Smart Museum of Art

12/02/2022

Bonnie Jones premieres “samesame,” a multichannel electronic music, sonic counter-narrative. Using field recordings, circuit-bent electronics, samples, and historical recordings, “samesame” considers how the specificities of our individual experience and perception of the world are reflected and refracted within geopolitical and historical conditions.

Join us and Lampo for this performance on December 10 at 8 pm. FREE, but space is limited. Please register in advance: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bonnie-jones-tickets-472660930567

11/26/2022

For the first time in nearly 60 years, Instrument for La Monte Young sings again - Chicago Reader

“You’ve only got one sound, but there’s a whole world that lives inside that one sound.” During a “Monochrome Multitudes” performance, David Skidmore played Walter De Maria’s sculpture “Instrument for La Monte Young” for the first time in decades.

David Skidmore couldn’t even begin to count the number of instruments he’s played. As a member of Grammy Award favorites Third Coast Percussion (most recently nominated for Perspectives, released earlier […]

11/23/2022

Class at Smart Museum immerses students in monochromatic art exhibition

Class at Smart Museum immerses students in monochromatic art exhibition

‘Monochrome Multitudes’ challenges viewers to see multiple meanings in a singular color

11/21/2022

Plan your visit—we will be operating with special hours this week. The Smart Museum of Art will close at 2 pm on Wednesday (Nov 23), will remain closed all day Thanksgiving Thursday and Friday (Nov 24–25), and will re-open with our regular weekend hours of 10 am–5 pm on Saturday and Sunday. (Nov 26–27).

11/18/2022

“Here viewers encounter works that incorporate nontraditional materials—plumbing pipes, pantyhose, wood, cement. Sometimes these works are juxtaposed with more ‘traditional’ monochromes; other times, they reference them. At every turn, a dialogue takes place.”

In the latest issue, the University of Chicago Magazine visits “Monochrome Multitudes”: https://mag.uchicago.edu/arts-humanities/power-one

11/15/2022

The Color Wheel: A Review of "Monochrome Multitudes" at Smart Museum

“One grouping is self-reflective, another about monochrome sound, another looks at urban spaces, and one focuses on the body. While the themes are the same, the works range in material, color, context or history. Weavings, sculpture, painting and video are among the mediums used by the global artists in the show.”

A review of “Monochrome Multitudes” in Newcity.

The Smart Museum reimagines the various ways and methods in which color and monochrome can be translated to the public.

11/10/2022

Join “Monochrome Multitudes” exhibiting artist Haegue Yang for a talk that reflects on the site-specific installation “Sol LeWitt Upside Down onto Wall – Modular Wall Structure, Expanded 20 Times” and more.

Artist Talk: Haegue Yang
Thursday, November 17, 6 pm

11/08/2022

From Émile Cohl’s “Le Peintre Neo-Impressioniste” (1910) to Paul Sharits’s aggressive color field flicker film “T, O, U, C, H, I, N, G” (1968) to the orange of dn rodowick’s “Pyramid” (2016), this week’s Film Studies Center program focuses on color. Join us Friday evening for “Color Corrections” and explore monochromatic color and the diverse ways that eleven different artists have used either a single color exclusively or various colors one at a time.

Learn more about the films: https://filmstudiescenter.uchicago.edu/events/2022/color-corrections

11/02/2022

🟨🟦🟥⬛️

11/02/2022

Happening this week, the "Kabuki in Print" symposium explores how the woodblock print medium played a pivotal role in connecting kabuki actors and fans.

Next week! "KABUKI in PRINT: Actor, Fans, Image, and Medium in Early Modern Japan and Beyond" Symposium.

Taking place November 4-5 (multiple locations). Join the Center for East Asian Studies, University of Chicago, Smart Museum of Art, The Franke Institute for the Humanities, and The University of Chicago Center for the Art of East Asia for this intimate symposium that seeks to bring together experts from theater, literature, and art history in order to study the collection and contribute their own insights on the relation between page and stage in the case of kabuki.

