Between the summer of 1794 and early spring of 1795, an artist using the name Tōshūsai Sharaku produced around 150 prints representing Kabuki actors: a prolific display of innovation in a mere ten months.

Such prints were popular mementos for fans of the stage—serving as a very marketable type of image at the time—and most of Sharaku’s works featured unusual characters with exaggerated, almost comic expressions and awkward poses. His extensive output stopped suddenly, perhaps because his style’s popularity could not be sustained. Today, his identity remains debated in Japanese print scholarship.

Visitors will need a separate $10 exhibition ticket in addition to general admission to visit this exhibition. Members never need exhibition tickets—just have your member card ready.

She created street-level compositions capturing the city’s monumental skyscrapers from below and suspended views looking down from her 30th-floor apartment. O’Keeffe called these works “my New Yorks” and through them investigated the dynamic potential of New York’s cityscape—the organic and the inorganic, the natural and the constructed. As she put it, “One can’t paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt.”
Georgia O’Keeffe. The Shelton with Sunspots, N.Y. (detail), 1926. The Art Institute of Chicago, gift of Leigh B. Block. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
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This exhibition is the first to seriously examine O’Keeffe’s paintings, drawings, and pastels of urban landscapes, while also situating them in the diverse context of her other compositions of the 1920s and early 1930s. The presentation establishes these works not as outliers or anomalous to her practice, but rather as entirely integral to her modernist investigation in the 1920s—from her abstractions and still lifes at Lake George in upstate New York and beyond to her works upon arriving in the Southwest in 1929. O’Keeffe’s “New Yorks” are essential to understanding how she became the artist we know today.

The presentation establishes these works not as outliers or anomalous to her practice, but rather as entirely integral to her modernist investigation in the 1920s—from her abstractions and still lifes at Lake George in upstate New York and beyond to her works upon arriving in the Southwest in 1929. O’Keeffe’s “New Yorks” are essential to understanding how she became the artist we know today.

Georgia O’Keeffe: “My New Yorks” is curated by the Art Institute’s Sarah Kelly Oehler, Field-McCormick Chair and Curator, Arts of the Americas, and vice president, Curatorial Strategy, and Annelise K. Madsen, Gilda and Henry Buchbinder Associate Curator, Arts of the Americas.

Catalogue
JA richly illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition and features a series of essays that presents new scholarship and viewpoints on this formative group of works. Learn more.

Sponsors
Georgia O’Keeffe: “My New Yorks” Corporate Sponsor Bank of America

Major support is provided by the Harris Family Foundation in memory of Bette and Neison Harris, an anonymous donor, Richard F. and Christine F. Karger, the Shure Charitable Trust, Richard and Ann Carr, Pam Conant, Constance and David Coolidge, Mr. and Mrs. John T. Golitz, the Jentes Family, Loretta and Allan Kaplan, and Margot Levin Schiff and the Harold Schiff Foundation.

Additional funding is provided by the Jack and Peggy Crowe Fund, the Suzanne and Wesley M. Dixon Exhibition Fund, and The Regenstein Foundation Fund.

This exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

Members of the Luminary Trust provide annual leadership support for the museum’s operations, including exhibition development, conservation and collection care, and educational programming. The Luminary Trust includes an anonymous donor, Karen Gray-Krehbiel and John Krehbiel, Jr., Kenneth C. Griffin, the Harris Family Foundation in memory of Bette and Neison Harris, Josef and Margot Lakonishok, Ann and Samuel M. Mencoff, Sylvia Neil and Dan Fischel, Cari and Michael J. Sacks, and the Earl and Brenda Shapiro Foundation.

Additional support is provided by Art Bridges and enjoy Illinois

Clown Torture chronicles the absurd misadventures of four clowns, each played by actor Walter Stevens. Artist Bruce Nauman described the protagonists as ranging from an “old French Baroque clown” to a “traditional … red-haired, oversized shoe clown.” The result is utter cacophony, an aural and visual assault. With both clown and viewer locked in an endless loop of failure and degradation, the humor soon turns to horror.

