Activity

Gaps (2025)

New collecting and research directions often emerge in what we might think of as the “gaps” of museum collections—absences that can reflect the subjective approaches inherent in curatorial work. But are gaps necessarily a problem? 

This colloquium set out to think in and around gaps to examine their utility for studying, developing, and caring for collections. Rather than “filling” gaps, presentations explored alternative strategies for approaching collection building, research methods, provenance, and the archive.

Hard to Say: On the Legibility of Objects (2024)

One task of a museum is to research and weave narratives about makers, manufacture, contexts, and meanings surrounding its collections. Sometimes, an object’s story can be quite straightforward; oftentimes, the story is complex, multifaceted, or difficult to fully decipher. Drawing from the diverse collection at the Art Institute of Chicago, this convening addressed objects that frustrate, obscure, or otherwise resist traditional narratives, methodologies, or modes of categorization. Posed as a series of evocations rather than conclusions, these presentations explored alternative ways to make meaning through or for such objects, and sought to generate cross-disciplinary dialogues on questions of (il)legibility, its limits, and its potential. 

Andrew W. Mellon Chicago Objects Study Initiative (COSI)

Established in 2014 with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Chicago Objects Study Initiative (COSI) is a tri-institutional collaboration aimed at enhancing object-based art historical training for doctoral students at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago in partnership with the Art Institute of Chicago.

COSI is comprised of four interrelated parts, each supported by in-depth exposure to the rich encyclopedic collections of the museum and to the expertise of the museum’s professional staff: object-based coursework; curatorial fellowships; academic events, including visiting scholar workshops and symposia designed around the Art Institute’s permanent collection; and cohort-driven opportunities for exchange of ideas across a wider scholarly network, serving to bridge art historical research between the three institutions.

COSI Spring Colloquium Themes:

• Fold, Bend, Flip: Museum Objects in Motion (2023) 
  
  This convening considered the physical interaction of objects in museum collections with the people tasked with preserving, understanding, and sharing them. Fellows presented research based on the physical manipulation of objects in the museum collection, and reflected on embodied practices of conservation and material investigation. Invited guests offered responses and presented from their own ongoing projects.
  
  
• Sensitivity and Authority (2022) 

The colloquium addressed the role of sensitivity and authority in art historical methods. 

• Towards a More Inclusive Museum: Object Challenges and Curatorial Strategies (2019)
  
  This roundtable aimed to collectively think through new and ongoing ethical challenges posed by museum objects in order to formulate inclusive curatorial strategies for shaping and showing museum collections. Housing an array of objects with multiple histories, museums simultaneously encourage new understandings of those objects and simplify their histories through their decontextualization. By attending to a selection of works in the museum, the participants hoped to illuminate those multiple histories and consider strategies—past, present, and future—for their re-presentation in the modern museum.
  
  
• Artists and their materials: A reflection on the science and circulation of art (2018)
  
  This colloquium sought to ignite meaningful dialogue on issues of materiality, science, conservation and art history through the research of the Art Institute’s graduate fellows.
  
  
• Altered States (2017)
  
  This convening addressed questions of material transformation and artists’ intent through the theme of “Altered States.” How do parameters of a work of art shift when it’s making involves transformation that is not controlled by the artist’s hand? If the physical state of an object completely changes over time, what might then become the interpretive significance of the material? How might an artist’s intention for a work of art affect its meaning as the work transforms?
  
  
• The International 1930s (2016)
  
  Timed to coincide with the Art Institute exhibition America after the Fall: Painting in the 1930s, the colloquium featured presentations based in the museum’s collection by current and former fellows.
  
  
• From Thread to Brush: Textiles and Their Representation in the Andes (2015)
  
  The spring colloquium drew its inspiration from the Art Institute exhibition A Voyage to South America: Andean Art in the Spanish Empire. Designed as a study session, this convening offered an opportunity to view remarkable and rarely seen Andean textiles from the Art Institute collection that correlated to the images and stories put forth in the exhibition.
  

Andrew W. Mellon Undergraduate Curatorial Fellowship Program

Conceived in 2013, and implemented in 2014 across five American museums, the Mellon Undergraduate Curatorial Fellowship program and Summer Academy provided specialized training to students across the United States from historically underrepresented groups in the curatorial field and supported the goal of promoting inclusive, pluralistic museums. The project operated as a national collaboration across six museums: The Art Institute of Chicago, the High Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with LACMA serving as the Program Director/Principal Investigator (PD/PI) for the Mellon Foundation grant. Collectively, the national program has provided introductory training to more than 500 students through the Summer Academy, and immersive fellowships to 76 emerging museum and arts professionals at the undergraduate level.

