Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago
Heartland
October 1, 2009 – January 17, 2010
Throughout the vast interior of the United States, contemporary artists are responding to the world around them and reshaping it in unexpected ways. Organized by the Smart Museum of Art and the Van Abbemuseum, one of Europe’s premier contemporary art institutions, this exhibition offers an idiosyncratic look at the innovative forms of artistic creation taking place in the American Heartland. In 2007 and 2008, the Heartland curators, eschewing traditional research methods, set out on a series of old-fashioned road trips through the vast center of the United States. These research trips informed two distinct exhibitions. The first presentation, which opened in October 2008 at the Van Abbemuseum in the Netherlands, sought to uncover new ways of thinking about the American interior during the U.S. presidential election and gave European audiences access to a broad survey of the Heartland’s culture, art, and music. The second, reconceived presentation at the Smart Museum, offers U.S. audiences a more focused look at the ideals of resourcefulness and invention that permeate the Heartland. Together, the two presentations offer a richly layered reading of a region that has too often been overlooked.
Heartland
October 1, 2009 – January 17, 2010
Throughout the vast interior of the United States, contemporary artists are responding to the world around them and reshaping it in unexpected ways. Organized by the Smart Museum of Art and the Van Abbemuseum, one of Europe’s premier contemporary art institutions, this exhibition offers an idiosyncratic look at the innovative forms of artistic creation taking place in the American Heartland. In 2007 and 2008, the Heartland curators, eschewing traditional research methods, set out on a series of old-fashioned road trips through the vast center of the United States. These research trips informed two distinct exhibitions. The first presentation, which opened in October 2008 at the Van Abbemuseum in the Netherlands, sought to uncover new ways of thinking about the American interior during the U.S. presidential election and gave European audiences access to a broad survey of the Heartland’s culture, art, and music. The second, reconceived presentation at the Smart Museum, offers U.S. audiences a more focused look at the ideals of resourcefulness and invention that permeate the Heartland. Together, the two presentations offer a richly layered reading of a region that has too often been overlooked.
Where Do We Go From Here? Selections from La Coleccion Jumex
December 3, 2009 - March 14, 2010
December 3, 2009 - March 14, 2010
This exhibition positions art as a cultural index by juxtaposing inter-generational artists, as well as, artists from, or based in Mexico with international counterparts. The exhibition has four sections: art about art; art and urban anthropology; text in art; and a series of artist profiles. These conceptual clusters are important as they spin a narrative from one work to the other as well as provide key contextual reference points.
December 10 – Ongoing
This exhibition represents the first serious effort to define a neglected art form—the serial publication. Artists have long seized on magazines and postcards to create new kinds of art, often the most avant-garde of its time. The exhibition will survey these works—from Wallace Berman’s Semina through Eleanor Antin’s 100 Boots, Robert Heinecken’s modified Periodicals, the Japanese Provoke group, to Raymond Pettibon’s Tripping Corpse and Maurizio Cattelan’s Permanent Food—and will offer a glimpse of rare works by Continuous Project, and a special appearance by North Drive Press. These works have had a profound effect on a diverse range of contemporary artists—such as Terence Koh, Tom Sachs, Scott Hug, and Roni Horn—who have embraced the form and contributed to an explosion of new artists’ publications.
Damián Ortega: Do It Yourself
September 18, 2009 - January 18 2010
September 18, 2009 - January 18 2010
Due in part to his background as a political cartoonist, Mexico City–based Damián Ortega has a knack for animating objects in unexpected yet incisive ways. Cosmic Thing, 2002, a fastidiously exploded 1983 VW Beetle whose disassembled parts are suspended in midair, is characteristic: at once playfully destructive and rigorously diagrammatic. A common car in Mexico, the Bug is one of many stereotypically Latin American products stacked, rolled, or pulled by Ortega, along with tortillas, pickaxes, and bricks. Indeed, this exhibition, which includes eighteen sculptures, photographs, and videos made between 1996 and 2007, promises not only technical finesse but a wry commentary on the movement of global commodities.
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