Calling on the Past: Selections from the Collection
March 21, 2023 – February 24, 2024
Smart Museum of Art
University of Chicago
5550 S. Greenwood Ave.
Chicago, Illinois 60637
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Curated by Jennifer Carty
Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art
Borrowing its title from Northern Trust Purchase Prize awardee Amir H. Fallah's painting of the same name, Calling on the Past invites visitors to experience the Smart Museum’s collection anew, through a sensory exploration of color, texture, and form.
In lieu of customary chronological or geographical divisions, such as those that have often guided the display of the collection in the past, this installation draws on the breadth and depth of the Museum’s holdings to situate key works side by side across centuries. From antiquities to contemporary painting and sculpture, the cross-historical selection of objects speaks to the varied materials, ideas, and questions artists continue to explore, while emphasizing the editing of history.
Calling on the Past is inspired in part by art historian George Kubler’s seminal text The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (1962), which argues the art of the past is in constant conversation with the present. Kubler replaces the notion of art historical styles with the understanding that time is both linear and looped, and artists have been revisiting the same sets of questions across the ages. Rather than emphasizing objects’ original context, this exhibition inserts them into imaginative groupings, unraveling historical hierarchies and encouraging us to see the collection with fresh eyes.
“Knowing the past is as astonishing a performance as knowing the stars. Astronomers look only at old light. There is no other light for them to look at. This old light of dead or distant stars was emitted long ago and it reaches us only in the present.”
—George Kubler
PRESENTED IN THE RICHARD AND MARY L. GRAY GALLERY AND THE ELISABETH AND WILLIAM M. LANDES GALLERY.
AMIR H. FALLAH, CALLING ON THE PAST (DETAIL), 2018, ACRYLIC ON CANVAS, 60 X 48 IN. COLLECTION OF THE SMART MUSEUM OF ART, THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, GIFT OF THE 2018 NORTHERN TRUST PURCHASE PRIZE.
Support for Calling on the Past has been provided by the Smart Museum’s Joan & Stanley Freehling Fund for Arts, Helen and Jack Halpern Fund, Janis Kanter and Thomas McCormick Endowment, Eloise W. Martin Fund, Inge and Edward Maser Memorial Fund, and the Museum’s SmartPartners.
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