Objects and Voices Exhibition Foregrounds The Smart Museum's Collection, and the Craft of Curation

Drew Messinger-Michaels, AM’10

For the second time in four months, the Smart Museum of Art has an entirely new look. Following on the success of the fall exhibition Carved Cast and Crumpled: Sculpture All Ways, the Smart has again dedicated its entire space to a wide-ranging exhibition in honor of the museum’s 40 th anniversary, along with this year’s campus-wide celebration of shared anniversaries, Artennial.

The new exhibition, Objects and Voices: A Collection of Stories, on view through June 21, foregrounds the museum’s permanent collection—and just as importantly, the process of curating it—in order to illustrate the many ways the collection can be used and interpreted.

“A lot of what we’ve tried to do is make the operations of the museum more transparent,” says Anne Leonard, Curator and Associate Director of Academic Initiatives

at the Smart and Lecturer in Art History at UChicago. “We’ve tried to make that process—of choosing, selecting, interpreting art—something that in itself is being enacted in these projects, so that it is no longer mysterious to people who come to visit.”

For even the most seasoned museum-goer, it’s easy to let curation become invisible—to imagine that some august object simply is what it is and means what it

means, regardless of context. Objects and Voices tries to shake us out of that particular form of myopia or apathy by placing works from the Smart’s collection into seventeen miniexhibitions designed by about two dozen co-curators, emphasizing the new meanings that arise from these objects’ new contexts.

“We’ve tried to get at the idea of the many ways that art can be experienced, interpreted, enjoyed, learned from, and so on,” Leonard explains. “It’s very much about the collection—not just as a set of inert objects, but more as a

set of possibilities, a set of narrations, really, that people can respond to in their different ways—and also the ways in which the collection has been used over the years to train, inspire, and educate.”

A Great Degree of Freedom

Kerry James Marshall is one of the few practicing artists participating in Objects and Voices as a co-curator. “He did not choose to curate any of his own work,” says Leonard, despite several of his pieces being in the Smart Museum’s collection. “However, another curator— [Professor of English] Ken Warren––is using a work from the collection by Kerry James Marshall, Slow Dance, in his presentation. So visitors will perhaps be surprised to find that mixup, and to find another commentator on the artist’s work when the artist is himself present as a curator.”

The exhibition’s other co-curators include UChicago faculty from a wide swath of disciplines, as well as what Leonard calls “Smart alumni.”

“These are former students of the University who have worked at the Smart Museum, and in many cases have gone on to make careers in the arts. So by their own admission, their formative experiences at the museum and at this university really shaped their choice of career path and what they’ve gone on to do.”

One such alumnus is Russell Bowman, a former Director of the Milwaukee Art Museum whose work with the Smart Museum dates back to its founding in the 1970s. Bowman’s mini-exhibition, From Nature to Abstraction, focuses on the work of Color Field painter Mark Rothko.

On the other end of the age spectrum, Leonard continues, is a class of fifth graders who “have worked with a teaching artist as well as our own education staff at the museum and their own teacher [at the] Ed Beasley Academic Center to produce a really terrific project that responds to works of art in our collection, and that arises out of a very sustained engagement with those works.”

Leonard and her diverse collaborators are aiming to give visitors a fluid experience, entirely non-linear and endlessly reconfigurable. “You also can choose your own adventure, so to speak. You can choose your own itinerary— there’s no prescribed order. You can skip around, you can see them all, you can dip into some and come back another day to see the others. So there’s a great degree of freedom to design your own experience when you visit.”

That’s not to say that the overall effect will be jumbled, or that each and every juxtaposition is surprising. “Some pairings are expected,” Leonard admits. “We’ve put [Associate Professor of Music] Berthold Hoeckner and [University Professor] David Wellbery, who are both experts in German Romanticism, on a set of German Romantic prints. However, because they are not art historians, they are offering literary/musicological perspectives on works, and really drawing out the media implications of those.”

“This is one of the very few museumwide exhibitions that we’ve done in our history,” Leonard concludes with palpable excitement. “So despite all the organizational complexities, it does seem like a worthwhile exercise—if only for that element of total surprise when people walk through the door and encounter a museum that they may think they know, but really can still experience in a new way.”