Of his work in general, Nauman has said, “From the beginning I was trying to see if I could make art that … was just there all at once. Like getting hit in the face with a baseball bat. Or better, like getting hit in the back of the head. You never see it coming; it just knocks you down. I like that … the kind of intensity that doesn’t give you any trace of whether you’re going to like it or not.” Experimenting with film and video, printmaking, and sculpture, the artist has explored anxiety, boredom, confusion, entrapment, and failure since the beginning of his career.

Nauman created Clown Torture after returning to video in the 1980s following a 10-year break.

Christina Ramberg (1946–1995) was an influential and beloved member of Chicago’s contemporary art scene.

While best known for her stylized paintings of fragmented female bodies, throughout her brief yet focused career, she vacillated between the depiction of various figural elements—hair, hands, torsos, and garments—while also creating equally rich, abstracted forms that emphasize structure and surface.

This retrospective—the first comprehensive exhibition devoted to Ramberg in almost 30 years—presents approximately 100 works from public and private collections, with several key pieces drawn from the Art Institute’s collection. From intimate early paintings focused on the pattern and form of women’s hairstyles and garments, to mature work featuring cropped female torsos in lingerie that contains and restrains, the exhibition presents her most iconic imagery while grappling with all phases and elements of Ramberg’s continually evolving career.

“[A] work of art exists as a whole. No explanation can convey to the heart the full meaning and wonder of art. That meaning is a live thing and withers at the [word’s] touch! —Evelyn Statsinger

Unlike many 20th-century cities where artists were expected to work within the parameters of a predefined canon, Chicago’s artistic influences circulated freely. In a do-it-yourself and communal spirit, local artists made their own way, creating a shared set of decidedly Chicago artistic values consistent across generations and statuses. Thus, despite the 20-year separation between Theodore “Ted” Halkin and Evelyn Statsinger and the generation of Barbara Rossi and Christina Ramberg, each of these four artists shared a commitment to personal authenticity and a talent for inventing original, imaginative compositions inspired by the world around them.

On a material level, these values translated into pieces that reworked found and imagined sources into new forms.

And what they find helps to develop and refine their personal artistic visions.

“[A] work of art exists as a whole. No explanation can convey to the heart the full meaning and wonder of art. That meaning is a live thing and withers at the [word’s] touch! —Evelyn Statsinger

Unlike many 20th-century cities where artists were expected to work within the parameters of a predefined canon, Chicago’s artistic influences circulated freely. In a do-it-yourself and communal spirit, local artists made their own way, creating a shared set of decidedly Chicago artistic values consistent across generations and statuses. Thus, despite the 20-year separation between Theodore “Ted” Halkin and Evelyn Statsinger and the generation of Barbara Rossi and Christina Ramberg, each of these four artists shared a commitment to personal authenticity and a talent for inventing original, imaginative compositions inspired by the world around them.

On a material level, these values translated into pieces that reworked found and imagined sources into new forms.

In her own practice, Rossi called this “form invention”—she once used dish rags to evoke ringlets of hair—but her term speaks broadly to the innovation at the core of each artist’s work. Halkin created landscapes reconfiguring architectural components into fantastical worlds. Statsinger’s intricately patterned drawings and experimental sketchbooks were playgrounds for shape and figure. Ramberg transformed corsets into urns.

These four artists, all formally educated at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and informally inspired by the city’s cultural resources—from the Field Museum to Maxwell Street Market—developed highly unique practices. The works that resulted are as visionary as they are true to feeling, centering the transformation of shape, line, and color into otherwise incommunicable meaning.

The exhibition brings together approximately 95 drawings, sketchbooks, prints, photograms, quilts, and ephemera from these four artists to showcase how their lives intersected across generations to shape the visual culture of our inimitable city.

It is held in conversation with Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective, the first comprehensive exhibition devoted to the iconic Chicago artist in almost 30 years.

Four Chicago Artists: Theodore Halkin, Evelyn Statsinger, Barbara Rossi, and Christina Ramberg is curated by Mark Pascale, Janet and Craig Duchossois Curator, Prints and Drawings; Stephanie Strother, research associate, Prints and Drawings; and Kathryn Cua, curatorial assistant, Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

Sponsors
Major support for Four Chicago Artists is provided by
Statsingercohenfoundation Logoblack 2

Additional support is provided by David R. Selmer and Nancy R. Cass and an anonymous donor.