To REGISTER (when applicable), click on the link below:
https://ceas.uchicago.edu/content/kabuki-print

11/01/2022

Join “Monochrome Multitudes” exhibiting artist Byron Kim for a talk that reflects on “Synecdoche,” a series of skin-toned “portraits” the artist created in the 1990s, and the history of abstraction broadly conceived.

Learn more: https://smartmuseum.uchicago.edu/events/2009/artist-talk-byron-kim/

10/28/2022

When the Smart opened in 1974, the inaugural installation featured several ancient Roman sculptures on loan from the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute. Now these classical artworks are back on public display across campus in the OI’s special exhibition “Making Sense of Marbles.” The exhibition brings together a group of Roman sculptures excavated at the ancient city of Ptolemais with others purchased on the antiquities market, highlighting divergent histories while examining the fundamental importance of archaeological context in telling an object’s story.

Learn more: https://oi.uchicago.edu/marbles

Photo: installation view of the Smart’s galleries in 1974. Digitized by Visual Resources Center for the LUNA database’s Smart Museum exhibition archive.

10/27/2022

The upcoming symposium “Kabuki in Print” seeks to bring together experts from theater, literature, and art history to explore the relation between page and stage.

https://ceas.uchicago.edu/content/kabuki-print

While on campus, the group will study the Smart Museum of Art’s Brooks McCormick Jr. Collection of Japanese Prints—a collection of hundreds of theater prints of the late Edo (1600–1868) and Meiji (1868–1912) eras, with a sizable number that relate to kabuki in the kamigata or Osaka region rather than in Edo.

Organized by the University of Chicago's Center for East Asian Studies in conjunction with the Smart Museum of Art, Franke Institute for the Humanities, and the Center for the Art of East Asia.

Images from Ichiyōsai Yosh*taki, “Eight Actors from Seinen Yume Monogatari, ‘Tale of the Southwestern Dream,’” 1878, Woodblock print. Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, The Brooks McCormick Jr. Collection of Japanese Prints, 2015.1009.

10/21/2022

What do you see when you see the color red? ❤️ 😡 ❌ 🧧 Join us Saturday at 3 pm for “Seeing Red,” an inquiry-based tour of select works in “Monochrome Multitudes.”

Learn more: https://smartmuseum.uchicago.edu/events/1995/tour-seeing-red/

10/19/2022

Join Sheila Hicks for a talk that reflects on the monochrome and “Evolving Tapestry—Soleil,” a multi-toned yellow sculpture of wound and knotted fibers currently on view in “Monochrome Multitudes.” Happening virtually, October 20 at 12 pm CT: https://smartmuseum.uchicago.edu/events/2007/artist-talk-sheila-hicks/

10/13/2022

Join “Monochrome Multitudes” exhibiting artist and Department of Visual Arts at The University of Chicago alum Dan Peterman today at 6 pm for an artist talk. In the exhibition, Peterman’s “Corridor (sulfur cycle)” invites visitors to think about ordinary, gray drywall and cycles of construction and demolition.

This is a continuation of our series of “Monochrome Multitudes” artist talks, where exhibiting artists consider “the monochrome” and the rich and sometimes idiosyncratic references in their own work.

Learn more: https://smartmuseum.uchicago.edu/events/2006/artist-talk-dan-peterman/

10/12/2022

Amanda Williams, Artist and Architect | 2022 MacArthur Fellow

Congratulations to Chicago-based artist and architect Amanda Williams on being named a 2022 MacArthur Fellow! You can find photos from her “Color(ed) Theory” series on display in our current exhibition “Monochrome Multitudes.” Plus, join us October 27 for a related artist talk: https://smartmuseum.uchicago.edu/events/2008/artist-talk-amanda-williams/

10/10/2022

On Humanities Day October 15, explore the global resonance and creative possibilities of “the monochrome” during a guided tour of “Monochrome Multitudes.” This exhibition offers an expanded history of 20th and 21st century art through more than 100 monochromatic works.

Tours led by UChicago Division of the Humanities graduate student researchers. Space still available for the 1:30 pm tour. Browse the full schedule of events and register at https://humanitiesday.uchicago.edu.

