Exhibitions

Awash in Color: French and Japanese Prints

2012-10-04T15:00:00Z

The rise of color printmaking in France in the late nineteenth century is often attributed to a fascination with Japanese woodblock prints, which began to circulate in great numbers after the opening of Japan in 1854. But a closer look at the history of color printmaking in these two cultures reveals that the story is not so simple. Parallel traditions were flourishing in both France and Japan well before 1854. And, when the two cultures met, the channels of technical and aesthetic influence flowed in both directions, not merely from East to West.

As the first major exhibition to take account of these complexities, Awash in Color explores the roles, functions, and technology of color in French and Japanese prints. It features more than one hundred prints and illustrated books from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, drawn from the Smart Museum’s substantial holdings as well as major public and private collections across the country. These exquisite works reveal two unfolding traditions—each shaped by artistic experimentation and technological progress—that came to complement each other aesthetically, even while preserving their own distinctive features.

Curators

Chelsea Foxwell, Assistant Professor of Art History at The University of Chicago, and Anne Leonard, Smart Museum Curator and Mellon Program Coordinator.

Support

This exhibition is one in a series of projects at the Smart Museum of Art supported by an endowment from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Additional support is provided by The IFPDA Foundation.

From the Land of the Morning Calm: Traditions of Korean Art

2012-07-05T20:45:17Z

Over thousands of years, traditional Korean society has forged a unique artistic heritage out of a blend of foreign ideals and local tastes. Korea’s expansive coastline and geographic position in Asia encouraged an outward focus, and Korean history is marked by periods of intense cultural, technological, and religious exchange with China and Japan (and more recently, the West). This is especially evident in the flourishing ceramic culture of the Goryeo period (918–1392) and in the innovations in literati painting during the Joseon dynasty (1392–1910).

Organized around the themes of craft, Buddhism, scholarly art, and modernity, From the Land of the Morning Calm offers a focused look at key components of this complex history of cross-cultural exchange and assimilation. It is the first major exhibition to showcase the Smart’s diverse collection of Korean art and includes nearly fifty works of ceramic, metalwork, sculpture, painting, and calligraphy that date from the late bronze age to the present day.

Curator

Richard A. Born, Smart Museum Senior Curator.

Presented in the Richard and Mary L. Gray Gallery for Special Exhibitions.

Above: Seon Monk-Painter Haejam, Indra and Heavenly Dragon General, circa 1770s, Opaque mineral pigments, ink, and gold on cloth (hanging scroll, remounted flat on stretched linen. Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, Purchase, Paul and Miriam Kirkley Fund for Acquisitions, 2009.21.

Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art

2012-02-16T16:00:00Z

Since the 1930s, numerous artists have used the simple act of sharing food and drink to advance aesthetic goals and to foster critical engagement with the culture of their moment. These artist-orchestrated meals can offer a radical form of hospitality that punctures everyday experience, using the meal as a means to shift perceptions and spark encounters that aren't always possible in a fast-moving and segmented society.

Feast surveys this practice for the first time, presenting the work of more than thirty artists and artist groups who have transformed the shared meal into a compelling artistic medium. The exhibition examines the history of the artist-orchestrated meal, assessing its roots in early-twentieth century European avant-garde art, its development over the past decades within Western art, and its current global ubiquity. Through a presentation within the Smart Museum and new commissions in public spaces, the exhibition will introduce new artists and contextualize their work in relation to other influential artists, from the Italian Futurists and Gordon Matta-Clark to Marina Abramović and Rirkrit Tiravanija. Feast addresses the radical hospitality embodied by these artists and the social, commercial, and political structures that surround the experience of eating together.

Join the Feast

Join the feast and discover first hand the ways in which artists are using shared experiences with food and drink to spark new encounters with the world around us. From a series of ritual soul food dinners to a food truck serving Iraqi cuisine, the Smart presents an array of participatory projects, meals, and salons that take place within the Smart Museum and throughout Chicago.

