Exhibitions

South Side Stories: Rethinking Chicago Art, 1960 to 1975

2018-09-13T15:00:00Z

During the 1960s and 1970s, Chicago was shaped by art and ideas produced and circulated on the South Side. Yet the history of the period's creative and social ferment has often remained segregated by the city's social, political, and geographic divides.

]]> This exhibition—co-organized by the DuSable Museum of African American History and the Smart Museum of Art and presented at both institutions concurrently—takes the first integrated look at the cultural history of Chicago’s South Side during this momentous era of change and conflict. It aims to upend dominant narratives of the period, and to unearth rich stories by examining watershed cultural moments from the Hairy Who to the Wall of Respect, from the Civil Rights movement to the Blackstone Rangers, from vivid protest posters to visionary outsider art, and from the Free University movement to the radical jazz of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.

Curators

South Side Stories is curated by Charles Bethea, Chief Operating Officer and Curator, DuSable Museum of African American History; Jessica Moss, Curator of Contemporary Art, Smart Museum of Art; and Rebecca Zorach, Mary Jane Crowe Professor in Art and Art History at Northwestern University.

Support

This exhibition has been made possible in part by the Terra Foundation for American Art.

Top: Carolyn Lawrence, Uphold Your Men, Unify Your Families, 1971, Screenprint on wove paper. Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, Gift of David Lusenhop in honor of the artist, 2013.7. © Carolyn Lawrence.

Revolution of the Eye: Modern Art and the Birth of American Television

2017-07-06T15:00:00Z

This is the first exhibition to explore how avant-garde art influenced and shaped the look and content of network television in its formative years, from the late 1940s to the mid-1970s.

]]> During this period, the pioneers of American television—many of them young, Jewish, and aesthetically adventurous—had adopted modernism as a source of inspiration. Revolution of the Eye looks at how the dynamic new medium, in its risk-taking and aesthetic experimentation, paralleled and embraced cutting-edge art and design.

Organized by the Jewish Museum in New York City and the Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, the exhibition highlights the visual revolution ushered in by American television and modernist art and design of the 1950s and 1960s. Revolution of the Eye features fine art and graphic design, including works by Saul Bass, Alexander Calder, Marcel Duchamp, Allan Kaprow, Roy Lichtenstein, Man Ray, Eero Saarinen, Ben Shahn, and Andy Warhol, as well as ephemera, television memorabilia, and clips from film and television, including Batman, The Ed Sullivan Show, The Ernie Kovacs Show, Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, and The Twilight Zone.

Revolution of the Eye examines television’s promotion of avant-garde ideals and aesthetics; its facility as a promotional platform for modern artists, designers, and critics; its role as a committed patron of the work of modern artists and designers; and as a medium whose relevance in contemporary culture was validated by the Museum of Modern Art’s historic Television Project (1952–55).

Curator

The exhibition is organized by Maurice Berger for the Jewish Museum, New York, and the Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture, University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Support

Revolution of the Eye: Modern Art and the Birth of American Television is made possible by the generous support of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities: Celebrating 50 Years of Excellence, and an anonymous donation in memory of Curtis Hereld.

Top: Still from The Dinah Shore Show, NBC, 1953, series of stage sets based on modern art: Surrealism. Library of Congress Look Archives.

Classicisms

2017-02-16T16:00:00Z

Classicism, as an aesthetic ideal, is often associated with a conventional set of rules founded on supposedly timeless notions such as “order,” “reason,” and “decorum.” As a result, it can be understood as rigid, outdated, or stodgy. But classicism is actually far from a stable concept—throughout history, it has given rise to more debate than consensus, and at times has been put to use for subversive ends.

]]> Informed by an interdisciplinary planning process involving faculty members from across the University of Chicago, Classicisms explodes the idea of classicism as an unchanging ideal. The exhibition traces the shifting parameters of classicism from antiquity to the early 20th century through nearly 60 objects in various media from the Smart Museum’s collection and other U.S. collections.

Catalouge

A fully illustrated, multi-author catalogue comprising scholary thematic essays, shorter entries, a complete checklist, and bibliography will accompany the exhibition.

Curators

Larry F. Norman, Frank L. Sulzberger Professor, Romance Languages and Literatures, Theater and Performance Studies, Fundamentals, and the College, University of Chicago; and Anne Leonard, Curator and Associate Director of Academic Initiatives at the Smart Museum.

