2005–06 Exhibitions

April 6, 2006

MEDIA CONTACTS:
Erin Hogan
(312) 443-3664

Chai Lee
(312) 443-3626

The following list of exhibitions, scheduled through 2006. The list is subject to additions and changes prior to the opening of each exhibition. Unless otherwise noted, exhibitions are free with suggested museum admission.  Please call the Department of Public Affairs to confirm titles, dates, and details of exhibitions before publication.

April

Casas Grandes and the Ceramic Art of the Ancient Southwest
April 22–August 13, 2006
Regenstein Hall

Overview: Between A.D. 1200 and 1400, in the vast desert region comprising parts of the American Southwest and Northwest Mexico, there flourished many ancient Indian communities whose diverse ceramic arts are considered among the most accomplished in the world. The visual tradition of this distinctive cultural area bears an unmistakable “southwestern” character, readily distinguished from that of Mesoamerica to the south, or the arts of the ancient Mississippian world to the east. Simple volumetric containers—spheres, hemispheres, and various globular forms—are covered with complex interlocking geometrical designs, sometimes combined with bold abstract animal and human figures. Yet within this larger shared tradition, there are many identifiable local styles and symbolic vocabularies created by different communities to represent and maintain their own cultural identity and sense of place in the landscape.

Casas Grandes and the Ceramic Art of the Ancient Southwest will be the first major exhibition to explore, through works of the highest artistic order, the complex imagery of the Casas Grandes-Pakimé tradition of Northwest Mexico, in relation to the more archaeologically well-known and aesthetically appreciated styles of the American part of the Great Southwest. The extensive Casas Grandes region, with its desert rivers and mountains, has been the subject of important archaeological explorations, and recent publications have outlined its significance in relation to the other cultural areas to the north—Hohokam, Mimbres, and Anasazi. In contrast the rich artistic achievement Casas Grandes ceramic works has barely been explored.  The exhibition will feature some 60 Casas vessels selected for the highest quality from public and private collections; these earthenware forms will be presented and discussed in relation to approximately 60 others of comparable masterpiece quality, representing other major styles the ancient Southwest.  Contrasting and comparing this powerful imagery will reveal as never before the exceptional achievement of Casas master potters, hitherto largely unknown to the public.  Polychromatic designs of animals both real and mythological, together with abstract human figures and geometries of remarkable variation, will be displayed to reveal their imaginative complexity. Certain motifs display affinities with Mesoamerican imagery yet they are incorporated into a visual vocabulary reflecting the tradition of abstract design and the cosmological outlook of the Southwestern desert cultural domain to which they belonged. Today, the Pueblo, Pima, and Papago peoples of New Mexico and Arizona trace ancestry to the ancient communities of the American part of the Southwest, while the old Casas Grandes communities have been absorbed in the larger populations of Northern Mexico.

Catalogue: Casas Grandes and the Ceramic Art of the Ancient Southwest is accompanied by a splendidly illustrated 214-page catalogue with interpretive essays by art historians and a contemporary ceramic artist, all closely familiar with the ancient southwestern arts. More than 140 illustrations in full color present, for the first time, a visually compelling picture of Casas Grandes vessels in relation to their neighboring ceramic styles. The catalogue, available in the Museum Shop, also includes photographs and plans of important archaeological sites.

Organizer: Casas Grandes and the Ceramic Art of the Ancient Southwest is organized by the Art Institute of Chicago.

Curator: Richard F. Townsend, Curator of African and Amerindian Art, Art Institute of Chicago

Sponsor: This exhibition is generously funded by the Joanne M. and Clarence E. Spanjer Fund.

May

Commemorative Events on Cloth
May 6–July 16, 2006
Gallery 141

Overview: Beginning in the last quarter of the 18th century, handkerchiefs and bandanas were issued to celebrate important events and personages of various kinds. The popularity of commemorative kerchiefs grew with the introduction of copper-plate printing, which sped up the process and brought down the cost. Illustrating many aspects of social and economic life, these items appealed to a broad range of people and were widespread throughout all levels of society. What’s more, the printed commemorative handkerchief quickly made the transition from useful object to affordable collector’s item due to the ephemeral nature of the image.

