Exhibitions

Monster Roster: Existentialist Art in Postwar Chicago

2015-09-17T15:00:00Z

The group postwar artists nicknamed the Monster Roster established the first unique Chicago style. Spearheaded by Leon Golub, the group created deeply psychological works that drew on classical mythology, ancient art, and a shared interest in what one critic has called “the figure under stress.” Indeed, the fiercely independent Monster Roster artists persisted in depicting the figure during a period in which abstraction held sway in international art circles.

This is the first major exhibition to examine the history and impact of the Monster Roster, which has been overlooked despite being one of the most important Midwestern contributions to the development of American art. It examines not only the complex aesthetics and personal styles of Golub and his compatriots—including Cosmo Campoli, June Leaf, Dominick Di Meo, Seymour Rosofsky, and Nancy Spero, among others—but also uncovers the Monster Roster’s relationships with preceding generations of Chicago artists and influences on the well-known Chicago Imagists who followed. Monster Roster brings together major paintings, sculpture, and works on paper from the Smart Museum and other major public and private collections in order to provide the authoritative account of the movement, from the formation of Exhibition Momentum in 1948 to the group’s dispersal in the mid 1960s.

Curators

John Corbett and Jim Dempsey, independent curators and owners of Corbett vs. Dempsy Gallery, Chicago, with Jessica Moss, Smart Museum Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, and Richard A. Born, Smart Museum Senior Curator, serving as coordinating curators.

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

Imaging/Imagining: The Body in Art

2014-03-25T15:00:00Z

For centuries, depicting the body has been essential to practitioners of art as well as medicine. Drawing the human form is a fundamental component of art pedagogy, while medical doctors have long relied on anatomical illustrations to understand what goes on inside the body. Yet the advent of advanced imaging technology now allows us to see structures and processes that were long inaccessible to the eye, taking away the artist’s “hand” and reducing the role of subjective imagination.

Organized by three physicians at the University of Chicago, this exhibition gathers images of the body from a range of historical periods and considers the extent to which they conform to established representational conventions or seem instead to reflect the artist’s own observations or expressive goals. Other themes to be considered are the enduring role of figure drawing in academic art study; the “posing” of bodies for artistic and diagnostic ends; the oscillation between abstraction and realistic detail; and the special emphasis on the hand, which comes into prominent focus as a symbol of dexterity and skill (whether the artist’s or the surgeon’s).

Related exhibitions

Imaging/Imagining will be presented concurrently with two related exhibitions at the University of Chicago Library’s Special Collections Research Center and the John Crerar Library.

Curators

Mindy Schwartz, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine, and Brian Callender, MD, Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine, with Kelly Nicholas, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Neurology and Surgery at the University of Chicago Medical Center, in consultation with Anne Leonard, Smart Museum Curator and Associate Director of Academic Initiatives.

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

Above: Attributed to Louis De Boullogne the Younger, Reclining Male Nude, c. 1700–1710, Black chalk heightened with white chalk on blue wove paper. Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, Purchase, Gift of the Friends of the Smart Gallery, 1988 and Mrs. George B. Young, 1988.69.

Performing Images: Opera in Chinese Visual Culture

2014-02-13T16:00:00Z

During the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), Chinese passion for opera and theater permeated the visual and material world of everyday life. Opera was at the heart of Chinese social life, from the village to the court, and the spectacle of theater was found not only on the stage—in costumes, props, and face painting—but also across the full spectrum of Chinese visual culture, from scroll paintings to popular prints.

One of the first major exhibitions of its kind in the West, Performing Images focuses on the vibrant imagery, rather than ethnographic artifacts, of Chinese opera. The exhibition examines the extent to which operatic characters and stories were represented in pictorial and decorative motifs in a wide array of media including ceramics, illustrated books, painted fans, prints, photographs, scroll paintings, and textiles. Featuring an array of remarkable objects on loan from major museum collections, the exhibition and its catalogue reveal how Chinese visual and performing traditions were aesthetically, ritually, and commercially intertwined.

Curators

Judith T. Zeitlin, Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and Theater and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago, and Yuhang Li, Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Wisconsin (fall 2013), in consultation with Richard A. Born, Smart Museum Senior Curator.

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

Interiors and Exteriors: Avant-Garde Itineraries in Postwar France

2013-12-17T16:00:00Z

This exhibition will trace the relationship between the emerging generation of avant-garde movements in 1950s France and the surrealist movement, re-established in Paris after the war.