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. The exhibition and catalogue have received additional support from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and the Elizabeth F. Cheney Foundation.

Presented in the Richard and Mary L. Gray Gallery

Image: Louis Dupré, Portrait of M. Fauvel, the French Consul, with View of the Acropolis, 1819, oil on canvas. Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Frank H. Woods, 1980.33.

There was a whole collection made: Photography from Lester and Betty Guttman

2016-09-15T15:00:00Z

Lester and Betty Guttman were avid collectors and companions in life who together built an extraordinary collection of photography. Over a lifetime of close looking, they carefully acquired an expansive collection of great photographs that span the very earliest days of the medium to the near-present day.

There was a whole collection made mines the Estate of Lester and Betty Guttman’s 2014 gift of 829 photographic works by 377 artists to the Smart Museum. It introduces this new resource to scholars and the public. The exhibition presents several hundred works—from rare vintage prints to contemporary classics—organized in thematic clusters that reflect the Guttman's shared commitment to humanist values and social engagement, including sections on the natural and built world; photographic experimentation; documentary; portraiture; and "fifteen minutes of fame," which features images of notable figures.

The exhibition's title is taken from Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons (1914). Stein is the subject of several photographs in the Guttman collection.

About the Guttmans

The Guttmans were married for 50 years and worked together at Argonne National Laboratory, where Lester Guttman (1919–2006) was a senior scientist and editor of the Journal of Applied Physics. Betty Guttman (1922–2014) was an alumna of the University of Chicago (SB 1943) and the couple were longtime Hyde Park residents. While photography was just one of their shared pursuits—they were also patrons of art and music in Chicago and, as amateur mycologists, co-edited the journal McIlvainea—they enjoyed the deep pleasure of living with art that one knows well.

Artists

William Henry Fox Talbot, David Octavius Hill, Hannah Höch, Man Ray, László Moholy-Nagy, Brassaï, Berenice Abbott, Helen Leavitt, Diane Arbus, Malick Sidibé, Chuck Close, Carrie Mae Weems, and more.

Catalogue

Exhibition catalogue will be available in fall 2016.

Curators

Laura Letinsky, Professor, Department of Cinema and Media Studies, Department of Visual Arts, and the College, The University of Chicago; and Jessica Moss, Smart Museum Curator of Contemporary Art.

Support

This exhibition and catalogue have been made possible by the David C. & Sarajean Ruttenberg Arts Foundation and the Smart Museum's Pamela and R. Christopher Hoehn-Saric Exhibition Fund.

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

Top: William Henry Fox Talbot, The Ancient Vestry, c. 1845, Salted paper print from a paper negative. Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, Gift of the Estate of Lester and Betty Guttman, TR2601/499.

Monster Roster: Existentialist Art in Postwar Chicago

2016-02-11T16:00:00Z

The group of postwar artists nicknamed the Monster Roster established the first unique Chicago style.

]]> Spearheaded by Leon Golub and united by a shared interest in the figure during a period that is often seen as dominated by abstraction, the group created deeply psychological works that drew on classical mythology and ancient art.

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 approximately 60 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.

Artists

Robert Barnes, Don Baum, Fred Berger, Cosmo Campoli, George Cohen, Dominick Di Meo, Leon Golub, Theodore Halkin, June Leaf, Arthur Lerner, Irving Petlin, Seymour Rosofsky, Franz Schulze, Nancy Spero, Evelyn Statsinger, and H. C. Westermann.

Curators

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

Support

The exhibition and catalogue have been made possible in part by the Estate of Gerald and Eunice Ratner, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Smart Museum’s Pamela and R. Christopher Hoehn-Saric Exhibition Fund, and by the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support is provided by Ulrich E. and Harriet H. Meyer and the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture at the University of Chicago.

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

Top: Seymour Rosofsky, Patient in Dentist's Chair, 1961, Oil on canvas. Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, Gift of the Rosofsky Estate, 2014.16.

Expressionist Impulses: German and Central European Art, 1890-1990

2015-10-01T15:00:00Z

In the years before World War I, Expressionism was a term vanguard art circles in France, Germany, and Central Europe used to denote various modern art movements that arose after Impressionism. Whether figurative or abstract, pre-war Expressionism was foremost anti-naturalist in style and idealist in content. Utilizing simplified forms, distorted details, and unnatural colors, Expressionist artists sought to penetrate to the essence of outer appearances to elicit an emotional response from the viewer. For such artists, exaggeration expressed their inner responses to the visual world around them, whether in the service of utopian idealism or to rebut contemporary social mores and injustices.

