Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society
The Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society explores new possibilities for humanistic research by fostering an environment in which new forms of thinking emerge and thrive. Neubauer Collegium gallery exhibitions provide space for scholars, artists, practitioners, and the general public to engage with the arts in the context of collaborative research.
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Ida Applebroog: Monalisa
October 14, 2021–January 16, 2022
As part of Toward Common Cause, the Neubauer Collegium’s gallery features an installation of Monalisa by Ida Applebroog. Living in Southern California in 1969, Applebroog sought refuge from her life as a single mother in her bathtub, where she spent between 2 and 3 hours an evening drawing pictures of her body. This ritual eventually resulted in 160 portraits of Applebroog’s vagina. Packed away in 1974 and rediscovered in 2009, the drawings are installed as wallpaper on a wooden structure resembling a house.
Plan your visit to the Neubauer Collegium
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Other initiatives
Rick Lowe: Black Wall Street Journey
Ongoing research and programming partnership
Rick Lowe, who is serving as a 2018–2021 Visiting Fellow at the Neubauer Collegium, developed Black Wall Street Journey as part of a collaborative research project at the Neubauer Collegium, which includes partners from the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation and the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago.
About
The Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society was established in 2012 to support collaborative humanistic research at the University of Chicago. Research projects sponsored by the Neubauer Collegium bring together scholars and practitioners whose collaboration is required to address complex challenges. The Visiting Fellows program brings the best minds from around the world for collaboration, animating the intellectual and creative environment on campus and strengthening ties between the University of Chicago and its global partners. The Neubauer Collegium’s gallery exhibitions express creative ideas in the context of collaborative research, enabling thought and creativity to move in whatever directions they need to go to address problems of human significance.
Related
I first began to explore art in a social context after being challenged by a high school student who looked at my earlier political work and said it wasn’t what people needed. People needed solutions. And he said, if you are an artist and you are creative, why can’t you create a solution? That was the turning point that got me thinking about how to produce work that was not only symbolic and poetic but also had a practical application.
“And what is your name?” she wrote in 1969. “In dreams it’s Ida Applebroog.” Born Ida Applebaum in the Bronx in 1929 to immigrant parents from Poland, renaming herself was, in part, about forgetting painful memories of her rigid upbringing. It was also an act of resistance, a refusal to be defined by the roles of…