Learn more »

Artists

Feast includes art, documentary materials, and new public projects by Marina Abramović and Ulay, Sonja Alhäuser, Mary Ellen Carroll, Fallen Fruit, Theaster Gates, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, InCUBATE, The Italian Futurists, Mella Jaarsma, Alison Knowles, Suzanne Lacy, Lee Mingwei, Laura Letinsky, Tom Marioni, Gordon Matta-Clark, Mildred's Lane, Julio César Morales and Max La Rivière-Hedrick, motiroti, National Bitter Melon Council, Ana Prvacki, Sudsiri Pui-Ock, Michael Rakowitz, Ayman Ramadan, Red76, David Robbins, Allen Ruppersberg, Bonnie Sherk, Barbara T. Smith, Daniel Spoerri, and Rirkrit Tiravanija.

Tour

Exact tour dates and possible additional venues to be announced.

Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston, Texas
Fall 2013

SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Winter 2014

Curator

Stephanie Smith, Smart Museum Deputy Director and Chief Curator.

Support

Feast is made possible by an Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award. Generous major support has also been provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Chicago Community Trust, Helen Zell, the Chauncey and Marion Deering McCormick Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support is provided by the Elizabeth F. Cheney Foundation, the Richard and Mary L. Gray Foundation, the University of Chicago's Arts Council, and Janis Kanter and Tom McCormick.

Presented in the Richard and Mary L. Gray Gallery, the Robert and Joan Feitler Gallery, and the Joel and Carole Bernstein Gallery.

Chris Vorhees and SIMPARCH: Uppers and Downers

2012-01-10T16:00:00Z

As part of our Threshold series, the collaborative team of Chris Vorhees and SIMPARCH will transform the Smart Museum’s reception hall into a fantastical domestic landscape.

Uppers and Downers reworks the familiar kitchen setup of cabinetry, countertop, and sink into an abstracted version of a massive rainbow arching over a waterfall. This kitschy natural scene plays upon the utopian promise that restraint yields bliss: if only you eliminate excess and organize clutter to hide messy reality behind stylish surfaces, then happiness will follow. Or perhaps not. Uppers and Downers draws equally on the history of twentieth-century sculpture and design and the twenty-first century problem of accumulation. This site-specific work showcases the artists’ seriously playful aesthetic, expert craftsmanship, sensitive reworking of everyday materials, and capacity to transform the ways people interact with and within architectural spaces.

Uppers and Downers will be the artists’ first long-term project for a U.S. museum.

Curator

Stephanie Smith, Smart Museum Deputy Director and Chief Curator

Support

Lead funding for Uppers and Downers has been generously provided by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts with additional support provided by the Smart Family Foundation.

Above: Chris Vorhees and SIMPARCH, partial installation view of Uppers and Downers, 2012, LED lighting, metal, plumbing fixtures, PVC sheet, water, and wood.

Vision and Communism

2011-09-29T17:42:45Z

The Soviet artist and designer Viktor Koretsky (1909–1998) created aggressive, emotionally charged images that articulated a Communist vision of the world utterly unlike that of conventional propaganda.

Koretsky's captivating scenes of survival and suffering were designed to create an emotional connection between Soviet citizens and others struggling for civil rights and independence around the globe. This vision of a multicultural world of shared sacrifice offered a dynamic alternative to the sleek consumerism of Madison Avenue and the West and, according to the curators, can be thought of "as a kind of Communist advertising for a future that never quite arrived."

Drawing on an extensive private collection of Soviet art and propaganda, this exhibition presents nearly ninety of Koretsky's posters, photographs, and original maquettes. It is the first major museum exhibition in the United States to focus on Koretsky, who remains largely unknown in the West. Together with a publication that explores the dissident public culture nurtured in the Soviet bloc and a screening of films by Aleksandr Medvedkin and Chris Marker, Vision and Communism offers a striking new interpretation of visual communication in the USSR and beyond.

Film Series

The exhibition's themes are extended to cinema through screenings of the militant films of Aleksandr Medvedkin and Chris Marker at the University of Chicago's Film Studies Center.

In 1967 the French filmmaker Marker happened upon Medvedkin’s 1935 film satire Happiness and discovered for the world a lost giant of Soviet cinema. Featuring several films that have rarely, if ever, been shown in the United States, the screenings explore how Soviet vanguard cinema provided a model for Marker’s insurgent, grass-roots filmmaking in the West.