]]> Spanning a century of momentous and rapid political, social, and economic change, this exhibition charts the ebb and flow of key Expressionist tendencies in German and Central European art from, among other countries, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Romania.

The incisive, often emotionally charged paintings, drawings, and sculptures on view—mounted from the Smart’s collection and supplemented by select promised gifts—bear powerful witness to periods of war, utopian dreams, economic depression, political division, and personal and political exile. No single style, technique, or theme dominates. Rather, Expressionist Impulses offers a fluid account of multiple waves of artists who were concerned with stylistic innovation bent in the service of social and political critiques.

The exhibition includes approximately 80 works and is divided into loosely chronological sections that cover major Expressionist moments in Germany: Die Brücke (1905–1914), Der Blaue Reiter (1911–1914), New Objectivity (1920s), and Neo-Expressionism (1960–80s). It also brings to the surface often overlooked international connections to modernism and the expressive impulse in avant-garde artists active across the great art centers of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire before the rupture of The Great War and in a divided Germany and Communist Europe throughout the Cold War.

Artists

Josef Albers, Georg Baselitz, Lovis Corinth, Max Dungert, Lyonel Feininger, Emil Filla, George Grosz, Erich Heckel, Hans Hofmann, Jörg Immendorff, Wassily Kandinsky, Martin Kippenberger, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Käthe Kollwitz, Karel Malich, Jan Matulka, Ludwig Meidner, Gabriele Münter, Richard Oelze, Emil Nolde, Felix Nussbaum, Max Pechstein, Karl Peter Röhl, and Kurt Schwitters, among others.

Related projects

In nearby galleries, the Smart Museum presents two related collection-based projects. To See in Black and White: German and Central European Photography, 1920s–1950s offers a selection German and Central European photography by Walter Peterhans, Hannah Höch, František Drtikol, Jaromír Funke, and others. Expressionist, New Objectivity, and Constructivist Prints, 1905–1925: Recent Acquisitions presents prints by the Austrian, German, and Hungarian masters Max Beckmann, Wassily Kandinsky, Alfred Kubin, László Moholy-Nagy, Emil Nolde, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff.

Curator

Richard A. Born, Smart Museum Senior Curator and Interim Chief Curator

Support

Support for this exhibition and its programming has been provided by the Smart Museum’s Pamela and R. Christopher Hoehn-Saric Exhibition Fund, Nuveen Investments, the Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany, the University of Chicago’s Arts Council, the Franke Institute for the Humanities, and the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on German Literature and Culture.

Presented in the Richard and Mary L. Gray Gallery

Top: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Dodo in the Studio, 1910, Pastel on paper. Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, Gift of Paul and Susan Freehling in memory of Mrs. Edna Freehling, 2002.70.

To See in Black and White: German and Central European Photography, 1920s-1950s

2015-10-01T14:59:00Z

The 1920s and 1930s in Europe are a storied era of unprecedented expressive innovations in black–and–white photography, particularly in France and Germany, and in the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). Less well known to American museum visitors, however, are the contributions of Central Europe toward modern photography.

Among the photographers that are featured in this exhibition, the oldest—Lyonel Feininger (1871–1956), František Drtikol (1883–1961) and Hannah Höch (1889–1978)—came of age as professional schools and amateur camera clubs were forming to educate eager young men and women in photographic aesthetics and techniques, and promulgating the dominant “art” photography of the day, also known as Pictorialism.

The youngest among them—Ernö Berda (1914–1961), Václav Zykmund (1914–1984), and Jan Lukas (1915–2006)—grew up as mass media enabled a boom in photography in Europe’s urban centers: a boom that could not have occurred without a great expansion of available subject matter, attitudes towards it, and technical innovations that popularized the apparatus of photography, which the “new” photography—New Objectivity, New Vision, Worker Photography, and advertising photography—proliferated widely. But distinctions between “art” and “new” photography were never razor sharp in practice, which contributes to this era’s remarkable expressive diversity.

This exhibition of over 40 photographs drawn from the Smart Museum's collection is presented in conjunction with Expressionist Impulses: German and Central European Art, 1890–1990.