This exhibition focuses on printed commemorative kerchiefs from England, Scotland, Germany and the United States covering over 100 years, from the late 18th to the late 19th century. American historical events commemorated include the death of Benjamin Franklin and the 1876 Centennial celebration in Philadelphia. Among the British occasions noted are the British naval victory of 1794, the siege of Gibraltar, the battle of Vittoria on June 21, 1813, the Crimean War, and the 60th Jubilee of the reign of Queen Victoria. Many historical figures are pictured, including Charles Fox, King George III, Horatio Nelson, Samuel Slater, and Queen Victoria. A map of the United States from 1811, a diagram of major battles sites of the Crimean War, and the Oxford Almanac for the year 1753 are some of the surprising illustrations found on these fascinating cloths that serve as a popular record of European and American history.

Organizer: Commemorative Events on Cloth is organized by the Art Institute of Chicago.

Curator: Christa C. Thurman, the Christa C. Mayer Thurman Curator of Textiles, Art Institute of Chicago

Focus: Maureen Gallace
May 25–September 3, 2006
Gallery TBA

Overview: Maureen Gallace is a painter of discreet and deceptively simple compositions depicting the vernacular architecture and landscape of rural New England. On exhibition here are 30 paintings in which stark geometrical forms in a muted palette bump up against assertive wet-on-wet brushstrokes, embodying the struggle between minimalism and abstraction. With the initial air of another time and place, Gallace’s paintings also find influence in the landscapes of Edward Hopper and Fairfield Porter, as well as Giorgio Morandi’s still lifes. The discomforting silence and precarious perspective ultimately reveals the exceedingly contemporary nature of Gallace’s compositions, which are less records of places than memories of them. Stripped of all specificity, the intimate paintings allow viewers to impose on them their own recollections of “home.” 

Maureen Gallace was born in Stamford, Connecticut, and currently lives and works in New York City. She received her BFA from The Hartford Art School, University of Hartford, Connecticut and her MFA from Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. Gallace has had recent solo exhibitions of her work at the Kerlin Gallery, Dublin (2005), the Dallas Museum of Art (2003) and Interim Art, London (2003). Her paintings have also been included in a number of group exhibitions including “Now is a Good Time,” Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York (2004), “Size Matters,” Texas Gallery, Houston, and “School is Out” Southfirst, Brooklyn (2003).

Organizer:Focus: Maureen Gallace is organized by the Art Institute of Chicago.

Curators: James Rondeau, Francis and Thomas Dittmer Curator of Contemporary Art, and Lisa Dorin, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art, Art Institute of Chicago

Todd Eberle: Architectural Abstractions
May 20–August 13, 2006
Gallery 24

Overview: Todd Eberle—best known for his photographs of Donald Judd’s work and buildings in Marfa, Texas—started his career taking photographs of such noted artists and architects as Zaha Hadid, Philip Johnson, Brice Marden, and Agnes Martin.  He not only expanded into architectural photography, but also high-fashion photography, which can be found on the pages of Vanity Fair and Vogue.

Eberle has a knack of photographing the ceiling plane—a marginalized surface in contemporary architecture—and then visually editing it. He shifts the horizontal surface to a vertical one (the gallery wall), highlighting elements that are rarely seen when these interiors are experienced. Eberle’s photographs also incorporate abstract images of grilles, windows, tiling, and other architectural details.

The Art Institute of Chicago will present Todd Eberle: Architectural Abstractions, an exhibition of 12 large-format (60 x 45 in.) photographs by Eberle. The presentation focuses on the photographer’s recent architectural abstractions— cropped details of ceilings and other architectural surfaces—and patterns from 20th-century buildings by such noted designers as Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Philip Johnson.

