting and Calligraphy from the Late Choson Dynasty in the Smart Museum

September 14 – December 15, 2002

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.

Confronting Identities in German Art: Myths, Reactions, Reflections

October 3, 2002 – January 5, 2003

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.

Sacred Fragments: Magic, Mystery, and Religion in the Ancient World

October 22, 2002 – March 16, 2003

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.

Reflections of Beauty: Late Nineteenth-Century Japanese Prints in the Smart Museum Collection

December 15, 2002 – March 23, 2003

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).