October 12, October 19, and November 2, 2011
7 pm
Film Studies Center, 5811 S. Ellis Avenue, C307

The series begins with Medvedkin’s early shorts and Marker’s films documenting the turmoil of 1968–1969. The second screening examines both filmmakers’ interest in the effects of Cold War politics on the Third World. The final screening presents Marker’s magisterial reflection on the history of the International Left, A Grin without a Cat (1977).

For a complete list of films and synopses, visit filmstudiescenter.uchicago.edu or call 773.702.8596.

Above: Logo for Medvedkin's film train in the 1930s.

Curators

Robert Bird, Associate Professor, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, The University of Chicago; Christopher Heuer, Assistant Professor, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University; Matthew Jesse Jackson, Associate Professor of Art History and the Department of Visual Arts, The University of Chicago; Tumelo Mosaka, Curator of Contemporary Art, Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and Stephanie Smith, Deputy Director and Chief Curator, Smart Museum of Art; with Richard A. Born, Senior Curator, Smart Museum of Art, as coordinating curator.

Presented in the Richard and Mary L. Gray Gallery for Special Exhibitions.

Matthew Metzger: Ghost

2011-09-26T15:00:00Z

The instantly recognizable red-and-white scuba “diver down” emblem alerts boaters to keep their distance as a diver is in the water and near the surface. Designed in 1953, it is now commonly emblazoned on stickers, t-shirts, flags, and other products.

For Chicago-based artist Matthew Metzger, the logo also provides formal and philosophical groundwork for exploration in a new painting commissioned for the Smart’s sculpture garden. Metzger (University of Chicago MFA 2009) sees the image as a memento mori that reminds us both of the body’s limited capacity to occupy a space and of our fleeting mortality. He is also interested in the emblem’s formal connections to hard-edge abstract painting of the 1950s and 60s through its color fields and emphasis on shape and dimension. In a thought-provoking new painting that references art history and popular culture, Metzger recreates the “diver down” logo while maintaining its emblematic proportions, within the constraints of a large canvas that fills the horizontal dimensions of the Museum’s entryway.

Curator

Jessica Moss, Smart Museum Associate Curator for Contemporary Art

Above: Matthew Metzger, Ghost, 2011, Latex on canvas with clear coat protectant. Courtesy of the artist.

Process and Artistry in the Soviet Vanguard

2011-08-30T18:52:18Z

This intimate exhibition offers a rare glimpse at the experimental creative processes that generated iconic Soviet propaganda in the 1920s and 1930s. Featuring works by Gustav Klucis and Valentina Kulagina, it traces classic compositions from preparatory drawings and collage studies to approved designs to posters and other mass-produced print material.

Curator: Kimberly Mims, Smart Museum curatorial intern and PhD student at the University of Chicago, in consultation with Richard A. Born, Smart Museum Senior Curator.

The exhibition is part of The Soviet Arts Experience, a Chicago-wide showcase exploring the arts of the Soviet Union.

Presented in two parts in the Joel and Carole Bernstein Gallery and the Elisabeth and William Landes Gallery.

Above: Gustav Klucis, Long Live Red Army of Workers and Peasants – Faithful Guard of Soviet Borders!, 1935. Poster. Ne boltai! Collection. © 2011 Estate of Gustav Klutsis / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Go Figure

2011-06-30T15:00:00Z

The human form has endured as a powerful subject throughout the history of art. This episodic exhibition illustrates pivotal moments in figurative art of the last sixty years through the work of nine exceptional artists: Nick Cave, Leon Golub, Yun-Fei Ji, Kerry James Marshall, Christina Ramberg, Martín Ramírez, Ravinder Reddy, Clare Rojas, and Sylvia Sleigh.

Despite their varied approaches to media and subject, these artists are bound by their sustained engagement with the human figure and by their use of pattern as a visual strategy to enhance, entice, or complicate our viewing experience. Go Figure brings together exemplary paintings, drawings, and sculpture from the Smart Museum and other collections throughout Chicago. Together, these works explore issues of identity, personal history, and social change and, in doing so, reveal the versatile capacity of art to capture the diversity and complexity of contemporary human experience.