The social milieu of the Left Bank offered rich material for artists to map social and psychological experience by tracing quotidian itineraries and social interactions. These contesting visions of the relationship between interior and exterior life in art represent a tense exploration of the location of the personal and the political within reconstruction-era France. Interiors and Exteriors features an array of artworks and artists’ publications from the Smart’s collection as well as the University of Chicago and Northwestern University libraries. A related film, performance, and lecture series will explore these topics throughout the year.

Curators

Jennifer Cohen and Marin Sarvé-Tarr, PhD students at the University of Chicago, in consultation with Anne Leonard, Smart Museum Curator and Associate Director of Academic Initiatives.

Support

This exhibition and related programs are supported in part by the France Chicago Center at the University of Chicago.

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

State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970

2013-10-03T15:00:00Z

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the Imagists exhibited in Chicago and abstract painting held sway in New York, a distinct strain of avant-garde and conceptual art emerged in California.

The state was an incubator of social change and counter-culture that attracted artists seeking alternatives to traditional modes of art making. California's distance from commercial galleries and the art-world press also gave artists greater freedom to experiment as they challenged the definition of art, the role of the artist, and the academic and institutional structures of the art world.

Organized as part of the landmark Pacific Standard Time initiative by the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) and the Orange County Museum of Art, State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970 is the first in-depth survey of conceptual art in California. It examines this formative period and the enduring legacy it has left for succeeding generations of artists. It includes the work of sixty artists and collectives, including Ant Farm, John Baldessari, Chris Burden, Lynn Hershman, Bruce Nauman, Martha Rosler, and Ed Ruscha. Organized thematically, the exhibition showcases more than 150 works of art—installations, photographs, videos and films, artists' books, and extensive performance documentation—that demonstrate the critical role of California artists in the development of conceptual art and other new genres.

Artists

Bas Jan Ader, Terry Allen, Ant Farm, Eleanor Antin, Asco, Michael Asher, John Baldessari, Gary Beydler, Nancy Buchanan, Chris Burden, Paul Cotton, Robert Cumming, Peter d'Agostino, Lowell Darling, Guy de Cointet, Robert Cumming, Morgan Fisher, Terry Fox, Howard Fried, Charles Gaines, David Hammons, Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, Mel Henderson, Joe Hawley, Lynn Hershman, Douglas Huebler, Stephen Kaltenbach, Allan Kaprow, Robert Kinmont, John Knight, Paul Kos, Suzanne Lacy, Stephen Laub, William Leavitt, Fred Lonidier, Mike Mandel, Tom Marioni, Paul McCarthy, Jim Melchert, Susan Mogul, Linda Mary Montano, Bruce Nauman, Martha Rosler, Allen Ruppersberg, Ed Ruscha, Sam's Café, Darryl Sapien, Ilene Segalove, Allan Sekula, Bonnie Sherk, Alexis Smith, Barbara Smith, Larry Sultan, T.R. Uthco, Ger van Elk, William Wegman, John Woodall, and Alfred Young.

About

State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970 is an exhibition curated by Constance Lewallen and Karen Moss, and co-organized by the Orange County Museum of Art and the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. The tour is organized by Independent Curators International (ICI), New York, and is made possible, in part, by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, Video Data Bank, Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), and with the generous support of Robert Redd, LLC, and the ICI Board of Trustees.

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

Above: Robert Kinmont, 8 Natural Handstands (detail), 1969/2009, Nine silver gelatin prints, each: 8 x 8 in/ 21.5 x 21.5 cm. Photo: Joerg Lohse. Image courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York.

Wings, Speed, and Cosmic Dominion in Renaissance Italy

2013-09-03T15:00:00Z

Wings are prevalent in a wide range of Renaissance representations, from figures (angels, winged cherubs, and mythological gods) to animals (eagles, griffins, and winged horses). The multiple iconographies of wings during this period drew on allegorical, cosmological, and religious symbols inherited from both Christian and ancient Near Eastern mythologies.

Drawing on the Smart Museum’s permanent collection, with selected loans from the University of Chicago’s Library and the Oriental Institute, this intimate exhibition examines the Renaissance fascination with wings as symbols of speed and power through the influential histories of flight derived from the bird cult of Horus in ancient Egypt to the circulation of winged creatures in prints by Albrecht Dürer and others.