Weaving—it’s a familiar term, a millennia-old art form, and a technique used across the world. But what exactly is weaving? What does the process entail?

Weaving is the act of making fabric by interlacing threads using a loom. It may sound simple, but because a whole cloth or segment comes off the loom fully realized, all the various artistic decisions—colors, textures, design, materials, techniques—must be decided before any weaving begins. A woven work is a concept made manifest.

Each of these contemporary creators has been a diligent student of the history of textiles, and this is reflected in their work. Many of the textiles, created from 1983 to today, are made from materials that carry cultural significance for the artist. Respect for the origins of fibers and knowledge of modern and historical techniques enables each artist, in their own way, to make informed decisions about what to use and how to use it.

The show also takes a closer look at the visual alchemy that results from combining different raw materials and techniques, such as coloring materials prior to weaving and using contemporary technology to translate concepts to cloth.

Despite the great diversity and originality these artists display, a common thread runs through their work: appreciation for the limitless possibilities of weaving to communicate ideas about human experience.

Threaded Visions: Contemporary Weaving from the Collection is curated by Melinda Watt, Chair and Christa C. Mayer Thurman Curator of Textiles.

In October and November of 1951, Ellsworth Kelly produced a series of eight large-scale collages.

Each of the works consisted of papier gommette, sticky colored paper used by French schoolchildren, cut into squares and arranged by chance in a 40-inch-wide grid formation. These collages are key early works in Kelly’s career, showing his experiments with chance, his constructive use of color, and the evolution of his impersonal aesthetic.

By the time he made these collages, Kelly was already in the process of developing the non-compositional strategies he would use throughout his career. The humble, commercially produced papier gommette allowed for a nearly infinite number of unexpected color combinations and an overall composition that was not determined by the artist himself. The breakthrough of the Spectrum Colors collages would lead to some of the artist’s most iconic and best known works, including the painting Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance, made in the summer of 1953 and based on the collage Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance VI. In 1953 Kelly also produced a ninth and final Spectrum Colors collage.

This exhibition brings together, for the first time, the full series of Spectrum Colors collages along with the 1953 painting. By focusing on the importance of a single series to Kelly’s practice, this exhibition illuminates a pivotal chapter in the career of one of the 20th century’s defining artists

“[A] work of art exists as a whole. No explanation can convey to the heart the full meaning and wonder of art. That meaning is a live thing and withers at the [word’s] touch! —Evelyn Statsinger

Unlike many 20th-century cities where artists were expected to work within the parameters of a predefined canon, Chicago’s artistic influences circulated freely. In a do-it-yourself and communal spirit, local artists made their own way, creating a shared set of decidedly Chicago artistic values consistent across generations and statuses. Thus, despite the 20-year separation between Theodore “Ted” Halkin and Evelyn Statsinger and the generation of Barbara Rossi and Christina Ramberg, each of these four artists shared a commitment to personal authenticity and a talent for inventing original, imaginative compositions inspired by the world around them.

On a material level, these values translated into pieces that reworked found and imagined sources into new forms.alleries 124–27

“[A] work of art exists as a whole. No explanation can convey to the heart the full meaning and wonder of art. That meaning is a live thing and withers at the [word’s] touch! —Evelyn Statsinger

Unlike many 20th-century cities where artists were expected to work within the parameters of a predefined canon, Chicago’s artistic influences circulated freely. In a do-it-yourself and communal spirit, local artists made their own way, creating a shared set of decidedly Chicago artistic values consistent across generations and statuses. Thus, despite the 20-year separation between Theodore “Ted” Halkin and Evelyn Statsinger and the generation of Barbara Rossi and Christina Ramberg, each of these four artists shared a commitment to personal authenticity and a talent for inventing original, imaginative compositions inspired by the world around them.

On a material level, these values translated into pieces that reworked found and imagined sources into new forms.

