Smart Museum of Art
The Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago is a site for rigorous inquiry and exchange that encourages the examination of complex issues through the lens of art objects and artistic practice.
Plan your visit
Visits to the Smart Museum of Art are free, but reservations are recommended. Open Tuesday–Sunday 10 am–5 pm; Thursday until 8 pm. Make a reservation to visit.
Toward Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and the MacArthur Fellows Program at 40
July 15–December 19, 2021
As the main gallery venue for Toward Common Cause, the Smart Museum presents a group show that foregrounds issues of the natural and built environments: environmental racism, urban geographies, and the depiction of those spaces. The selected works—by Mark Bradford, Mel Chin, Nicole Eisenman, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Jeffrey Gibson, Toba Khedoori, Rick Lowe, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Julie Mehretu, Fazal Sheikh, and Xu Bing—consider how race and class shape our rural and urban spaces while also engaging art historical questions about the history of landscape photography and painting. Together, these works call into question the local and global power structures and social inequities that plague contemporary society, a reality thrown into stark relief by the global pandemic.
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Virtual tour
Other initiatives
Toward Common Cause is organized by the Smart Museum of Art in collaboration with exhibition, programmatic, and research partners across Chicago. The Smart is a co-presenter of numerous related events, artist projects, and other initiatives happening in conjunction with the exhibition, both at the Museum and throughout the city.
A cohort of young people from the joint Smart and Chicago Housing Authority Teen Program are deeply engaged in shaping the presentation of Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s work at CHA’s Minnie Riperton Apartments and the National Public Housing Museum. The teens will also design posters that will be displayed in bus shelters across the South Side in conjunction with another Toward Common Cause initiative, Rick Lowe’s Black Wall Street Journey.
About
Through strong community and scholarly partnerships, the Smart Museum of Art incorporates diverse ideas, identities, and experiences into its exhibitions and collections, academic inquiry, and public programming. The Smart offers programs, supports artistic interventions, and provides platforms that address the pressing cultural, social, and political issues of our moment. These projects are driven by the intellectual and cultural energy of its place–the University of Chicago on the South Side of Chicago–and situate the Museum as a critical civic site for its publics to convene in meaningful dialogue and action.
Related
Mark Bradford is known as an abstract painter, though paint only plays a minor role in his works, which are full of concrete meanings. Instead of painting, Bradford builds up layers of papers and other materials that he has collected from everyday life, creating thick surfaces that he then burrows into, scrubbing preselected sections out…
Toward Common Cause exhibiting artist Mel Chin inaugurates the Civic Arts Church at Sweet Water Foundation as headquarters for the Chicago Fundred Initiative: A Bill for IL. Presented on the 12th anniversary of the Fundred Initiative, Chin will be joined by Sweet Water Foundation Executive Director Emmanuel Pratt and participants from the Smart Museum and SkyART teen…
This virtual conversation addresses the ongoing crisis of lead contamination, its interconnected relationship to health, housing, and the environment in the greater Chicago area, and the status of policy change. Organized on the occasion of the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools Corvus Gallery “Fundred Lab” exhibition (through March 11, 2022), the program features presentations and…
Join the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago for the opening event of the Chicago-wide exhibition Toward Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and the MacArthur Fellows Program at 40. Combining a gallery walkthrough with remarks and performances from local artists, museum representatives, and community partners, the opening promises to be a joyful…
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…
I think what art can provide is an option that has not been considered before, and I think that's important because those options might be the liberating factor that is necessary to understand how to cope with what is going around us.
Being one of the most prominent Chinese artists on the global stage, Xu Bing is known for his attempts to deconstruct traditional art forms for new creations to explore the issues of common meaning. Extending the dimensions of contemporary Chinese art but centering on the values which human beings share, his works built up a…
Fazal Sheikh seeks to restore face, voice, and agency to the world’s displaced peoples. His work is often beautiful—visually stunning—but beneath the aesthetic qualities of Sheikh’s work lies this deeper purpose of aiding refugees around the world in their ongoing struggle to secure basic tenets of human livelihood. Sheikh’s entire approach—his choice of subjects, his…
Through scholarly research, collaborative artmaking, and community organizing Jason De León, Wendy Ewald, and Daysi Funes address critical immigration, migration, and human rights issues. Join these panelists for a virtual conversation as they reflect on recent projects including Ewald’s current Toward Common Cause initiative, Daily Life and Dreams in the Pandemic: Photographs by Youth in Rogers Park organized at…
The collaboration between my family and myself blurs the line between self-portraiture and social document. Utilizing photography and video to navigate dynamics of the roles we play complicates the usual classifications of functional and dysfunctional families.
I draw from the world around me, what I know. I pull my friends and family into my paintings . . . I paint the figure because I know the world through my body. And I understand my desires and my anxieties through my body and the desires and anxieties of our culture. I think the body can hold so much, it can be a site for just exploring the paint in or it can hold metaphorical and allegorical meanings. It’s just wide open.
Newly commissioned public artwork Safehouse Temple Door presented at the Civic Arts Church in Chicago, in a collaboration between MacArthur Fellow Mel Chin and the Smart Museum of Art, Sweet Water Foundation, S.O.U.R.C.E. Studio, and UNC Asheville STEAM Studio.
If art for me is a platform from which to speak, but not tell you something, that’s good. If that’s a way I give you a platform from which to think and debate, that’s even better. Ultimately, art for me does not reside in the object: it resides in what is said about the object. All of my work, even the most formal work, has an underlying politics to it, but I don’t want to reveal my position.
All my work is a response to reality, to a human situation, a human context, a human tragedy.
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.
Guillermo Gómez-Peña has an obsession with rewriting and restaging so-called “Western Art History” while highlighting colonial legacies of systematic exclusion, demonization and fetishization of Brown, Black, and indigenous bodies. This live radio keynote from Gómez-Peña challenges contemporary art museum practices and calls for an open discussion regarding radical restructuring from within. The keynote is part…
Mark Bradford and Julie Mehretu are internationally acclaimed artists who explore the natural and built environment, imagined spaces, and urban geography. Their artwork reveals the complex and overlapping systems that shape public spaces and the ways in which race and class impact the layout of our cities. Join us live for a virtual conversation with the artists…
“I think the work is about trying to make sense of what is happening outside of that mediated reality. There are more and more of these complicated situations and I think we all exist in them, or at least I know I do, where I come from two different realities and I’m trying to locate…
Electronic music has a rich tradition of sampling. A well-crafted techno track might contain countless sources to build up texture: a reworked breakbeat, a transposed chord progression, and sped-up vocals taken from another recording. Dance music artfully partakes in appropriation. The trace of one song becomes the dominant theme of another, and so on. That…
The spare world of Toba Khedoori’s paintings is populated by familiar objects that structure the world that we inhabit. Doors, hallways, windows, rows of seats, a chain-link fence—her repertoire evinces a particular affinity for elements of built environment that mediate both access and exclusion. Treated with Khedoori’s singular combination of intricate detail and resolute abstraction,…