Catalogue:  Todd Eberle: Architectural Abstractions (40 pages, 13 color plates, essay by curator Joe Rosa) is published by Dibble Hill Press and is available at the Museum Shop.

Organizers: Todd Eberle: Architectural Abstractions is organized by the Art Institute of Chicago.

Curator: Joseph Rosa, the John H. Bryan Curator of Architecture, Art Institute of Chicago

June

Drawings in Dialogue: Old Master through Modern
The Harry B. and Bessie K. Braude Memorial Collection
June 3–July 30, 2006
Regenstein Hall

Overview: In June 2006, the Art Institute of Chicago will celebrate a major gift to its renowned Department of Prints and Drawings of works on paper from the collection of Dorothy Braude Edinburg of Brookline, Massachusetts. The Edinburg collection comprises drawings from the 16th through the 20th centuries and is one of the most important private collections of its kind in the United States. Paramount in Dorothy Edinburg’s quest has been the acquisition of drawings that effectively represent the essence of an artist’s achievement, i.e., powerful images that often relate to works in other media but are significant works that function as independent statements. In addition to the seminal role these drawings often play within an artist’s oeuvre, they must satisfy as well Mrs. Edinburg’s high standards of authenticity and condition—hence, the superb state of the drawings’ preservation.

Drawings in Dialogue and the catalogue that accompanies it will feature approximately 165 of the more than 240 drawings being given to the Art Institute. The exhibition will be organized in three parts: Earlier Masters (62 works), Late Nineteenth Century (41), and Twentieth Century (63). Among the Old Master works are stunning allegorical and religious drawings by Cortona, Giulio Romano, Murillo, Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, Strozzi, the Tiepolos, and Federico Zuccaro, as well as sparkling landscapes by Agostino and Annibale Carracci, Claude, Corot, David, and Guardi, and figurative studies by Boucher, Magnasco, Piazzetta, Prud’hon, Rosa, and Watteau. Masterpieces of the British and American schools include works by Blake, Fuseli, Gainsborough, Hogarth, Turner, and Whistler. Of special interest among the work of German Romantic artists is a watercolor by Schinkel, and drawings by Schnorr von Carolsfeld. Rich black chalk or ink studies by Bresdin, Courbet, Ensor, Millet, and Toulouse-Lautrec lead to others by Gauguin, Redon, Seurat, and van Gogh. The Braude-Edinburg collection is especially rich in late 19th-century French art, with particular depth in works by Cézanne, Degas, Monet, Morisot, Pissarro, and Renoir, continuing through later artists such as Bonnard, Henri Rousseau, and Vuillard. Perhaps the greatest strength of the collection is the group of early 20th-century drawings that capture the richness and diversity of modernism. Among these are outstanding and unusual examples by Braque, Dix, Ernst, Gris, Grosz, Lissitzky, Kandinsky, Kirchner, Klee, Kokoschka, Leger, Masson, Miró, Modigliani, Mondrian, Nolde, Pechstein, Picabia and de Staël, and other masters of Italian Futurism, Russian Constructivism, German Expressionism, and Surrealism. Picasso and Matisse are particularly well-represented. Powerful drawings by such American artists as Bellows and Gorky complete the survey.

All of the exhibited works will be illustrated in full color in the catalogue, accompanied by entries presenting current scholarship in an engaging, accessible way, along with provenance, exhibition, and publication histories. A history of the collection, an overview of its importance, and its relationship to the permanent holdings of the museum will also be included.

Catalogue: 224 pages, 166 color illustrations, 75 duotones, hard-cover only. Distributed by Yale University Press. Authors: The project has been organized by a team of Art Institute curators and research assistants led by Suzanne Folds McCullagh, the Anne Vogt Fuller and Marion Titus Searle Curator of Earlier Prints and Drawings; and Douglas W. Druick, Prince Trust Curator of Prints and Drawings, in collaboration with Brandon Ruud. The catalogue includes contributions by curators Jay A. Clarke, Martha Tedeschi, Stephanie D’Alessandro, Mark Pascale, Gloria Groom, and Peter Zegers, as well as Research Assistant Emily Vokt, with Lia Markey, Lucia Tantardini, and Michelle McCormick.