10/06/2022

Smart Museum of Art updated their information in their About section.

Smart Museum of Art updated their information in their About section.

10/04/2022

Join “Monochrome Multitudes” exhibiting artist Arturo Herrera this Thursday for a talk co-sponsored by Goethe-Institut Chicago.

10/03/2022

Photos from The University of Chicago's post

10/01/2022

Now open—the expansive exhibition “Monochrome Multitudes” features works by 91 modern and contemporary artists from around the globe, including Sheila Hicks, Charles and Ray Eames, William Turnbull, and Anne Truitt.

Learn more: https://smartmuseum.uchicago.edu/exhibitions/monochrome-multitudes/

09/22/2022

Visit “Monochrome Multitudes” this weekend and then enjoy the sounds of the Hyde Park Jazz Festival! Darren Johnston’s Life in Time (1 pm) and the Fred Jackson, Jr. Quartet (2:30 pm) perform Saturday in the Smart Museum’s sculpture garden as part of the sixteenth annual festival, a weekend of free performances at cultural venues across the neighborhood.

Browse the lineup: https://www.hydeparkjazzfestival.org/hpjf2022

09/22/2022

Smart Museum of Art updated their address.

Smart Museum of Art updated their address.

09/22/2022

Smart Museum of Art updated their phone number.

Smart Museum of Art updated their phone number.

09/15/2022

“Monochrome Multitudes” opens next week! The exhibition traces “the monochrome” as a fundamental if surprisingly expansive artistic practice. Featuring more than 120 artworks by 91 artists, the exhibition opens up this seemingly reductive art to reveal its global resonance and creative possibilities.

Learn more: https://smartmuseum.uchicago.edu/exhibitions/monochrome-multitudes/

09/02/2022

Vanja V. Malloy appointed the Dana Feitler Director of Smart Museum of Art

We’re thrilled to announce that Vanja V. Malloy, an accomplished museum director, curator, scholar and community builder, has been appointed as the Dana Feitler Director of the Smart Museum of Art.

As the Dana Feitler Director, Vanja will lead The University of Chicago’s fine arts museum and its exhibitions, public and arts education programs, and student and faculty collaborations. She joins the Smart Museum from the Syracuse University Art Museum, where she was appointed director and chief curator in 2019.

Join us in welcoming Vanja!

The accomplished museum curator and community builder joins the UChicago community Oct. 1.

08/29/2022

Paint plants with us! The Smart Museum is partnering with Garfield Park Conservatory to present two plein air painting workshops this week in the conservatory's exhibition “Garden Nouveau.”

Join us August 31 or September 7, 4–7 pm. All materials provided.

08/09/2022

Murals Hit a High Note on this CHA Building

“Loving these murals is easy, because they’re beautiful.” Chicago Magazine talks with teens and residents from our Toward Common Cause collaboration with Chicago Housing Authority.

The otherwise forgettable Minnie Riperton Apartments (yes, she of

07/19/2022

Always read the plaque.

Inconspicuously bolted on plain interior walls of several University of Chicago buildings, Jenny Holzer’s text-based interventions command authority through their materials as much as their words.

Learn more: https://arts.uchicago.edu/public-art-campus/browse-work/survival

06/30/2022

“Untidy Objects” is a video essay by Isabella Diefendorf (AB’24) that explores the connections between “Unsettled Ground” and “Untidy Objects,” an ongoing environmental sculpture by Sarah Black, Amber Ginsburg, and Sam Frost. The sculpture, can be visited at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, takes the form of a collection of biozones, or small ecosystems based around sunlight, shade, water, and elevation, challenging the traditional distinctions between subject and object by creating a horticultural sculpture that includes humans as co-constituents of the ecological community. Untidy Objects contains themes such as temporality, surreality, artifice, close looking, and slow violence. 👀

What is an untidy object? An untidy object is an object that is inextricably intertwined with its surroundings. Each tree would not exist without the support of the forest, so where does the forest end and the tree begin? This is the question of the untidy object. Untidy Objects seeks to bring this co-mingling of beings to the forefront of the mind. By emphasizing these porous boundaries between the self and the other, a person walking through the sculptural garden feels as though they’re becoming a part of it.

