Location: Regenstein Library, 1st Floor Lobby
Dates: Monday, March 28th to Friday, June 3rd (Spring Quarter 2011)
Public Hours: M–Th. 8:30am–7pm ; Fri. 8:30am–5pm; Sat. 9am–1pm; Closed Sundays
Guided Tour & Opening Reception: Tuesday, March 29th at 4:30pm
Presented by Eric Huntington, Ph.D. Candidate Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations
The Oriental Institute Museum exhibition Visible Language: Inventions of Writing in the Middle East is on view through Sunday March 6th.
Exhibit curator Christopher Woods, Associate Professor at the Oriental Institute, said, “In the eyes of many, writing represents a defining quality of civilization. There are four instances and places in human history when writing was invented from scratch — in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and Mesoamerica — without previous exposure to or knowledge of writing. It appears likely that all other writing systems evolved from the four systems we have in our exhibition.”
For museum hours, click here.
An exhibition of documents at Rome’s State Archives throws vivid light on his tumultuous life here at the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th centuries.
…He had frequent brushes with the police, got into trouble for throwing a plate of cooked artichokes in the face of a waiter in a tavern, and made a hole in the ceiling of his rented studio, so that his huge paintings would fit inside. His landlady sued, so he and a friend pelted her window with stones.
To explore an interactive sample of the documents, see the recent article from BBC News.
The Brooklyn Museum’s project Split Second aims to explore how an audience’s initial reaction to a work of art is affected by various factors. It begins with an online, interactive experiment and will culminate in a small installation of Indian paintings from the permanent collection.
Split Second begins with a three-part activity that explores the Museum’s collection of Indian paintings… The first stage explores split-second reactions… Next, participants will be asked to write in their own words about a painting before rating its appeal on a scale. In the third phase, participants will be asked to rate a work of art after being given unlimited time to view it alongside a typical interpretive text. Each part of the exercise aims to examine how a different type of information—or a lack thereof—might affect a person’s reaction to a work of art.
The installation will open on the museum’s second floor on July 13, 2011. To participate, visit the Split Second website.
The exhibition For All the World to See examines the influence of visual culture and images like that of Emmett Till in shaping and transforming the struggle for racial equality by showing… realities of segregation and racial violence, inspiring activists, and fostering African American pride and the Black Power movement.
This traveling exhibit will be open at the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago until May 16, 2011. A comprehensive online exhibition is also available.
Via the National Endowment for the Humanities.
History Coming Home at the Chicago Tourism Center Gallery…
reveals public policies, oral histories, and artifacts from public housing in cities from Chicago to Boston and New Orleans to Sacramento. The core of this exhibition at the Chicago Tourism Center Gallery consists of a 1950s-style public housing apartment that visitors can walk through. Inside the 20 ft X 20 ft installation, a living room, kitchen, and bedroom filled with artifacts from public housing residents and a video capture various aspects of the public housing experience.
Alison Cuddy, host of WBEZ’s Eight Forty-Eight, recently toured History Coming Home with National Public Housing Museum Executive Director Keith Magee. You can listen to it here.
The exhibit includes photographs from the Chicago Housing Authority archives and the Chicago History Museum. It previews the opening of the National Public Housing Museum, a permanent home for the history of public housing in America, set to open in 2012. History Coming Home will be open until April 15, 2011 at the Chicago Tourism Center Gallery, 72 E. Randolph. Tours are available M-F, 11am-3pm and by appointment.
Via the City of Chicago’s Official Tourism Site.
David Wojnarowicz’s 1986–87 video A Fire in My Belly is a poetic, unfinished tribute to the artist’s friend and colleague, Peter Hujar, who died of AIDS.
An excerpt of the work was recently removed from the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture following protests by a religious group and conservative politicians. In response to the Smithsonian’s decision to pull the work, institutions around the country have joined together to host screenings as a way to draw attention to its removal and to foster discussion around the work and issues of censorship.
The Smart Museum will be screening the original, 13-minute version of the film edited by Wojnarowicz in 1986–87 followed by a 7-minute additional chapter that was later found in his collection. It will be playing on continuous loop in a black box screening area.
The film will be screened from January 4 – February 6, 2011. Via Smart Museum of Art.
Jason DeCaires Taylor creates environmental artwork by dropping cement casts of real people onto the ocean floor — creating artificial reefs that help restore coral ecosystems. His latest project, completed this month, is a massive collection of 400 sculptures off the coast of Cancun.
The sculptures will continue to evolve as sea creatures and plants colonize them. Video of the Cancun installation and photographs of previous transformations in Grenada are available on Science Friday’s blog Science & the Arts.
Electrical engineer and light sculptor Jim Campbell creates outdoor installations that quietly play with ideas of technological advancement and images. One work, called Scattered Light was recently installed in Manhattan’s Madison Square Park and comprises 1,600 lightbulbs fitted with LED bulbs. From afar, each bulb creates a kind of pixel, appearing flat as the shadows of people walking around the sculpture move through the light.
As the artist states in a videotaped interview:
“I see the work as an homage to the lightbulb, in a way… I like the light bulb shape. So I’m saying goodbye to it.”
For more information, please see the artist’s website.
Via Deep Focus.
The most recent University of Chicago newsletter highlights the interdisciplinary nature of the Smart Museum‘s current exhibition, Echoes of the Past: The Buddhist Cave Temples of Xiangtangshan:
Visitors can step inside re-creations of spaces and groupings of sculptural images that no longer exist today. The displays combine digital imagery of the caves with physical artifacts such as three-foot-tall limestone heads of bodhisattvas and the Buddha. The exhibition’s centerpiece is a multimedia installation known as a “digital cave,” designed by artist Jason Salavon, Assistant Professor in Visual Arts and the Computation Institute. Salavon conceived of the cave as an immersive experience, using multiple screens to give visitors a glimpse inside the largest temple at Xiangtangshan.
The article also discusses at length the extensive research undertaken by The University of Chicago’s Katherine Tsiang (exhibition curator) and Wu Hung, among others. This Sunday at 2pm, Jason Salavon will discuss the components of his installation in an Artist Talk at the Smart.
The exhibition will be open from September 30, 2010 to January 16, 2011 and, like all Smart Museum exhibitions, is free.