In eighteenth-century Leipzig, a new temptation beckoned from the street corners—coffee. This new luxury inspired Johann Sebastian Bach to write a miniature comic opera known as the “Coffee Cantata.” Last year, a group of University of Chicago students founded the Cantata Collegium, and Thursday evening’s performance of the satirical “Coffee Cantata” at the Smart Museum of Art was their debut. The group was able to secure an Arts Council grant to adapt the piece for a modern audience. This involved a complete translation of the libretto from German to English, modified instrumentation, and original costume and set designs. Read the rest of this entry »

Idols, as described by curator Aaron Tugendhaft’s introduction to the Smart Museum’s new special exhibit “Idol Anxiety,” are worrisome objects. A physical intersection between humanity and the divine, idols have been the subject of devotion and the inspiration of anxiety for millennia, from the still-mysterious Venus figurines of the Paleolithic to more recent sculptural depictions of the body of Christ, so central in Gothic art that in some European cities guilds held a monopoly on their manufacture. The nature of idols as made objects, however, has stimulated anxieties of its own. Created by human hands, but claiming a relationship with the supernatural, idols tread an uncertain ground between veneration as a symbol of divinity and worship as a divinely-imbued object. Using a variety of religious and secular perspectives, “Idol Anxiety” explores the necessarily complex relationship between idols, their makers, and their audiences. Read the rest of this entry »

Adaptation: a work that has been recast into a new form. In regard to the Smart Museum’s new exhibition, “Adapation,” this entails the transformation of various artistic expressions—written works, movies, dance, music, email—into film installations. The remodeling of a novel into a movie is quite a familiar process, but the method of adaptation in contemporary art is not quite so common a practice. “Adaptation” works to uncover new understandings of adaptation in postmodern art and address the idea of loyalty and the struggle of the creative process. The show includes six film adaptations by featured artists Guy Ben-Ner, Arturo Herrera, Catherine Sullivan, and Eve Sussman & The Rufus Corporation. The exhibition includes a varying selection of film genres, from narrative to more abstract, but all of the works are united through their common form of adaptation. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the largest epics ever written in the English language was composed entirely in an apartment on Chicago’s North Side. Its author was a quiet man named Henry Darger, whose impressive composition was accompanied by huge collages and watercolor paintings. The epic is entitled “The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion.” It is 15,145 pages long. Read the rest of this entry »

The pristine walls of the Smart Museum house many of the University of Chicago’s greatest artistic assets. It makes sense, then, that the museum would be included in the program of the University’s Family Weekend, when parents come to tour the institution to which they have entrusted their children and tuition money. On Sunday, visiting UofC parents, a segment of the population that is always ready for cultural enrichment, were treated to a tour of the museum’s galleries. As on most Sunday afternoons, the Smart Museum’s cafe and courtyard were filled with the usual students and art lovers, enjoying the nice weather outside and the aesthetically pleasing atmosphere inside. Read the rest of this entry »

For a number of reasons, drawing has never commanded the same position in the artistic pantheon afforded to painting or sculpture. Among the bigger ones is that drawing often seems a preparatory step for the creation of a more substantial work, and the rawest one at that. So while painted studies sometimes get their due as critical experiments in expressing ideas for a final work, the sketches that first incubate those ideas often languish in archives.
Read the rest of this entry »