Curator

Iva Olah, Mellon Foundation Curatorial Intern at the Smart Museum and PhD student at the University of Chicago, in consultation with Anne Leonard, Smart Museum Curator and Associate Director of Academic Initiatives.

Presented in the Joel and Carole Bernstein Gallery.

Above: Peter Flötner, Mars as a Sign of the Zodiac, c. 1540, Cast gilt bronze plaquette. Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, Purchase, The Cochrane-Woods Collection, 1977.115.

Zachary Cahill: USSA 2012: Wellness Center: Idyllic—affair of the heart

2013-08-23T15:00:00Z

In his site-specific banner commissioned for the Smart Museum’s courtyard, Zachary Cahill questions whether art has the power to make us well.

Drawing from multiple historical sources, Cahill (University of Chicago MFA 2007) considers the parallel traditions of the artistic retreat and the health spa or sanatorium—places often situated within idyllic natural environments, where residents or weary guests seek a bit of respite. For this year-long installation he will present a vinyl banner painting, featuring gestural responses to the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich's The Monk by the Sea (1808–10) and early-twentieth-century expressionistic portraiture. Cahill reflects upon these references as descriptions of an existential relationship between the individual and the landscape. His work invites us to consider the distance—often difficult to express—between internal and external experience.

Idyllic—affair of the heart inaugurates the third and concluding chapter of Cahill’s long-term USSA 2012 project, building on his previous works The Orphanage Project (2011) and The People’s Palace’s Gift Shop (2012). Each of these iterations invokes USSA 2012: an institution invented to support the artist’s interventions into cultural spaces. USSA 2012: Wellness Center is conceived as a work with multiple parts; this banner marks the first, and will be accompanied by performative and discursive events over the year the banner is on view. More details about these events will be posted shortly.

"Idyllic—affair of the heart, my dear lady," Behrens said, and held Louisa Ziemssen’s hand in his own two, the size of two shovels, looking down at her with his goggling, watery, blood-shot eyes. "I’m tremendously glad it is taking such a gratifying course, and he doesn’t need to go through with the Œdema of the glottis or any indignity of that sort, he will be spared a lot of messing about. The heart is giving out rapidly, lucky for him and for us; we can do our duty with camphor injections and the like, without much chance of drawing things out. He will sleep a good deal at the end, and his dreams will be pleasant, I think I can promise you that, even if he shouldn’t go off to sleep, still it will be a short crossing, he’ll scarcely notice, you may rely upon it. It’s so in the majority of the cases, at bottom— I know what death is, I am an old retainer of his; and believe me, he’s overrated. Almost nothing to him: Of course, all kinds of beastliness can happen beforehand— but it isn’t fair to count those in, they are as living life itself, and can just as well lead up to a cure. But about Death— No one who came back from it could tell you anything, because we don’t realize it. We come out of the dark and go into the dark again, and in between lie the experience of our life. But the beginning and the end, birth and death, we do not experience; they have no subjective character, they fall entirely in the category of objective events, and that’s that."

— Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

Curator

Sarah Mendelsohn, Smart Museum Executive Assistant for Program Support.

About

Cahill’s piece is the fourth art-banner commissioned as part of the Smart’s annual Threshold series, and the third commissioned from an alum of the University of Chicago’s Department of Visual Arts.

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

Image: Inspiration for USSA 2012: Wellness Center: Idyllic—affair of the heart. Photo taken by the artist.

The Land Beneath Our Feet: American Art at the Smart Museum

2013-06-27T15:00:00Z

Tracing a chronological arc of almost a century, this exhibition showcases both familiar and lesser-known works from the Smart Museum’s collection of American art. It presents approximately eighty works—paintings, sculptures, prints, and photographs—by American artists, while exploring national context and changes in art between 1850 and 1945.

The exhibition will make a subtle nod to the hundredth anniversary of the 1913 Armory Show with paintings by two key artist-organizers, Arthur Davies and Walt Kuhn. Among other highlights are a wealth of survey photographs—including an exceptional panorama of the American West—taken by Timothy O’Sullivan and William Bell in the 1860s and 70s; celebrated etchings by James McNeill Whistler; landscape paintings by Tonalist master George Inness; and photographs by Walker Evans.

Artists

William Bell, William Merritt Chase, Jasper Francis Cropsey, Arthur Davies, Jo Davidson, Manierre Dawson, Arthur Dove, Walker Evans, Andreas Feininger, Childe Hassam, Lewis Hine, Winslow Homer, Georges Inness, Rockwell Kent, Walt Kuhn, Robert Laurent, John Mowbray-Clarke, Timothy O’Sullivan, Guy Pène du Bois, John Sloan, Raphael Soyer, John Storrs, Bessie Potter Vonnoh, James McNeill Whistler, and Grant Wood, among others.