Videos

Video: Sylvia Sleigh tells the story behind her iconic nude painting The Turkish Bath

The exhibition is accompanied by a series of video clips showcasing exhibiting artists Nick Cave, Leon Golub, Yun-Fei Ji, Kerry James Marshall, Ravinder Reddy, Clare Rojas, and Sylvia Sleigh. In the videos the artists discuss the human figure, artistic process, materials, and the role of art in our world.

Browse all the videos below. They'll also be available on iPads alongside the respective works in Go Figure.

Nick Cave / Materials

Nick Cave / Inspiration

Nick Cave / Performance

Nick Cave / Smart Soundsuit Performance

Leon Golub / Process

Leon Golub / Figuration and Monsters

Yun-Fei Ji / Background

Yun-Fei Ji / Right to Left

Kerry James Marshall / Biography

Kerry James Marshall / Black Figures

Kerry James Marshall / Slow Dance

Ravinder Reddy / Process

Ravinder Reddy / Girija

Clare Rojas / Everything's Connected

Clare Rojas / Peggy Honeywell

Clare Rojas / Quilts

Sylvia Sleigh / Portraits

Sylvia Sleigh / Equality

Sylvia Sleigh / The Turkish Bath

Curator

Jessica Moss, Smart Museum Associate Curator of Contemporary Art.

Support

This exhibition is supported by the Smart Family Foundation.

Presented in the Richard and Mary L. Gray Gallery for Special Exhibitions.

Warhol at Work: Portrait Snapshots, 1973-1986

2011-05-02T17:07:33Z

Over the course of his career, Pop Art pioneer Andy Warhol took thousands of photographs that were never intended to be seen by the public.

In the 1970s, at the height of Warhol’s extraordinary fame as an artist and filmmaker, he bought two automatic cameras that he carried with him everywhere. Using a small 35mm camera he took countless black and white snapshots of his immediate environment—parties, art studios, and New York City streets. Meanwhile, Warhol restructured his artistic practice around the Polaroid Big Shot camera: he produced carefully staged Polaroid portraits of friends and celebrities, many of which he used as the basis for his iconic prints and silkscreen paintings. The Polaroids follow a standard format, with the subject posed against a blank wall, close to the camera, their features abstracted by the strong flash and, often, heavy white makeup. The search to capture just the right image often resulted in up to a hundred slightly varied pictures of each sitter—an approach that reveals Warhol’s eye for detail and obsession with photography as an all-consuming process.

In 2008, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts donated 152 of the Polaroid and black and white photographs to the Smart Museum through the Andy Warhol Legacy Program. Featuring over sixty of them—many of which are being displayed publicly for the first time—Warhol at Work offers an almost voyeuristic glimpse into Warhol’s world, where experimental play, business, and art mix freely. The exhibition will illuminate both the identity of many of the sitters and establish their relationships to the artist and his work. It will also spotlight one example of Warhol’s characteristic use of photography by displaying Witch, a screenprint from his 1981 portfolio Myths, alongside its source—a Polaroid portrait of Margaret Hamilton, former star of the Hollywood classic The Wizard of Oz (1939). Such a pairing allows a concrete understanding of the sort of mechanical and creative transformations that characterize Warhol’s most important work.

Curators

Jessica Moss, Smart Museum Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art, and Emily Capper, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Curatorial Intern and PhD student at the University of Chicago

Credits

Support for this exhibition is generously provided by the David C. & Sarajean Ruttenberg Arts Foundation.

Presented in the Joel and Carole Bernstein Gallery for Works on Paper.

Above: Andy Warhol, Mrs. Yves (Debra) Arman, 1986, Polacolor ER. Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, Gift of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc, 2008.76.

After the Readymade

2011-05-02T15:49:56Z

This intimate exhibition charts the history of the readymade, a particular strain of twentieth- and twenty-first-century art that takes manufactured objects as primary material.

The works on view exploit commodities of varying origin, texture, scale, and color—including chocolate, comic and coloring books, shopping bags, sweaters, and wallpaper. Nearly a hundred years after Marcel Duchamp constructed the first readymade, the exhibition enables us to reconsider old notions of materiality and to reassess the now-ubiquitous use of non-traditional materials in art. After the Readymade coincides with, and serves as a primary source for, the University of Chicago graduate course Materialities of Modern Art. Students from this class will produce the individual object labels over the course of their study.