Curator

Kimberly Mims, independent curator and former Mellon Foundation Curatorial Intern at the Smart Museum.

Presented in the Joel and Carole Bernstein Gallery

Top: Walter Peterhans, Dead Hare (Toter Hase), 1929, Gelatin silver print. Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, Anonymous Gift, 2007.118.1. © Estate of Walter Peterhans.

Conversations with the Collection: Memory

2015-09-12T15:00:00Z

As the University of Chicago reflects upon its 125-year history, the Smart Museum of Art presents an experimental installation on the theme of Memory that explores art's relationship to the recollection of personal and cultural histories, nostalgia, and other facets of memory.

The collection-based project mixes works from across cultures and eras, from ancient Chinese oracle bones to Antony Gormley's Infinite Cube (2014).

Presented in the Elisabeth and William M. Landes Gallery, Janis Kanter and Thomas McCormick Gallery, Edward A. and Inge Maser Gallery, and Robert and Joan Feitler Gallery.

Top: Jason Salavon, The Class of 1988, 1998, Digital C-print. Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, Gift of Gary and Susan Garrett, 2013.17. Art © Jason Salavon.

Jessica Stockholder: Rose's Inclination

2015-09-12T15:00:00Z

In a site-specific Threshold series installation, Jessica Stockholder intersects the Smart’s lobby with a wave of color and texture that climbs to the clerestory, cuts across the floor, and travels outwards into the Museum’s sculpture garden and beyond. Rose’s Inclination makes use of ordinary materials—lamps, paint, Plexiglas, carpet, and garden mulch—to “reach up and out,” altering the physical experience of the Smart Museum’s modernist architecture and landscaped courtyard. The work also repurposes a small section of the previous Threshold commission, a wall painting by Judy Ledgerwood, by agreement of both artists.

]]> Stockholder is Raymond W. and Martha Hilpert Gruner Distinguished Service Professor and Chair of the Department of Visual Art, The University of Chicago. Art21 deemed her “a pioneer of multimedia genre-bending installations that have become a prominent language in contemporary art.” Rose’s Inclination is her second public installation in Chicago since she arrived in 2011—the first being Color Jam (2012), which took over a busy intersection in the Loop and was one of the largest public art installations in the city’s history.

Videos

Rose’s Inclination is to reach up and out. She slips under and over, and weaves into the landscape while flapping towards the sky.

She is painted on the walls, embodied by carpet on the floor, and her spirited entry into the world is carried by daylight streaming in through glass and by lamplight. Her essence is flapping in the wind as the doors are opened and closed.

Rose plays a part in the Smart foyer. She includes visitors, tables, chairs, a remnant of Judy Ledgerwood's painting, and coffee in her drama. She acknowledges and mirrors her surroundings; she is contained by the museum, and wears it like a close fitting jacket, though she is bursting through the seams. At times she is reminiscent of plant parts pushing through material so slowly that the eye can’t detect the motion.

She is like the plant in the Little Shop of Horrors film growing bigger and bigger and more demanding. She is greedy and hungry. Her infiltration of the ground creates instability. The design of the building, the Smart courtyard, and by extension the sidewalks, and the grid of the city, could morph at any moment. The cumulous cloud of subjectivity that is each one of us—clattering words in mind and falling out of mouth—feelings in body, filling self-awareness and driving action—pass through her rosy glow.

— Jessica Stockholder

Project coordinator

Ray Klemchuk, Associate Preparator and Special Projects Coordinator, Smart Museum of Art

Support

This Threshold commission is supported by the Smart Museum's Contemporary Art Council.

Top: Jessica Stockholder, Rose's Inclination, 2015, Paint, carpet, fragment of Judy Ledgerwood's painting, branches, rope, Plexiglas, light fixtures, hardware, extension cord, mulch, Smart Museum foyer, courtyard, and sidewalks. Commissioned by the Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago. Courtesy of the artist, Mitchell-Innes & Nash Gallery, and Kavi Gupta Gallery.

Objects and Voices: A Collection of Stories

2015-02-12T16:00:00Z

Why do objects matter? What kind of stories do they help tell? Through a series of micro-exhibitions curated by a diverse roster of collaborators, Objects and Voices reveals the multiple ways we work with, learn from, and enjoy objects of art.