Curator

Anne Leonard, Smart Museum Curator and Associate Director of Academic Initiatives.

Support

This exhibition is supported in part by Nuveen Investments.

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

Top: Childe Hassam, On the Lake Front Promenade, Columbian World Exposition, 1893, Oil on canvas. Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, The Harold H. Swift Bequest, 1962, 1976.146.

Other Modernisms: Serge Charchoune (1889-1975)

2013-05-07T15:00:00Z

The achievement of Franco-Russian painter Serge Charchoune (1889–1975) is among the least widely known or understood in twentieth-century European art.

Sometimes seen as a minor practitioner of major modernist styles—Dada, Cubism, Purism, informal abstraction—Charchoune in fact operated quite independently within and beyond those tendencies. He was an unpredictable individualist, who in his resistance to stylistic conformity and his ambiguous relationship to taste presages a strain of post-conceptual painting only fully recognized toward the turn of the twenty-first century.

Organized by the Talbot Rice Gallery at the University of Edinburgh, Other Modernisms is a concise survey, comprising around twenty works from the 1920s to the 1970s, carefully selected to demonstrate Charchoune’s diversity, uniqueness, and current relevance. The majority of the works are paintings, with a few works on paper and one livre d’artiste.

Curators

Other Modernisms is curated by Merlin James, an artist, writer, and curator, and by David Schutter, Assistant Professor of Visual Arts, The University of Chicago, in consultation with Richard A. Born, Smart Museum Senior Curator.

Top: Serge Charchoune, Grossissement, 1927, Oil on canvas.

The Sahmat Collective: Art and Activism in India since 1989

2013-02-14T16:00:00Z

Since 1989, the influential Delhi-based Sahmat has offered a platform for artists, writers, poets, musicians, actors, and activists to create and present works of art that promote artistic freedom and celebrate secular, egalitarian values.

The collective formed in the weeks after playwright, actor, and activist Safdar Hashmi was fatally attacked by political thugs while performing a street play. In the more than twenty years since, Sahmat has drawn on India’s secular heritage and an expansive group of collaborators to produce a series of projects that engage in important political and social debates through a mix of high art and street culture. This exhibition will introduce Sahmat's work to the United States through a survey of art and ephemera while assessing the impact this unique—and sometimes controversial—collective has had on contemporary Indian society and artistic practice.

About Safdar Hashmi

Safdar Hashmi (1954–1989) was a political activist, actor, playwright, poet, and founding member of the street theater group Jana Natya Manch, or Janam ("birth") for short. He was deeply committed to secularism and egalitarianism, and built Janam into a forum for democratic and accessible theater aimed at political change.

On January 1, 1989, Hashmi and Janam were violently attacked while performing the play Halla Bol! (Raise Your Voice!) during municipal elections outside of Delhi. Hashmi died of his injuries the next day. His death aroused a nationwide wave of revulsion against political violence and led to the founding of Sahmat. The name is both an acronym for the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust and the Hindi word for "in agreement."

India's culture wars

Ever since, Sahmat has been at the heart of what co-curator Ram Rahman likens to "India's culture wars."

Animated by the urgent belief that art can propel change and that culture can reach across boundaries, Sahmat has offered a platform for an expansive group of artists and collaborators to present powerful works of art that defend freedom of expression and battle intolerance within India's often divisive political landscape.

Sahmat's projects (timeline PDF) are defined in part by their consistent stance against the threat of religious fundamentalism and sectarianism—known in South Asia as "communalism"—in public life. Collaborations have cut across class, caste, and religious lines and have involved artists, performers, scholars, and a wide array of other participants, such as the Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim auto-rickshaw drivers in the contest Slogans for Communal Harmony. Projects also have sought to counter political distortions to India's history, most notably in Sahmat's multifaceted response to the demolition of Babri Masjid (Babur's Mosque) in Ayodhya. In other cases, Sahmat has sought to celebrate India's cultural diversity and democratic ideals, engaging artists to create work that responds to ideas of national history and individual identity.

Videos

In a series of videos, artists and other collaborators discuss Sahmat's history and its impact on contemporary art-making in India.

