Reading Room Exhibition

The notion of a worldview, or a comprehensive outlook on life, feels at odds with the clips, cuts, memes, and fragmentation that shape 21st-century communication. At a time when it feels as if there is no mainstream—only streaming—the idea of a worldview can prompt nostalgia for big ideas that connect how individuals look at the world around them.

Students, curators, faculty, and visiting scholars visit the Franke Reading Room to trace established ideas that can shape new directions in the study of art. They investigate these ideas beneath an entablature naming historical figures—Vasari, Leonardo, Winckelmann—who helped to shape the earliest conversations about art, but who could never have conceived of the technological, interconnected world in which we presently live.

Drawn from the Art Institute’s collection of modern and contemporary art, the featured works in Worldviews examine different vantage points on landscapes, psychic and earthly, and natural phenomena in an exploration of subjectivity and what bridges us to the past.

Plan a visit today and discover how these works can encourage us to look out as well as within, and consider our own positions as researchers, as viewers, and as people present in this moment, here and now.

Worldviews features paintings by Eleanor Coen, Kurt Seligmann, Bob Thompson, Judith Godwin, Ellen Lanyon, Miyoko Ito, Irving Petlin, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Amy Sillman, Alex Katz, Roger Brown, and Max Ernst. 

See what’s on view.