The University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art presents Bob Thompson: This House Is Mine, the first museum exhibition dedicated to this visionary painter in more than twenty years.

Organized by the Colby College Museum of Art, where it debuted in summer 2021, the exhibition features more than 85 paintings and works on paper. This House Is Mine centers Bob Thompson’s brief but prolific transatlantic career within expansive art historical narratives and ongoing dialogues about the politics of representation, charting his enduring influence.

About the exhibition

Born in 1937 in Louisville, Kentucky, Thompson was recognized during his lifetime for his paintings of figurative complexity and chromatic intensity. Over a mere eight years, from 1958 to his untimely death at the age of 28 in 1966, he developed an enigmatic style that used canonical European paintings as points of departure to create radically inventive contemporary allegories. Human and animal figures, often silhouetted and relatively featureless, populate mysterious vignettes set in wooded landscapes or haunt theatrically compressed spaces. Thompson reconfigures well-known compositions by European artists such as Piero della Francesca and Francisco de Goya through brilliant acts of formal distortion and elision, recasting these scenes in sumptuous colors.

This House Is Mine examines both Thompson’s formal inventiveness and his engagement with universal themes such as collectivity, freedom, bearing witness, struggle, justice and music.

Bob Thompson: This House Is Mine is organized by the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine, and curated by Diana Tuite. The presentation at the Smart Museum of Art is organized by Jennifer Carty, Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art with Orianna Cacchione, Curator of Global Contemporary Art. It will continue its national tour with stops in Atlanta and Los Angeles. The exhibition is generously supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, halley k harrisburg and Michael Rosenfeld, and the Alex Katz Foundation. Principal support for the presentation at the Smart Museum of Art has been provided by the Terra Foundation for American Art. Additional support has been provided by the Museum’s SmartPartners.