Curators

Emily Capper, Smart Museum Mellon Foundation curatorial intern and PhD student at the University of Chicago, in consultation with Christine Mehring, Associate Professor of Art History, and Jessica Moss, Smart Museum Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art.

Credits

This exhibition is one in a series of projects at the Smart Museum of Art supported by an endowment from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that fosters interdisciplinary use of the Museum’s collections by University of Chicago faculty and students in both courses and special exhibitions.

Presented in the Joel and Carole Bernstein Gallery for Works on Paper.

Above: Installation view of After the Readymade.

The Tragic Muse: Art and Emotion, 1700-1900

2011-02-10T17:52:39Z

Art is often appreciated for its ability to delight our eyes and refresh our minds. But it can also serve as a powerful vehicle for exploring darker emotions, such as fear, sadness, and grief. And while these themes have a history dating back to the ancients, the ways in which they have been represented in art have changed dramatically over time.

This exhibition examines two centuries of works intertwined with emotion—from the sacrifice of classical heroines to the grief of ordinary people, from martyred saints to actors in tragic roles—and explores how art’s cathartic power grows or fades for new generations of viewers. With over forty paintings, sculptures, and prints, The Tragic Muse combines works from the Smart’s collection—both long-held treasures and new acquisitions—with important loans from the Art Institute of Chicago, Milwaukee Art Museum, National Gallery of Art, and Tate. Together with an accompanying catalogue, the exhibition draws on the scholarship of University of Chicago faculty to offer fresh insight into the visual representation of tragedy and art’s power to express and elicit intense emotions.

Curator

Anne Leonard, Smart Museum Curator and Mellon Program Coordinator.

Credits

Presented in the Richard and Mary L. Gray Gallery for Special Exhibitions.

David Wojnarowicz: A Fire in My Belly

2011-01-04T17:35:38Z

A leading artist of the 1980s, David Wojnarowicz is known for the richly aesthetic and strongly activist works that he made in response to the AIDS crisis. The artist's 1986–87 film A Fire in My Belly is a poetic, unfinished work that was created in part as a tribute to his friend and colleague, Peter Hujar, who died of AIDS.

An excerpt of the work was removed from the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture following protests by a religious group and conservative politicians. In response to the Smithsonian's decision to pull the work, institutions around the country joined together to host screenings as a way to draw attention to its removal and to foster discussion around the work and issues of censorship.

The Smart Museum screened the original, 13-minute version of the film edited by Wojnarowicz in 1986–87 followed by a 7-minute additional chapter that was later found in his collection. It played on continuous loop in a black box screening area.

Video

Video: Experts discuss Wojnarowicz and the controversy surrounding his work at a panel discussion on January 27, 2011.

Presented in the Robert and Joan Feitler Gallery for Contemporary Art.

Above: still from David Wojnarowicz, A Fire In My Belly (Film In Progress), 1986-87, Super 8mm film, black and white & color, Silent. Courtesy of The Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W Gallery, New York and The Fales Library and Special Collections/ New York University.

Bingyi: Cascade

2010-11-16T16:00:00Z

The Chinese-born artist Bingyi inaugurates the Threshold series with the specially commissioned Cascade, an enormous painting that fills the central wall in the Smart’s reception hall.

Taking over a basketball court in Xuli, a small village in China’s Anhui province, the artist created this beautiful, abstracted black-and-white landscape on massive panels of rice paper which were then shipped to Chicago and attached to the Smart's concave wall using wheat paste. The work draws on the artist's deep knowledge of traditional Chinese landscape painting—Bingyi holds a PhD in art history—as well as contemporary painting techniques. Thought to be the largest rice paper ink painting ever made, it depicts the artist's inner vision of a giant waterfall flowing backward from earth to heaven.

Video

On May 8, the Smart Museum, the Center for East Asian Studies, and the Confucius Institute presented Four Movements of Water, an avant-garde Chinese opera composed by Bingyi to illuminate her painting Cascade. The concert united visual and musical expression, mixing flute and pipa (lute) music with free-style improvised chanting to evoke the movement of water from cascade to cloud. The concert was performed by Ding Xue'er (guzheng), Shao Tianshuai (vocalist), Wei Zidong (bamboo flute), Wang Yayu (pipa), and Wei Xing (vocalist) with lyrics and narrative composed by Bingyi.

