Museum of Contemporary Photography
Founded in 1976 by Columbia College Chicago, the MoCP cultivates a deeper understanding of the artistic, cultural, and political roles of photography in our world today.
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Much Unseen is Also Here: An-My Lê and Shahzia Sikander
June 3–August 29, 2021
In presenting Much Unseen is Also Here as part of Toward Common Cause, the MoCP brings together the works of two major artists who both consider the theater of the landscape, monumentality, cultural history, and representation. Probing monuments and identity, An-My Lê and Shahzia Sikander explore history’s embeddedness in our present. Lê’s Silent General (2015–ongoing) presents large-scale views of places and people in the contemporary American landscape, while Sikander’s uses sculpture, drawings, and animation to examine representations of intersectional femininity that is prompted by questions of who monuments historically depict.
Virtual tour
Much Unseen is Also Here has been generously supported through the Terra Foundation for American Art.
About
The Museum of Contemporary Photography is the world’s premier college art museum dedicated to photography. As an international hub, it generates ideas and provokes dialogue among students, artists, and diverse communities through groundbreaking exhibitions and programming. Founded in 1976 by Columbia College Chicago as the successor to the Chicago Center for Contemporary Photography, MoCP began collecting in the early 1980s and has since grown its collection to include over 16,000 objects by over 1,500 artists.
Related
Engage in the themes of Toward Common Cause through a weeklong exchange between teachers, educators at multiple Chicago museums, and artists at the center of the exhibition. This Summer Teacher Institute offers participants—classroom teachers at any grade and any subject matter, teaching artists, and cultural educators from arts or community-based organizations—to engage deeply with the…
In an essay, curator Abigail Winograd reflects upon how An-My Lê and Shahzia Sikander are connected by an impulse to see America, to see oneself in America, and to see America seeing itself.
Walk into the South Asian galleries at a museum, leaf through a survey book on Persian art, or Google “Hindu sculpture”—you will find artworks isolated against white gallery walls, images cropped from pages aged hundreds of years, sculptures extracted from temples and set against jet-black voids. For Pakistani-American artist Shahzia Sikander, seeing centuries-old works of…
Though women make up more than half the population of Chicago, and are noted for their role in shaping the city’s history, they make up a minuscule percentage of the monuments in the landscape. Join Michelle Duster, Sam Kirk, and Marcia Walker-McWilliams along with moderator Meg Duguid as they explore the ways women have been…
Much Unseen is Also Here, a Toward Common Cause initiative presented at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, brings together the works of two major Asian American artists who both consider the theater of the landscape, monumentality, cultural history, and representation. In this virtual talk exhibiting artists An-My Lê and Shahzia Sikander discuss their artistic practices…
Join the exhibition curators, friends, and DJ CQQCHIFRUIT for a virtual celebration of Much Unseen is Also Here: An-My Lê and Shahzia Sikander and other summer exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Photography. Register for the Zoom link
Since 2015, An-My Lê has used her camera to cast a critical eye on contemporary American politics in a capacious series of photographs titled Silent General. The series began with an invitation to document the making of the 2016 Hollywood film Free State of Jones, a fictionalized telling of the story of a Civil War…