Although the Smart Museum of Art will be temporarily closed, there are still other wonderful resources and opportunities to closely engage with art this summer! Till very soon. 🫶

06/28/2022

Didn’t get a chance to visit “Unsettled Ground” before the renovation this summer? No worries, here is one more gallery talk! ✨

Student curator Wenshu Wang’s (MAPH’22) project centers on Yun-Fei Ji’s handscroll titled “The Three Gorges Dam Migration” (2010). It depicts a crowd of villagers making their way along the Yangtze River. This migration was provoked by the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest hydroelectric plant that displaced approximately 1.5 million people. 💦

Extending 10 feet in length, Ji’s scroll - printed from hand-carved woodblocks rather than painted with ink - engenders a sense of visual exhaustion that echoes the migrants’ wearing journey. Interspersed amid banal details of waiting, smoking, and sleeping are ghostly and fantastic figures that extend the upheaval of forced resettlement beyond the human world. With former townships and villages now submerged by the flooded waters of the reservoir, Ji made this work to remind us of the costs of reconfiguring the land of exploitation. 🏗

06/27/2022

🚧 Closed for renovations and reinstallation—the Smart Museum of Art will temporarily close for planned renovations to its study room and other facilities work this summer, June 27–September 21, 2022.

As a primary focus of the work, the gallery-adjacent study room will receive its first major update since the space opened in 1999. The study room renovation, which is supported through capital project funds from the University of Chicago, will expand and enhance this critical site of access to the Smart Museum’s collection for use in research and teaching.

Learn more: https://smartmuseum.uchicago.edu/blog/closed-for-summer-renovations-2022/

06/24/2022

Navigating land use and its evolving forms, objects in the third section titled “Land at Work” raise questions about how we value the earth and the way it has been irrevocably altered as a result. To designate an area as “land” is to situate it in relation to human activities past, present, and future. In the context of still colonialism, land is often regarded as a property to be owned and a resource to be exploited. This extractive attitude has left its mark on the earth—transforming the landscape, exhausting ecologies, and unleashing toxins into the ground, water, and air. Yet this viewpoint remains partial, neglecting both the natural forces that have shaped topography over millennia and alternative models for less harmful relations with the environment. Experimenting with perspective, framing, and scale, the works in this section invite us to consider the conflict between shaping space for human purposes and respecting natural processes.

In the last section titled “No Man’s Land,” four artists mobilize and subvert the genre of landscape to bear witness to moments—real and imagined, personal and collective—in which human relationships to the land have been unsettled and upended. The earth can also act as a catalyst for, archive of, and memorial to human events. Environmental disasters, extractive economics, and forced migrations continually reshape the topographies of land and memory, underscoring the tension between mastery and precocity that unevenly structures human relations with the environment. At the same time, these works also testify to the enduring nature of memory embedded in the earth and its potential as a source of resilience. Above all, they beg the question: what happened here?

06/23/2022

Today, we are featuring two etchings in the second sub-theme — Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein's "Der Tierlaokoon (The Animal Laocoön)" (1796) and Mukul Dey's "Sacred Tree" (1927). Student curators Ellis LeBlanc (MAPH'22) and Xuanlin Ye (MAPH'22) researched the artworks respectively. 📚✍️

Tischbein's etching represents a zoomorphic reinterpretation of the famous Laocoön Group sculpture, which, during the eighteenth century, was widely regarded as the paragon of classical artistic tradition. As he created this work, the artist was actively experimenting with comparative physiognomy, a practice that explored analogies between the human and animal world. The transformation of the sculpture’s human figures into lions is not the only alteration; the etching also embeds the scene into a rich natural landscape. Formal echoes, such as similarities between the lion’s tufted mane and the vegetation draped over the rocks, suggest a continuation of Tischbein’s interest in metamorphosis into the vegetal world. The rocky outcroppings meticulously frame the tumbling arrangement, giving the impression of a drama that has been momentarily paused. This raises the question: is the natural world around us a stage? 🧐