Browse all the videos below (or on Vimeo). They're also available on iPads in the exhibition itself.

Sahmat's Beginnings

National Street Theatre Day

Slogans for Communal Harmony

Sufi-Bhakti Traditions

Anhad Garje

Hum Sab Ayodhya

Muktnaad

Tribute to Gandhi

Postcards for Gandhi

Art on the Move

Ways of Resisting

The Making of India

M.F. Husain

Tributes to M.F. Husain

On Performance

Sahmat's Legacy

Participating artists

The Sahmat Collective includes works in a variety of media from over sixty artists including Manjeet Bawa, Atul Dodiya, Subodh Gupta, Zarina Hashmi, Rummana Husain, Bharti Kher, Pushpamala N., Nalini Malani, Gigi Scaria, Nilima Sheikh, and Vivan Sundaram.

See a complete list of all those who have participated in Sahmat projects (PDF).

Tour

Ackland Art Museum, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
September 13, 2013–January 5, 2014

Curators

Jessica Moss, Smart Museum Associate Curator for Contemporary Art, and Ram Rahman, photographer and independent curator.

Support

The Sahmat Collective: Art and Activism in India since 1989 is made possible by The Smart Family Foundation; Helen Zell; the Efroymson Family Fund, a CICF Fund; The Joyce Foundation; and the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support is provided by Larry & Marilyn Fields; Barbara Fosco, The Fosco Family Foundation; Lisa and Michael Kornick; and the University of Chicago’s Committee on Southern Asian Studies.

Presented in the Richard and Mary L. Gray Gallery and the Robert and Joan Feitler Gallery.

Images:

Photo documenting Sahmat's 1992 auto-rickshaw project, Slogans for Communal Harmony. The text reads: "Call Him Ishwar, Allah, Wahe-Guru, or Shri Ram, if you will / These are but different names for the one creator."

Safdar Hashmi performing in a Janam street play, ca. late 1970s. Photo courtesy Janam archive.

Nalini Malani, still from Unity in Diversity, 2003, video, 7 minutes, 30 seconds. Collection of Walsh Gallery archives.

Gigi Scaria: City Unclaimed

2013-01-19T16:00:00Z

Revealing the complex layers and stark contrasts of Delhi, Indian artist Gigi Scaria’s site-specific installation City Unclaimed combines a large photo-based mural of an imaginary cityscape with a working fountain that stands as both a monument to a glorious past and also a reminder of bubbling societal tension.

Covering the central wall of the Smart Museum’s reception hall, the immersive mural is manipulated and stitched together from photographs Scaria has taken around his home city of Delhi. The collage of images shows the extreme differences and layers of social and economic class that are characteristic of the city, which Scaria says “grows and decays by its own logic.” In front of the mural stands a twelve-foot high fountain that mirrors the architecture and images behind it. The five tiers of the fountain resemble Delhi apartment buildings with windows and balconies, and the flowing water raises issues about scarcity, abundance, and the allocation of resources in urban spaces.

City Unclaimed is the artist’s first project for a U.S. museum.

Video

Gigi Scaria talks about architectural spaces, class and social disparities, and polluted water in Delhi.

Curator

Jessica Moss, Smart Museum Associate Curator of Contemporary Art

Support

City Unclaimed has been generously supported in part by BMO Harris Bank.

Presented in the Eunice Ratner Reception Gallery.

Top: Gigi Scaria, installation view of City Unclaimed, 2013, Mixed media including epoxy, digital print, motor system, paint, plastic, polyerethane, and water. Courtesy of the Artist. Commissioned by the Smart Museum of Art.

Divine and Princely Realms: Indian Art from the Permanent Collection

2012-12-18T16:00:00Z

Traditional art from the Indian sub-continent reveals the region’s layers of history and unique racial, linguistic, and cultural diversity.

This exhibition presents a small yet incredibly diverse selection of Indian art from the Smart’s collection. Spanning the ages—from the third to the twentieth centuries—the nine works bring to light classic historic styles, regional variations, and the importance of secular and sacred literature. Divine and Princely Realms also explores how India’s distinct art was molded over time by the region’s major religions—Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, and Jain faiths among others—and influenced by the patronage of its Mughal kings and Hindu princes.

Curator

Richard A. Born, Smart Museum Senior Curator

Above: Indian, Orissa, Krishna and Brahma, Late 19th/early 20th century, Folio from the tenth book of a manuscript of the Bhagavata Purana, tempera and ink on wove paper. Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, Purchase, Gift of Mr. Harris J. Fishman through the Alumni Fund, 1974.62.