]]> This collection-based exhibition is divided into a series of small thematic presentations organized by distinguished professors, artists, museum professionals, UChicago students, and notable Smart alumni. These vignettes reveal the diverse perspectives, passions, and expertise of their curators while raising bigger questions about the interpretation of creative and cultural objects, the role of audiences, and the transmission of knowledge through art.

As with Carved, Cast, Crumpled before it, this special 40th anniversary exhibition takes over the entirety of the Smart Museum—permanent collection and special exhibition galleries alike—and mixes traditional and non-traditional presentations of the Smart’s collection of Modern, Asian, European, and Contemporary art. Together with GalleryX, these projects illustrate how objects and stories are intertwined, preserved, re-interpreted, discovered, and re-invented at a university art museum like the Smart—indeed, how we all can connect with and be inspired by our experiences with art.

Micro-exhibitions and collaborators

Objects and Voices micro-exhibitions are coordinated by Anne Leonard, Smart Museum Curator and Associate Director of Academic Initiatives. Follow links below for video introductions to each micro-exhibition.

Interaction: British and American Modernist Design
Alice Kain
Assistant Registrar and Coordinator of Academic Initiatives, Smart Museum of Art

Individual Stories and Collective Narratives: Forming the Modern British Art Collection
Keith Hartley
Deputy Director and Chief Curator, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

Richard A. Born
Senior Curator and Interim Chief Curator, Smart Museum of Art

Mark Rothko: From Nature to Abstraction
Russell Bowman
Former Director, Milwaukee Art Museum

Between Two Worlds: Asian/American Modern Art
Kris Ercums
Curator of Asian Art and Global Contemporary Art, Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas; Smart Museum Curatorial Intern (1997–2005) and PhD 2014, University of Chicago

Signed and Sealed: Connoisseurship of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Paintings
Jie Shi
Smart Museum Curatorial Intern and PhD candidate in Art History, University of Chicago

Catherine Stuer
Assistant Professor of Art History, Denison University; Smart Museum Mellon Foundation Curatorial Intern (2011–2012) and PhD 2012, University of Chicago

Japan at the Fair, 1876–1920
Chelsea Foxwell
Assistant Professor of Art History, University of Chicago

Literary Narratives in Painting
Frederick de Armas
Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities, Spanish Literature, and Comparative Literature, University of Chicago

Romantic Inter-Mediality
David Wellbery
LeRoy T. and Margaret Deffenbaugh Carlson University Professor in the Department of Germanic Studies, Comparative Literature, and Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago

Berthold Hoeckner
Associate Professor of Music, University of Chicago

Fragments of the Medieval Past
Aden Kumler
Associate Professor of Art History, University of Chicago

Claire Jenson
PhD student in Art History, University of Chicago

Rong Rong’s East Village
Wu Hung
Smart Museum Consulting Curator, Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History, and Director of the Center for the Art of East Asia at the University of Chicago

Times and Places That Become Us
Kenneth Warren
Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English and the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, University of Chicago

The Naked and the Dead
Kerry James Marshall
Artist

Marcel Duchamp: Boîte-en-valise
Angela Steinmetz
Former Head Registrar, Smart Museum of Art

War Portfolios in Teaching
Martha Ward
Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Arts, University of Chicago

The Museum Classroom: Responsive Art from Beasley Academic Center
Shannon Foster, Candice Latimer, and 5th grade students
Beasley Academic Center, Chicago Public Schools

Paintings and Evidence
Hannah Klemm
Smart Museum Mellon Foundation Curatorial Intern (2013–14) and PhD candidate in Art History, University of Chicago

Iva Olah
Smart Museum Mellon Foundation Curatorial Intern (2012–13) and PhD 2013, University of Chicago

The Gift of Art
Gay-Young Cho
Member, Smart Museum Board of Governors

Alan Fern
Former Director, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; Life Member, Smart Museum Board of Governors

W. J. T. Mitchell
Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Services Professor of English Language and Literature, Art History, and the College, University of Chicago

Peter Parshall
Former Curator of Old Master Prints, National Gallery of Art

Support

This exhibition and its related programming have been made possible by Mary Smart and the Smart Family Foundation; the Smart Museum’s Pamela and R. Christopher Hoehn-Saric Exhibition Fund; the Smart Museum's Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Endowment; Janis Kanter and Thomas McCormick and the Kanter Family Foundation; Barbara Fosco and the Fosco Family Foundation; the University of Chicago Women’s Board; the David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg Arts Foundation; Lorna Ferguson and Terry Clark; Jill and John Levi; Amy Gold and Brett Gorvy; and the IFPDA Foundation.