This performance was made possible by the University of Chicago Arts Council, the China Committee of the Center for East Asian Studies, and the Confucius Institute.

This Threshold commission is supported by the Smart Family Foundation.

Presented in the Eunice Ratner Reception Gallery.

Above: Bingyi, Cascade, Ink, household cleaners, and water on paper. Commissioned by the Smart Museum of Art. Courtesy the artist.

Echoes of the Past: The Buddhist Cave Temples of Xiangtangshan

2010-09-30T16:47:27Z

Carved into the mountains of northern China, the Buddhist cave temples of Xiangtangshan (響堂山, pronounced “shahng-tahng-shahn”) were the crowning cultural achievement of the sixth-century Northern Qi dynasty. Once home to a magnificent array of sculptures—monumental Buddhas, elaborate attendant figures, and crouching monsters framed by floral motifs—the limestone caves were severely damaged in the first half of the twentieth century when their contents were chiseled away and offered for sale on the international art market. During the past six years, however, the caves have become the focus of a research and reconstruction project based at the Center for the Art of East Asia at the University of Chicago. Combining cutting-edge 3-D imaging technology with old-fashioned scholarly work, an international team of experts has photographed and scanned the dispersed objects as well as the interior of the caves themselves.

Organized by the Smart Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Institution's Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Echoes of the Past represents the culmination of this extraordinary research project. It sheds new light on the original beauty and meaning of the shrines, uniting dispersed objects from Xiangtangshan—considered among the finest achievements of Chinese sculpture—with innovative digital components, including a video installation that provides an immersive, kinetic re-creation of one of the most important caves.

About the Xiangtangshan research project

In 2004, the University of Chicago’s Center for the Art of East Asia launched a project to identify, locate, research, and document the dispersed stone carvings of the Xiangtangshan caves. Using sophisticated 3-D scanning equipment, the project’s imaging team has photographed and scanned nearly 100 objects believed to be from Xiangtangshan, which are now located in museums and private collections around the globe. Through a collaboration with Peking University and the Fengfeng Office for the Protection and Management of Cultural Properties, the imaging team was also granted official permission to photograph and scan the Xiangtangshan cave sites.

A digital archive of the project, cave sites, and dispersed sculptures is available online at xts.uchicago.edu.

Explore the 3-D models

Video: Manipulating a 3-D model using JScanView.

For each object, the Xiangtangshan research team captured hundreds of overlapping scans that were later knitted together into untextured 3-D models. Through a java application called JScanView, select high-resolution models of the sculptures are available to the general public and scholars worldwide.

The 3-D scans captured chisel marks, break areas, and other fine details that allow researchers to match the dispersed fragments to their original locations within the Xiangtangshan caves. With some additional image processing, the objects and shrines can be texture mapped—that is, covered with surface details taken from high-resolution color photographs—to create realistic digital reconstructions of the caves' original appearance.

JScanView was developed by Lec Maj and others in Humanities Research Computing at the University of Chicago based on ScanView software designed by Marc Levoy and David Koller of the Stanford Computer Graphics Laboratory.

About the exhibition

The Smart Museum’s presentation of Echoes of the Past includes thirteen objects from Xiangtangshan and three related Northern Qi works of art. The exhibition juxtaposes dispersed sculptural fragments with a set of media projects including an immersive video installation, a documentary film directed by Judy Hoffman about the present-day environs of the cave sites, and interactive touchscreen labels related to the monumental stone fragments on view.

The Xiangtangshan sculptures on view at the Smart Museum are on loan from the Asian Museum of San Francisco, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Sackler Collections at Columbia University, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

The digital cave

Above: Still from the "digital cave" showing wireframe rendering of the main and side altars of South Cave, Northern Xiangtangshan. Image by Jason Salavon and Travis Saul.

A centerpiece of the Echoes of the Past exhibition is the "digital cave," an immersive video installation overseen by artist and University of Chicago faculty member Jason Salavon.

Three rear-projection screens show a montage of black-and-white archival images, contemporary color photographs, and 3-D digital reconstructions of the South Cave, Northern Xiangtangshan. This poetic video installation provides visitors with a vivid illustration of the site's modern history, tracing an arc of despoliation, preservation, and reconstruction.