Goshka Macuga: Of what is, that it is; of what is not, that it is not, 2

2012-12-13T16:00:00Z

In collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Smart Museum of Art presents a vast (approximately 11 x 38 feet) tapestry by London-based Polish artist Goshka Macuga.

Of what is, that it is; of what is not, that it is not is a two-part work commissioned for the recent dOCUMENTA (13). It is comprised of two photo-based black-and-white tapestries that are to be exhibited simultaneously but never together in the same place. Part 1, originally shown in Kassel, Germany and presented at the MCA as part of the survey Goshka Macuga: Exhibit, A (December 15, 2012 to April 7, 2013), depicts a diverse crowd of Afghans and Westerners in front of Darul Aman Palace outside of Kabul, Afghanistan. Part 2, originally exhibited in Kabul, and on view in the Smart's reception hall, shows an art-world crowd and protesters gathering outside of the Orangerie in Kassel. Both scenes are conceived as complementary halves of an elusive truth.

This is the first time the diptych will be shown in separate art institutions within one city; the exhibition at the MCA marks the artist’s first museum survey in the United States.

Curator

Organized by Dieter Roelstraete, Manilow Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, with the Smart's presentation overseen by Stephanie Smith, Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the Smart Museum of Art.

Above: Installation view of Goshka Macuga, Of what is, that it is; of what is not, that it is not, 2, 2012, Courtesy of Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York; Kate McGarry Gallery, London; and Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich. Commissioned and produced by dOCUMENTA (13) with the support of the Fiorucci Art trust, London, and Outset Contemporary Art Fund, London.

Valerie Snobeck: American Standard Movement

2012-10-08T14:00:00Z

In her new site-specific work commissioned for the Smart’s courtyard, Valerie Snobeck (University of Chicago MFA 2008) re-uses construction material to open up broad questions about aesthetics, value, and the built environment. American Standard Movement centers on debris netting that was previously used in a building project on the University of Chicago’s campus.

Such netting serves a function—to catch debris let loose by construction activities—and also behaves as an aesthetic marker of the construction site itself. Snobeck’s work takes this duality as a point of entry. Netting marks the absence of a wall, but is, unlike a wall,woven and hung, permeable. In American Standard Movement, the netting is co-opted, but not necessarily displaced.

Snobeck’s interest in the language of structure extends beyond narratives of the material's past use, and connections to nearby projects to renovate old buildings or erect new structures. The netting contains the space of the wall and holds it within frame—at the same time the netting relies on the wall as its support. As in much of her recent work, the artist considers the limits of both visibility and production, and a structure of reliance between work and context: "What is it that we are building? What are we rebuilding? What existing structures are we using for support?"

The language and marks painted on Snobeck’s banner refer to specific information printed on a tool used in watch repair to measure internal components. American Standard Movement suggests a relationship between body and environmental space as component parts; questioning moves to inscribe the future with speculative values, fixed measurements or meanings.

Snobeck’s piece is the third art-banner commissioned as part of the Smart’s annual Threshold series.

Curator

Sarah Mendelsohn, Smart Museum Executive Assistant for Program Support

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

Top: Valerie Snobeck, American Standard Movement, 2012, Spray paint on debris netting. Courtesy of the artist, Essex Street, New York, and Galerie Catherine Bastide, Brussels. Commissioned by the Smart Museum of Art.

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.

Embracing these complexities, Awash in Color explores the roles, functions, and technology of color in French and Japanese prints. It features more than one hundred and thirty prints and illustrated books dating 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 Associate Director of Academic Initiatives.

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.

Major funding is provided by the University of Chicago Women's Board and The Samuel H. Kress Foundation, with additional support generously provided by Ariel Investments, The Elizabeth F. Cheney Foundation, The IFPDA Foundation, and Thomas McCormick and Janis Kanter.

Related programming is made possible by the University of Chicago’s France Chicago Center, Department of Music, and Department of Art History as well as Mrs. Betty Guttman. Additional funding for the catalogue was provided by Furthermore: a program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund.

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

Top: Henri Rivière, Vegetable Garden at Ville-Hue (Saint-Briac), 1890, From the Breton Landscapes, Color woodblock print printed from eight blocks on eighteenth-century Japanese laid paper. Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, Paul and Miriam Kirkley Fund for Acquisitions, 2006.12.