Intersections of Art and Science Initiative

In 2017 the Art Institute of Chicago received funding from the National Science Foundation to examine how visitors can engage with art, conservation, and science at the museum. This toolkit publication, Intersections in an Art Museum: Where Art Meets Science, brings together questions, processes, research, and a set of case studies to show how conservation and science stories give visitors new ways and perspectives for discovering and rediscovering the museum’s collection. The collaborative effort—among Learning and Public Engagement, Conservation and Science, Experience Design, plus many more—also aims to bring special attention to values of interdisciplinarity and multivocality, a reflection of the project itself.

Rhoades Foundation Exchange

With the assistance of Art Institute trustee and University of Chicago alumnus Julius Lewis, the Rhoades Foundation endowed a formal scholarly exchange program between the two institutions, enabling Art Institute curators to teach on specialized art historical topics in the University of Chicago’s Department of Art History and University of Chicago graduate students to hold a 10-month internship in one of the museum’s curatorial departments. This exchange, alongside regular faculty use of the museum’s collections for teaching and a close relationship in terms of jointly organized scholarly events, exhibition and publication collaborations, paved the way for the launch in 2014 of the Chicago Objects Study Initiative (COSI) with generous support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Time-Based Media Initiative

Launched in January 2018, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation supported Time-Based Media Initiative (TBM) at the Art Institute is strengthening the museum’s internal practices in collecting, preserving, and presenting time-based media works including film, video, slide, software, and digital art. The project is also building capacity and communication across a regional network of professionals dedicated to the research and care of time-based media artworks. The first convening in 2018 led to the establishment of the Midwest Media Arts Consortium, a professional community field-testing best practices and challenges related to time-based media concerns. The initiative has marshalled the talents of staff across several departments at the Art Institute, including Academic Engagement and Research; Architecture and Design; Collections and Loans; Curatorial Affairs; Conservation and Science; Exhibitions; Imaging; Media Production; Modern and Contemporary Art; Photography and the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries.

The Time-Based Media Initiative is made possible by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Additional support is provided by The Grainger Fund for Conservation.

Northwestern University/Art Institute of Chicago Center for Scientific Studies in the Arts (NU-ACCESS)

The Northwestern University/Art Institute of Chicago Center for Scientific Studies in the Arts (NU-ACCESS) is a collaborative endeavor in conservation science that pursues objects-based and objects-inspired scientific research to advance the role of science within art history, curatorial scholarship, archaeology, and conservation. The goals of the collaborative program are to enrich the breadth, scope, and reach of scientific studies in the arts and in the wider field of conservation in the United States and abroad, by leveraging resources at the Art Institute and materials-related departments at Northwestern University. This research and education initiative also provides enhanced training opportunities for participants through involvement in university-museum multidisciplinary programs.

National Science Foundation: Partnerships for International Research and Education Award

Computationally-Based Imaging of Structure in Materials (CuBISM)

Art objects age over time, and while the materials that make up these objects hold intrinsic archival value, the objects are also models for understanding the process of property degradation over time. CuBISM aims to develop computational and experimental tools needed to understand how these changes take place. To accomplish this task, a research network––Northwestern University/Art Institute of Chicago Center for Scientific Studies in the Arts––has been established, incorporating leaders in cultural heritage science from the Rijksmuseum and the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, the National Research Council in Italy, and the Synchrotron Soleil in France. This new infrastructure promises to deliver a significant enhancement of research and educational resources (networks, partnerships, and increased access to facilities and instrumentation) to a diverse group of users.

The art objects central to the project provide a series of well-defined case studies for investigating complex materials systems that are both applicable to materials education and that push the limits of the existing analytical tools, thereby inspiring instrumental innovations across broad sectors of the physical sciences. Further development of these tools will enable art conservators to more effectively make informed decisions about treatments of works of art, and to understand long-term materials degradation more generally.

The project will also deliver a significant enhancement of research and education infrastructure by a diverse group of users and will provide meaningful, international research experience to 50 participants, with a strong emphasis on scientists at the beginning of their careers. The connections between science and art illustrate the creative aspects of both disciplines to a very broad audience, attracting a more representative cross section of people into the scientific field.