The subject of Dey's drypoint etching is the sacred Bodhi tree under which the Buddha achieved spiritual awakening. Growing upwards from an urn, the tree’s tangled branches dominate the composition and offer refuge to a host of small creatures. Winged deities frame its crown, while people lay offerings at its base. Dey was a pioneer of drypoint etching in India, a technique that he learned while traveling to Chicago and London. Working at a time when India was under British rule, he was deeply concerned with developing a national artistic language. In addition to his printmaking practice, he also worked to recover and preserve India’s rich cultural heritage. Between 1918 and 1919, Dey undertook an arduous journey to copy the Buddhist frescoes at the Ajanta and Bagh caves. These encounters informed his work, which conveys a sense of national pride in its combination of traditional imagery and modern technique. 🌳

06/22/2022

If you have visited our current exhibition "Unsettled Ground," you might've remembered a textile sculpture that tempts your hands to reach out. 🧶

Teddy Sandler (AB'23)'s research centers on Sheila Hicks's bundled threads titled "Evolving Tapestry–Soleil" (1984). Renowned for her textile sculptures, Hicks used wound, tied, and knotted linen to form bouquets of threads, whose pointillist combination of oranges, yellows, and greens evokes flowers, moss, and lichens, and, as suggested by its title, the sun. As we move around the work, these allusions to natural abundance give way to the ordered presentation of ponytails of bound strings that form the three separate coils from which the sculpture is built. The transition draws attention to Hicks’s meticulous process, offering new insights into the work’s materiality.

Sheila Hicks, "Evolving Tapestry–Soleil," (1984). Wound, tied, and knotted dyed linen. Gift of the artist, Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, 1995.45a-c.

06/21/2022

The second sub theme “Earthly Visions” invites us to wonder how we envision the natural world around us. The ways in which we see, touch, and otherwise sense the earth affects how we understand and share our planet. In this section, artists approach the environment as a natural utopia. Though the concept of “nature” as something separate from the human has rightly been critiqued, these works insist on the natural world’s enduring significance as a source of inspiration, strength, and rejuvenation. Working across disparate geographies and eras, the artists in this section employ a diverse array of media—from ceramics and textiles to printmaking and painting—to create their own earthly visions. Drawing variously upon artistic tradition, spirituality, and science, this section includes such artists like Ruth Duckworth, Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, Mukul Dey, and Sheila Hicks, presenting holistic yet idiosyncratic representations of the natural world and offering new perspectives on the planet and our place within a shared ecology.

Inspired by topographical maps and the emergence of satellite imagery, Ruth Duckworth’s maquette and mural depict aerial views of the earth that collapse geomorphic, hydrologic, and atmospheric processes onto a single plane. By shaping these diverse environmental forces from a common earthen material, clay, Duckworth’s artwork echoes her belief in a “common energy” from which all things grow. Viewed from above, Duckworth’s maquette is a humble portrayal of the environment, whereas her monumental mural surrounds and incorporates its viewers into its representation of a planetary ecology, perhaps moving them to share in her “intense concern for nature – our environment and what we do to it.”

Read more about Ruth Duckworth by Jack Schneider:
https://voices.uchicago.edu/unsettledground/one-big-lump-of-clay-on-ruth-duckworths-earth-water-and-sky/

06/20/2022

"Unsettled Ground" Gallery Talk

🔊Join Meichen Liu (MPAH’22) for a gallery talk on a print titled “Cherry, South Haven” (1909) by Bertha Evelyn Jaques. This print features a cherry branch collected in South Haven, Michigan. In addition to its scientific value, it also evinced Jaques’s aesthetic sensibility. The cherry blossoms, rendered in various degrees of transparency, seem to radiate outwards and upwards, while the scattered petals to the right suggest the passing of time. ⏳

A founder of the Chicago Society of Etchers and active member of the Wildflower Preservation Society, Bertha Evelyn Jaques also created thousands of cyanotypes of plant specimens. Jaques regarded her work as a way of preserving the ephemeral beauty of the natural world. She once described her practice, “There is a moment’s loveliness too great for words to hold; so paper caught and scattered it for all the world to keep.” 🌸