Presented in the Elisabeth and William M. Landes Gallery, Janis Kanter and Thomas McCormick Gallery, Edward A. and Inge Maser Gallery, Robert and Joan Feitler Gallery, Joel and Carole Bernstein Gallery, and Richard and Mary L. Gray Gallery.

Top: Attributed to Wassily Kandinsky, Composition, 1914, Oil on canvas. Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, Gift of Dolores and Donn Shapiro in honor of Jory Shapiro, 2012.51.

GalleryX

2014-09-27T15:00:00Z

GalleryX is a flexible, open space at the center of the Museum that will serve as a hub for creative discussions and experiences of all sorts during the Smart's 40th anniversary exhibitions Carved, Cast, Crumpled (September 27–December 21, 2014) and Objects and Voices (February 12–June 21, 2015). It will be home to informal displays of art, public discussions, programs, experiments, and a new project by Interpreters in Residence 500 Clown. It also will provide a space for groups to convene, talk, share ideas, dream, and scheme.

]]> Through these activities, the Smart will encourage visitors to explore the Museum and its collection in new ways. The lessons we learn from the GalleryX initiative will inform our future approaches to interpretation and visitor engagement, and will help us to redefine the Smart’s role as a teaching museum in the twenty-first century.

GalleryX is designed by the Chicago-based Range Design.

What is GalleryX?

An invitation

The Smart invites you to fill GalleryX with your own meetings, classes, get-togethers, rehearsals, and ideas.

The gallery is designed to be a free resource for groups and individuals to make use of during the Smart’s public hours. We welcome book clubs, student organizations, music groups, professors, co-workers, school teachers, artist groups, theatre troupes, and community partners—anyone and everyone—to use GalleryX as a forum to meet, create, and collaborate.

Interested in using works in our collection during your program, project, get-together? Drop us a line and let us know what you’re up to. We’d be happy to help you find art that matches your interests.

Resources

Flexible seating for up to 25
Flatscreen monitor
Wi-fi
Display space for objects from the Smart’s collection

Guidelines

Available only during public hours*
To help protect the artwork, all regular visit guidelines apply (that means no food or drink)
We intended to be as flexible as possible, but each request is contingent on the approval of the Museum.

*Contact us to learn more about after-hour event rental options.

Office hours

Come muse with us! Between noon and 1:30 pm, the Smart offers daily drop-in experiences—part discussion, part tour, and partly undetermined—that invite new perspectives on art and ideas.

Organized by Museum staff, educators, and special guest artists in collaboration with you, our visitors, these informal experiences begin in GalleryX and explore select artworks from the collection. The facilitated experiences range from close looking at a single work of art and playing The Art of Experience: The Smart Museum to unconventional musical interventions and more.

Office hours are held daily (Tuesday–Sunday) between noon and 1:30 pm in GalleryX. Please call 773.702.0200 for more information.

Calendar

Fill out my online form.

Support

The GalleryX initiative has been made possible with support from Pamela and R. Christopher Hoehn-Saric and the Smart Family Foundation, University of Chicago Arts Council, and Ariel Investments.

The How to Make a Smart Museum programming series was made possible by the Efroymson Family Fund. Additional support was provided by the Illinois Humanities Council, and the Franke Institute for the Humanities.

Presented in the Richard and Mary L. Gray Gallery.

Above: Working sketch of GalleryX.

Carved, Cast, Crumpled: Sculpture All Ways

2014-09-27T15:00:00Z

What makes an object a sculpture? The immersive exhibition Carved, Cast, Crumpled investigates the essential qualities of three-dimensional art across historical and cultural contexts, questioning what it means to be in the presence of an object.

]]> The exhibition is the first in a series of special projects celebrating the Smart Museum of Art's 40th anniversary. Comprised entirely of three-dimensional works and a handful of drawings by sculptors, it showcases a foundational component of the Museum’s collection, one that can be traced back to the Joel Starrels, Jr. Memorial Collection of modern sculpture that was featured in the Smart’s inaugural exhibition in the fall of 1974.

