Since the 1980s, Chinese contemporary artists have cultivated intimate relationships with their materials, establishing a framework of interpretation revolving around materiality. Their media range from the commonplace to the unconventional, the natural to the synthetic, the elemental to the composite: from plastic, water, and wood, to hair, gunpowder, and Coca-Cola. Artists continue to explore and […]

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 […]

How has the environment shaped artistic practice, and how can artistic form teach us to understand our local and planetary environment in new ways? The artworks presented in Unsettled Ground speak to a generative conversation between art and the environment—whether understood as natural, human, or something altogether more complex—across multiple scales of time and space. Drawing on […]

This exhibition offers an expansive narrative of modern monochrome, or “one color,” art. Revisiting classic modernist ideas of flatness, idealized form, and color, Monochrome Multitudes opens this fundamental artistic practice up to reveal its surprising creative possibilities. The exhibition features monochromatic groupings—rooms of blue, white, yellow, gray, black, and red works respectively—alongside thematic sections where single colors […]

The sixties were a long time coming. The sixties keep coming back. For many parts of Africa, to refer to the 1960s is to gesture broadly toward a time of great transformation: the postcolonial turn. That decade’s beginning marks a wave of national independence movements coming to fruition in all parts of the continent with […]