After World War I, a striking visual language came to prominence in photography, characterized by the use of multiple exposures, unusual vantages, and sharp focus.

While this style is often associated with the Bauhaus, an influential German art school of the 1920s and early ‘30s, this exhibition—of nearly 100 works across four decades—explores this modernist aesthetic as it developed through exchanges among a broader set of artists from Germany, Japan, and the United States.

In 1920s Germany, the Bauhaus professors Walter Gropius and Johannes Itten claimed Japanese traditional architecture and ink painting as precursors to their work, especially the Edo period’s clean lines and stark contrasts between black and white. In the 1930s, certain Japanese artists, such as Ei-Q and Osamu Shiihara, in turn pursued and helped popularize experimental photography from the Bauhaus, including cameraless abstractions and photocollages. This dialogue soon expanded to the United States, where photographers like Nathan Lerner and Yasuhiro Ishimoto, alumni of Chicago’s New Bauhaus (later the Institute of Design), highlighted bold lines and decisive forms in the city’s architecture. Back in Japan, this visual language resurfaced after World War II, as seen in the abstract sculptural constructions and experimental stage sets photographed jointly by Shozo Kitadai and Kiyoji Otsuji.

This exhibition brings together exemplary objects from our collections of Photography and Media, Arts of Asia, Modern and Contemporary, and Prints and Drawings to trace this conversation that transcended national boundaries and identities and that, for many artists, offered refuge from racist and nationalist hostilities fomented in wartime. Their shared visual language was, and is, stateless.

Foreign Exchange: Photography between Chicago, Japan, and Germany, 1920–1960 is curated by Yechen Zhao, assistant curator, Photography and Media, with assistance from Stephanie Lee, Dangler Intern,

In a new installation for the Modern Wing, Margaret Honda works with sunlight, existing architecture, and the viewer’s presence to reconfigure standard elements of film projection.

Extending the length of the Griffin Court skylight—nearly 300 feet from the front door to the newly reopened Modern Café—the work is composed of differently colored film gels, one for each of the skylight’s 126 glass panes. Identical in size, the gels function as film frames, and each side of the skylight forms a reel of film. Instead of a projector, the sun provides light while museum visitors lend motion to the work, frame by frame, as they pass through the space.
J14620 005 Test

Double Feature with Short Subject marks the sixth iteration of a work by Honda titled Film, ongoing since 2016. Honda is interested in the materials and mechanics of analog motion picture production rather than its capacity for telling stories, and she uses existing structures and environmental conditions as the basis for her interventions. In her Film series she works with cinema lighting gels, which come in manufactured sets in a range of colors and tones and typically serve to adjust the color temperature of a given scene. Honda always uses a full set of gels on all available windows. In this case, she is able for the first time to include multiple gel sets, thus offering two “feature films” as well as one “short.”

Moviegoers typically sit still, in the dark, and watch a single film from beginning to end. Here, the viewers are in motion, the space itself is full of light, and three films can be viewed more or less at once—forwards or backwards. For the nearly four months it remains on view, Double Feature with Short Subject will change in appearance constantly as the weather shifts, the earth turns, and summer fades into fall. The full duration of the installation functions as an extended single screening, open-ended and unrepeatable.

Double Feature with Short Subject is curated by Matthew S. Witkovsky, Richard and Ellen Sandor Chair and Curator, Photography and Media, and Vice President for Strategic Art Initiatives.
Sponsors

This installation is made possible by the generous support of the Society for Contemporary Art, Kristin Rey and Michael Rubel, and the Chauncey and Marion Deering McCormick Family Foundation. Additional support has been provided by Ann Soh Woods and the Danielson Foundation.

John Knight creates projects in situ, which are the result of careful observation of specific sites, and ex situ, which bring references to other places into the exhibition space. Whether in situ or ex situ, Knight’s works are context dependent, crystalizing the social, political, and economic forces that structure our built environment.

John Knight: A work in situ is curated by Giampaolo Bianconi, associate curator, Modern and Contemporary Art.

Sponsors
This exhibition is organized by the Art Institute of Chicago with major funding from the Bluhm Family Endowment Fund, which supports exhibitions of modern and contemporary sculpture.