The exhibition takes over the entirety of the Museum, transforming both spaces normally dedicated to temporary exhibitions as well as those that are home to longer-standing installations of the Smart’s collection. Highlights include small-scale sculptures by modern masters like Auguste Rodin, Jacques Lipchitz, and Henry Moore; ancient Chinese mingqi tomb figures and Buddhist devotional statues; European bronzes of princes, putti, and classical heroes; and boundary-breaking work by contemporary artists including Magdalena Abakanowicz, John Chamberlain, Robert Irwin, and H. C. Westermann. Through roughly chronological presentations as well as unexpected juxtapositions of objects, Carved, Cast, Crumpled explores the notion of sculpture in all its forms.

Curators

This exhibition is organized by the entire curatorial staff of the Smart Museum of Art, with Senior Curator Richard A. Born as coordinating curator.

Support

This exhibition and its related programming have been made possible by the Smart Museum’s Pamela and R. Christopher Hoehn-Saric Exhibition Fund; Janis Kanter and Thomas McCormick and the Kanter Family Foundation; Barbara Fosco, the Fosco Family Foundation; Sharon Flanagan; and Nuveen Investments.

Top: Installation view Carved, Cast, Crumpled.

Serial Drawings: Robert Barnes, Barbara Rossi, Robert Lucy

2014-07-01T15:00:00Z

This collection-based exhibition considers three sets of drawings by three generations of artists associated with Chicago. Robert Barnes, Barbara Rossi, and Robert Lucy all work in a figurative mode, though each assumes a different and highly personal approach to the human form. They all have explored drawing’s expressive or narrative potential through unified cycles of drawings, ranging from four to eleven works.

]]> The exhibition reunites ten drawings by Barnes that are based on Ezra Pound’s Cantos (1961). Also featured are Rossi’s series Very Rich Hims and Hers (1970) and Lucy’s suite Sea Fashions (2002–03).

Curator

Richard A. Born, Smart Museum Senior Curator

Presented in the Joel and Carole Bernstein Gallery

Image: Robert M. Barnes, Canto I, From the series of eight drawings based on Ezra Pound’s Cantos, 1961, Pastel on laid paper. Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, Gift of Allan Frumkin, 1996.58a. © Robert Barnes.

Imaging/Imagining: The Body as 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 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 relation between artistic and scientific abstraction; the depiction of bodily suffering in wartime; and what art and medicine have to offer each other in the pursuit of accuracy, humanity, and empathy, when it comes to representing the body.

Curators

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

Support

This exhibition is made possible by Smart Museum's Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Endowment. Additional support is provided by the Arts|Science Initiative/Office of the Provost at the University of Chicago.

Presented in the Joel and Carole Bernstein Gallery.

Above: Arthur Pond and Charles Knapton, Nude Female Carrying Water Jars (after Raphael), 1734, Etching and woodblock on wove paper. Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, University Transfer from Max Epstein Archive, Gift of Max Epstein, 1937, 1976.145.358.

Inspired by the Opera: Contemporary Chinese Photography and Video

2014-02-13T16:00:00Z

Since the mid 1990s, a number of Chinese artists have incorporated the visual vocabulary of Chinese opera into new art forms. This concise exhibition reveals the continued relevance of opera, both within contemporary Chinese society and within the experimental work of individual artists.

]]> It features: a series of black-and-white photographs of elderly actors by Liu Zheng that play with conventions of ethnographic and opera photography; two videos by Chen Qiulin that make use of traditional opera characters to respond to changes wrought by the Three Gorges Dam; The Forbidden City (Zijincheng) by Liu Wei, a lyrical video of theatrical “glove puppets” (budai kuilei) shown publicly for the first time; and videos by Cui Xiuwen that connect to opera in more oblique ways, through performative elements and symbolic props, gestures, and costumes.

Together, the works help illuminate the relationship between contemporary art and China’s cultural heritage.

Curator

Inspired by the Opera is curated by Wu Hung, Smart Museum Consulting Curator, Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History, and Director of the Center for the Art of East Asia at the University of Chicago, in consultation with Stephanie Smith, Smart Museum Deputy Director and Chief Curator.

Support

This exhibition has been made possible in part by Gay-Young Cho and Christopher Chiu.

Presented in the Robert and Joan Feitler Gallery.

Image: Liu Zheng, An Old Peking Opera Actor Playing a Female Role, Beijing, 1995 (negative, this impression printed 2007), from the series My Countrymen (Guoren, alternately translated as The Chinese), Gelatin silver print. Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, Purchase, The Paul and Miriam Kirkley Fund for Acquisitions, 2013.25.