Tag Archive
Where the Heart Is: The Smart Museum Discovers the Real America
At the Smart Museum’s student sneak preview of “Heartland,” curator Stephanie Smith asked the audience what they had expected from the title. Quilts, admitted one woman, shrugging. The title recalls images of hard-working, humble, and devout farm families working to feed all of America, their art limited to hand-stitched flags and corncob sculptures. In... »
Picture Im(Perfect): The Smart Museum chronicles changing notions of photographic accuracy
Photographs are an interesting thing: since their debut in the middle of the 19th century, they’ve promised the perfect vision of the world, entirely truthful and unaffected by human biases. Yet we have always tried to manipulate this medium to present ourselves in certain ways, to present a certain vision of the world. This... »
Smart Letters
Last Saturday, the Smart Museum of Art held the Yours Truly Letter Writing Workshop, inspired by the museum’s current exhibit, “Your Pal, Cliff: Selections from the H.C. Westermann Study Collection.” Drawn from the museum’s permanent collection, the exhibit contains over 800 letters Westermann wrote to others in addition to about 1000 letters the sculptor... »
Death Ships and Love Notes: H.C. Westerman’s life and work on display at the Smart Museum
Walking through the H. C. Westermann exhibit now showing at the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art means embracing a certain degree of sensory overload. Its title “Your Pal, Cliff,” references the artist’s prolific letter writing, and the exhibit features an enormous collection of his personal and professional correspondence along with sculptures, prints,... »
Another Green World: The eco-friendly UrbanLab designs our future
The grassy knoll in the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum courtyard was a pleasant surprise at the beginning of this school year. Perhaps this five-foot-tall hill seems a bit out of place, as it rises out of a sea of concrete, jutting out from the simple façade of the Cochrane-Woods Art Center. It conjures... »
Etch-a-Sketch: Etching captures modern art and modern life at the Smart Museum
As the 19th century roared into the 20th, the world was opening itself up. People of relatively limited means found themselves able to take trains and caravans across the American West and ships across the Atlantic Ocean. It was an age of colonialism and proto-globalization, when explorers took pride in roaming the so-called exotic... »
Bach’s coffee
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... »
Idol Speculation: A peek inside the Smart Museum’s new exhibit
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... »
