Calling on the Past: Selections from the Collection

Smart Museum of Art 5550 S. Greenwood Avenue, Chicago, IL, United States

Calling on the Past invites visitors to experience the Smart Museum’s collection anew, through a sensory exploration of color, texture, and form. In lieu of customary chronological or geographical divisions, such as those that have often guided the display of the collection in the past, this installation draws on the breadth and depth of the Museum’s holdings to […]

Free

The Metropol Drama

Smart Museum of Art 5550 S. Greenwood Avenue, Chicago, IL, United States

The things we call art can, at their best, provide a way to peek a sideways glance at the emotions behind someone else’s human experience. In this relating to others—be they friends, family, strangers, or the citizens of a different time and place—facts and truth go only so far. The Metropol Drama proposes another way of […]

Free

not all realisms: photography, Africa, and the long 1960s

Smart Museum of Art 5550 S. Greenwood Avenue, Chicago, IL, United States

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 […]

Free

Monochrome Multitudes

Smart Museum of Art 5550 S. Greenwood Avenue, Chicago, IL, United States

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 […]

Free

Unsettled Ground: Art and Environment from the Smart Museum Collection

Smart Museum of Art 5550 S. Greenwood Avenue, Chicago, IL, United States

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 […]