Organizers: Drawings in Dialogue is organized by the Art Institute of Chicago.

Curator: Suzanne Folds McCullagh, the Anne Vogt Fuller and Marion Titus Searle Curator of Earlier Prints and Drawings, Department of Prints and Drawings, Art Institute of Chicago

Douglas Garofalo
June 17–October 8, 2006
Gallery 227

Overview: Doug Garofalo is one of the country’s leading voices in the digital pedagogy and practice of architecture. The proliferation of digital literacy in architectural production—since the early 1990s—has made theory instructional, informing new methods of conceptualization and construction resulting in building ideologies. The work of Garofalo illustrates how these new frontiers are widening as practices fuse with other mediums to carry forward varying aesthetic explorations, embodying diverse ideologies, and generating new typologies that are changing the way architecture is fabricated, aestheticized, and perceived in the 21st century. Chicago-based Garofalo established his studio in 1987 and is one of the most prolific designers in this genre with a broad range of projects and completed works. The exhibition—comprised of drawing, models, and digital media—will showcase the vast range of his work from the theoretical Camouflage House to the soon-to-be-completed Hyde Park Art Center. This is Garofalo’s  first solo museum exhibition.

Catalogue: A 60-page soft-cover catalogue will accompany the exhibition Douglas Garofalo.

Organizer: Douglas Garofalo is organized by the Art Institute of Chicago.

Curator: Joseph Rosa, John H. Bryan Curator of Architecture and Design, Art Institute of Chicago

Harry Callahan:  The Photographer at Work
June 24–September 24, 2006
Galleries 1–4

Overview: One of the canonical American photographers of the 20th century, Harry Callahan holds particular significance for Chicago, where he made some of his most influential work. This exhibition will present Callahan’s key images, focusing on his intuitive and experimental methods. Alongside museum prints, it will show unpublished variants, contact sheets, proof prints, and negatives. Witnessing Callahan’s decision-making process and comparing different treatments of his favorite subjects, we can see his artistic achievement in a new light.

Catalogue: Harry Callahan: The Photographer at Work features a catalog essay by curator Britt Salvesen and an introduction by John Szarkowski. It is published by Yale University Press.

Organizer:  Harry Callahan: The Photographer at Work is organized by the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson.

Curators: Britt Salvesen, Curator, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson; and Elizabeth Siegel, Assistant Curator of Photography, Art Institute of Chicago

September

So The Story Goes: Photographs by Tina Barney, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Nan Goldin, Sally Mann and Larry Sultan
September 16–December 3, 2006
Regenstein Hall

Overview: Photography has always been the perfect medium for recording one’s life. From early amateur snapshots taken with the first mass-marketed Kodak cameras to the high-tech digital photographs that can be viewed and shared instantly today, people have turned to photography as a way to remember the lives they lead. This is no less true for artists who have used their own daily experiences as their inspiration.

Contemporary photographers Tina Barney, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Nan Goldin, Sally Mann, and Larry Sultan offer viewers a glimpse into their private realities, sometimes imparting the names, dates, and places pictured and other times leaving the possible narrative to our own imagining. Just as no two people keep the same diary or necessarily find the same occurrences worth writing down, each of these five photographers has created highly personal, shifting, and intriguing visions of his or her life.

This exhibition of nearly 150 photographs and the catalogue that accompanies it will showcase five talents of contemporary photography whose work over the past two decades has continually fused art and life. Coming 15 years after a similarly themed exhibition and book entitled Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Art Institute’s project will offer a more focused and monographic consideration of one of the most appealing motifs of photography.

