Smart Museum celebrates 50 years of examining the world through art

One fateful day in the early 1980s, Brian Hieggelke, AB’83, MBA’84, wandered into the Smart Museum of Art “to see what it was all about.” The economics and business major had little to no experience with art, but when he laid eyes on a series of watercolors by Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, everything changed. This encounter kicked off a lifelong love for—and career in—the arts.

“It was literally like in those cartoons where the light bulb goes off. It just opened my mind up to art,” said the co-founder and editor of Newcity, a Chicago arts and culture media company.

For the past 50 years, the fine arts museum on the University of Chicago’s campus has been a space for students, art scholars and anyone walking by to be inspired. Within the museum's collection are over 17,000 artworks from across the globe, spanning 5,000 years of history.

The museum opened in October 1974 thanks to a $1 million gift from the Smart Family Foundation. Originally a fine arts gallery, the institution was named in memory of David and Alfred Smart, founders of Esquire, Inc. and publishers of Esquire Magazine.

Since then, the Smart Museum has constantly evolved—shaped by artist collaborations, curatorial voices, generous gifts and rigorous art scholarship. Open through March 2, The 50th: An Anniversary Exhibition reflects on each decade of the museum's history, displaying over 180 works from the permanent collection. In the spring, the exhibition will have a second iteration with new commissioned artworks.

Throughout the year, the museum will also celebrate its legacy programs, including the beloved campus tradition Art to Live With, free family days, panels and artist talks.

Though the Smart has evolved over its five decades, a few things have remained unchanged: First, the museum’s commitment to the study and appreciation of visual arts. Second, that the Smart is free and open to all.

“My mission at the Smart is to try to get people to feel that this is a place for them,” said Vanja Malloy, the Dana Feitler Director of the Smart Museum. “If they have access to an art museum that they feel at home with, that's going to be a relationship they take with them for the rest of their lives.”

‘How it grew’

Even before entering the Smart Museum, a visitor will encounter art. The Smart’s Threshold series commissions a contemporary art installation for the courtyard or lobby each year; for the 50th anniversary, colorful motifs designed by South Side artist Robert Earl Paige frame the Cochrane-Woods Courtyard, and the museum, splashing across the floors, walls and furniture of the lobby. Drawing from African and modernist designs, “Give the Drummer Some!” is named for James Brown’s “Funky Drummer,” one of the most sampled pieces of music of all time.

“For Robert, he sees these motifs as rhythms,” said Laura Steward, UChicago’s curator of public art. “We're basically trying to give everybody the same earworm, only with their eyes.”

Both Paige and Steward plan for the installation to unfurl across campus throughout the year—into dorm rooms and even flower beds.

The collaboration with Paige reflects the Smart Museum’s evolution, a theme running through “The 50th: An Anniversary Exhibition.”

Originally an outgrowth of the Department of Art History (itself an outgrowth of the former Department of Archaeology), the Smart’s collection began with nearly 2,000 works. Many of these corresponded with areas of faculty research, including Japanese prints and Chinese handscrolls. With generous gifts and donations, the collection grew and grew. Today the museum’s collection spans classical Greek pottery to mid-century furniture to modernist paintings to contemporary photography.

“It's been interesting to see and think about the collection, what it started from and how it grew,” said curator Galina Mardilovich, who dove into the museum’s archives to prepare the exhibition.

For the past several decades, the Smart Museum has aimed to expand the artists and histories it represents. In 1987, the museum exhibited work from the Chicago Imagists, a group of cutting-edge artists whose surrealist prints were shown at the Hyde Park Arts Center throughout the 1960s.

The museum’s close collaborations with UChicago faculty have produced field-defining exhibitions and expanded the collection. For example, Prof. Wu Hung, a renowned scholar of East Asian art history, has curated first-of-their kind exhibitions of contemporary Chinese art and photography since 1999—some of which have gone on to travel the globe.

Museum as classroom

The galleries of the Smart Museum serve many functions: exhibition space, public forum, study hall. But throughout the year, it also transforms into a space essential to its original mission—the classroom.

Since receiving a major grant from the Mellon Foundation in 1992, the Smart Museum has deepened academic engagement beyond art history—further cemented with the establishment of the Feitler Center for Academic Inquiry in 2018. For the past 30 years, scholars across the humanities and sciences have brought their classes into the museum, weaving art objects into their teaching, often inspiring new interpretations and new exhibitions.

In the center’s Smart to the Core series, faculty and museum staff curate exhibitions specifically designed to teach courses in UChicago’s renowned College Core Curriculum. The most recent in the series, “Poetry is Everything,” students examined the nature of poetry through objects as varied as contemporary prints and ancient sake cups.

For Malloy, this approach is what sets the Smart Museum, and UChicago, apart.

“What I love about this community is there an interdisciplinary spirit, where people, scholars and students are open to thinking outside the box,” she said, “and are curious about how things that are unexpected fit together.”

Plans for the future

As for the future, museum staff say more collaboration is in store. Alongside artists, scholars and visitors, the Smart plans to keep pushing the boundaries of art history—even the nature of what art is. One example currently on display for the 50th anniversary is Ever Blossoming Life – Gold (2014), a digital artwork created by the collective known as teamLab. Acquired by the museum through a partnership with the Physical Sciences Division and the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, the work uses computer algorithms to create ever-changing, never-repeating art.

Events throughout the year will bring people together to celebrate the museum’s history and impact. Several “Smarties,” former interns and alums, will convene to discuss the Smart’s impact on their careers ranging from business to art curation, as well as discuss the future of academic art museums.

Later in the year, the Smart plans to host programs with the Departments of Psychology, Computer Science and Visual Arts, and community partners, including the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago Public Libraries and EXPO.

The museum’s main mission for the future, according to Malloy, is to remain accessible for everyone who wants to visit.

“If you have any curiosity, go for it. Check it out,” Hieggelke said. “The worst-case scenario is you realize you're not interested. The best case, it changes your life, like it did for me.”