Curators

Katherine R. Tsiang, Associate Director of the Center for the Art of East Asia, Department of Art History, University of Chicago, in consultation with Richard A. Born, Senior Curator, Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago and J. Keith Wilson, Associate Director and Curator of Ancient Chinese Art, Freer and Sackler Galleries.

Tour

Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington, DC
February 26 – July 31, 2011

Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas
September 11, 2011 – January 8, 2012

San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, California
February 18 – May 27, 2012

Credits

Echoes of the Past: The Buddhist Cave Temples of Xiangtangshan is organized by the Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago and by the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. Major funding is provided by the Leon Levy Foundation, the Smart Family Foundation, the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Additional support for the Smart Museum’s presentation is generously provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, the University of Chicago Women’s Board, and Helen Zell. The exhibition catalogue was made possible by Fred Eychaner and Tommy Yang Guo, with additional support from Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund.

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this exhibition do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Presented in the Richard and Mary L. Gray Gallery for Special Exhibitions.

Anna Kunz: Eidolon

2010-09-11T00:42:38Z

The first art-banner commission in the Smart Museum's Threshold series is Ediolon, a large vinyl collage by Chicago-based artist Anna Kunz.

Commissioned by the Smart and designed by Kunz specifically for the Museum's sculpture garden, the collage banner reflects the forms and shapes the artist observed while visiting, and uses a color palette that the artist captured on site and filtered through the Pantone iPhone app.

Presented in Vera and A.D. Elden Sculpture Garden.

Exhibitions

Awash in Color: French and Japanese Prints

Curators

Support

From the Land of the Morning Calm: Traditions of Korean Art

Curator

Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art

Join the Feast

Artists

Tour

Curator

Support

Chris Vorhees and SIMPARCH: Uppers and Downers

Curator

Support

Above: Chris Vorhees and SIMPARCH, partial installation view of Uppers and Downers, 2012, LED lighting, metal, plumbing fixtures, PVC sheet, water, and wood.

Vision and Communism

Film Series

Above: Logo for Medvedkin's film train in the 1930s.

Curators

Matthew Metzger: Ghost

Curator

Above: Matthew Metzger, Ghost, 2011, Latex on canvas with clear coat protectant. Courtesy of the artist.

Process and Artistry in the Soviet Vanguard

Above: Gustav Klucis, Long Live Red Army of Workers and Peasants – Faithful Guard of Soviet Borders!, 1935. Poster. Ne boltai! Collection. © 2011 Estate of Gustav Klutsis / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Go Figure

Videos

Video: Sylvia Sleigh tells the story behind her iconic nude painting The Turkish Bath

Curator

Support

Warhol at Work: Portrait Snapshots, 1973-1986

Curators

Credits

Above: Andy Warhol, Mrs. Yves (Debra) Arman, 1986, Polacolor ER. Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, Gift of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc, 2008.76.

After the Readymade

Curators

Credits

Above: Installation view of After the Readymade.

The Tragic Muse: Art and Emotion, 1700-1900

Curator

Credits

David Wojnarowicz: A Fire in My Belly

Video

Video: Experts discuss Wojnarowicz and the controversy surrounding his work at a panel discussion on January 27, 2011.

Above: still from David Wojnarowicz, A Fire In My Belly (Film In Progress), 1986-87, Super 8mm film, black and white & color, Silent. Courtesy of The Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W Gallery, New York and The Fales Library and Special Collections/ New York University.

Bingyi: Cascade

Video

Above: Bingyi, Cascade, Ink, household cleaners, and water on paper. Commissioned by the Smart Museum of Art. Courtesy the artist.

Echoes of the Past: The Buddhist Cave Temples of Xiangtangshan

About the Xiangtangshan research project

Explore the 3-D models

Video: Manipulating a 3-D model using JScanView.

About the exhibition

The digital cave

Above: Still from the "digital cave" showing wireframe rendering of the main and side altars of South Cave, Northern Xiangtangshan. Image by Jason Salavon and Travis Saul.

Curators

Tour

Credits

Anna Kunz: Eidolon

Above: Anna Kunz, digital sketch of Eidolon, 2010. Courtesy of the artist.