Catalogue: A 128-page catalogue will accompany So the Story Goes, published by Yale University Press. The publication will feature an introductory essay by exhibition curator Katherine Bussard, Assistant Curator of Photography, and entries on each of the five artists, as well as four-color reproductions of nearly 20 photographs by each artist, and a handful of historical illustrations. Bussard, a Ph.D. candidate at the City University of New York, has worked in the area of photography at the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Clark Art Institute.

Related Event: "Snap: The First Photography Benefit Gala” will be held on September 15, 2006. All five photographers featured in the exhibition—Barney, diCorcia, Goldin, Mann, and Sultan—will attend the festivities at the Art Institute.  The photographers will also be hosting several public forums during the opening day of the exhibition on September 16.  For more information on the gala, please call (312) 857-7638.

Organizer: So the Story Goes is organized by the Art Institute of Chicago.

Curator: Katherine Bussard, Assistant Curator of Photography, Art Institute of Chicago

Silk Road Chicago
September 30, 2006–June 30, 2007
Galleries 141 and 142

Overview: From September 2006 to June 2007, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the Silk Road Project (a foundation established by renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma) will present Silk Road Chicago 2006–2007.

Through a series of installations, concerts, and educational programs, the three institutions will explore the transmission of art and culture across space and time, using the ancient trade routes from East to West and West to East as both historical fact and metaphor.  The collaboration will culminate April 9–15, 2007, with the residency of the Silk Road Ensemble in Chicago.  Performances, demonstrations, and concerts will take place at Symphony Hall and the Art Institute.

Organizer: Silk Road Chicago is organized by the Art Institute of Chicago.

Curators: James Cuno, President and Eloise W. Martin Director of the Art Institute of Chicago; Mary Sue Glosser, Associate Director of Performance Programs; and Karen Manchester, Curator of Ancient Art, Art Institute of Chicago

October

Focus: Mel Bochner
October 5, 2006–January 7, 2007
Gallery TBA

Overview: Including works on paper, painting, sculpture, photography, and installation, Focus: Mel Bochner will bring together, for the first time, an overview of the artist's language-based works created over four decades, from 1966 to 2006.

A leading practitioner of conceptual art, Bochner was one of the first artists in the 1960s to re-introduce language into the visual field, yet these efforts remain surprisingly undocumented. The exhibition will include the rarely seen landmark Working drawings and other visible things on paper not necessarily meant to be viewed as art (1966), which the art historian Benjamin Buchloh has called “the first conceptual art installation.”

Other highlights include the artist’s series of magazine interventions published between 1966 and 1968; a number of early word portraits—pen and ink drawings of Bochner’s artist contemporaries including Eva Hesse, Ad Reinhardt, Donald Judd, and Dan Flavin; and very recent, brightly colored canvases based on texts by Ludwig Wittgenstein or drawn from Roget’s thesaurus. Works culled from the artist’s own collection that have never before been exhibited and a number of historical installations, such as Axiom of Indifference (1973), that have seldom been presented publicly will also be on view. This exhibition will introduce a new generation of museum visitors to Bochner’s ideas about the complex and contradictory interactions between verbal language and visual art.

The exhibition will open with a Mel Bochner scholars symposium (dates and more information TBA), co-organized by two distinguished academics:  Judith Kirshner, Dean,College of Art and Design, University of Illinois, Chicago; and James Meyer, Associate Professor of Art History, Emory University, Atlanta. This symposium will bring together the leading international thinkers on Bochner’s work.

Organizer and Sponsor: Focus: Mel Bochner is organized by the Art Institute of Chicago.

Curator: James Rondeau, Francis and Thomas Dittmer Curator of Contemporary Art, Art Institute of Chicago

Julius Shulman: Modernists and the Metropolis
October–December 2006 (exact dates TBA)
Gallery 24

Overview: Julius Shulman is renowned for some of the most iconic photographs in architectural history. Whether photographing a skyscraper, house, or a gas station, Shulman’s compositional artistry and technical precision present a structure in its most engaging, heroic light. Transcending mere documentation of steel and glass, Shulman’s images seem to reveal the essence of an architect’s vision and capture the spirit of the eras in which they were produced.

This exhibition honors Shulman’s 95th birthday and his life’s work. For 70 years, Shulman steadily created one of the most comprehensive visual chronologies of modern architecture and the development of the Los Angeles region. The prints in the exhibition, selected from a portfolio of more than 70,000 images, provide three narratives of the changing aesthetics, technologies, and lifestyles framed by Shulman’s lens.

Organizer: Julius Shulman: Modernists and the Metropolis is organized by the Getty Research Institute Exhibition Gallery.

Curator: In Chicago, Julius Shulman: Modernists and the Metropolis is curated by Joseph Rosa, the John H. Bryan Curator of Architecture, Art Institute of Chicago

Charles Sheeler: Across Media
October 7, 2006–January 7, 2007
Gallery TBA

Overview: Charles Sheeler: Across Media will be the first exhibition to focus exclusively on the complex, often paradoxical, relationships between photography, film, drawing, printmaking, and painting that were so central to the art of Charles Sheeler (1883–1965), one of the most important painters and photographers in 20th-century American art. Early in his career, Sheeler studied to become a commissioned photographer to support himself as a painter, and eventually worked for Vogue, Vanity Fair, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. At the urging of his friend and fellow artist Alfred Stieglitz, Sheeler began to focus on his photographic work and consider it an equally valid form of personal expression. He became the leading figure of the Precisionist movement, which emphasized pure, geometric forms and a Modernist aesthetic.

In celebrating the formal clarity and beauty of Sheeler’s works, Charles Sheeler: Across Media will build on a core of 50 masterpieces, including the magnificent painting Classic Landscape (1931), the masterful conté crayon drawings Interior with Stove (1932, and Counterpoint (1949), and striking examples of the artist’s photographs. The exhibition will open with a small selection of Sheeler’s seminal photographs, circa 1917, of the interior of an 18th-century Quaker fieldstone house in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.  These highly experimental, innovative night scenes represent Sheeler’s first major achievement as a photographer.  Also featured is Manhattan, 1920, a fascinating six-minute film montage of New York City’s urban landscape. A collaboration between Sheeler and fellow photographer Paul Strand, this piece is regarded as the first avant-garde film made in the United States. 

Moving from the rural to the urban, the third component of the exhibition will highlight Sheeler’s series of iconic paintings and drawings inspired by industrial photographs of a Rouge River plant in Dearborn, Michigan, taken in 1927.  They will make clear how a mastery of various techniques enabled the artist to develop intricate relationships between different media. The final galleries will present the enigmatic masterpiece The Artist Looks at Nature (1943) as well as Sheeler’s experiments with photomontage in the 1940s and 1950s that are among the most complex and intriguing achievements of his entire career. 

Other venues: Charles Sheeler: Across Media will also be presented at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., May 7–August 27, 2006; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco February 10–May 6, 2007; and the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco (dates TBA).

Catalogue: The fully illustrated catalogue will feature three scholarly essays analyzing Sheeler’s work.

Organizer: Charles Sheeler: Across Media is organized by the Art Institute of Chicago.

Curator: Judy Barter, the Field-McCormick Curator of American Art, Art Institute of Chicago

November

Young Chicago
November 18, 2006–April 29, 2007
Gallery 227

Overview: Since the early 20th century, Chicago has been a city that has continually fostered young design talent. To showcase this depth and breadth of design culture in Chicago and celebrate the 25th anniversary of the founding of the Art Institute’s Architecture and Design department, this exhibition will feature 25 young architects and designers—whose works are not yet included in the collection—who are taking Chicago into the 21st century.

Catalogue: A lavishly illustrated 96-page catalog will include an essay by Joseph Rosa that traces evolution of design in Chicago from its origins to today’s “young Chicago.”

Organizer: Young Chicago is organized by the Getty Research Institute Exhibition Gallery.

Curator: Joseph Rosa, the John H. Bryan Curator of Architecture, Art Institute of Chicago