Tours & Exhibits
Art in Public Spaces: A Walking Tour of Sculptures on the University of Chicago Campus
Guided tour at 3:30 p.m. Registration is required.
Siting outdoor sculpture is a critical factor to the artwork’s meaning and the artistic intention, but how can this be navigated within an active and developing university campus? During this walking tour of public artwork on the University of Chicago campus we will discuss issues of landscaping, architecture, and conservation. Key sculptures will include Nuclear Energy by Henry Moore, Construction in Space and Time and in the Third and Fourth Dimensions by Antoine Pevsner, and Black Sphere by Jene Highstein.
Carved, Cast, Crumpled
Smart Museum of Art
Smart Museum of Art
Exhibition Hours: 10:00 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Guided tours at 2 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. Registration is required.
Guided tours at 2 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. Registration is required.
Carved, Cast, Crumpled investigates the essential qualities of three-dimensional art across historical and cultural contexts, questioning what it means to be in the presence of an object. The exhibition is the first in a series of special projects celebrating the Smart Museum of Art's fortieth anniversary. Comprised entirely of three-dimensional works and a handful of drawings by sculptors, it showcases a foundational component of the Museum’s collection, one that can be traced back to the Joel Starrels, Jr. Memorial Collection of modern sculpture that was featured in the Smart’s inaugural exhibition in the fall of 1974. The exhibition takes over the entirety of the Museum, transforming both spaces normally dedicated to temporary exhibitions as well as those that are home to longer-standing installations of the Smart’s collection.
En Guerre: French Illustrators and World War I
Special Collections Exhibition Gallery
Special Collections Exhibition Gallery
Exhibition Hours: 9 a.m. to 12:45 p.m.
On the centenary of the Great War’s commencement, En Guerre: French Illustrators and World War I explores the conflict through French graphic illustration of the period. The exhibition presents themes essential to a deeper understanding of the war in France: patriotism, propaganda, the soldier’s experience, as well as the mobilization of the home front as seen through fashion, humor, and children’s literature. Like no other conflict before it, the Great War was a war of images. Its scale, duration, and intensity were brought home to the public by media and technologies that, in some cases, were well established, but in others seemed novel and even startling. Films, photographs, lithographic posters, illustrated books, prints, and postcards—many in huge quantities—were part of an international propaganda effort that had few parallels before or since. It offered special opportunities to artists with established reputations and rich possibilities for those just beginning their careers
Highlights of the Collection: An Oriental Institute Guided Tour
Oriental Institute
Guided tours at 1 p.m. and 2 p.m. Registration is required.
Oriental Institute
Guided tours at 1 p.m. and 2 p.m. Registration is required.
The Oriental Institute Museum is a world-renowned showcase for the history, art and archaeology of the Ancient Near East. A guide will take you on a one-hour tour, focusing on some of the highlights of the collection.
In Remembrance of Me: Feasting with the Dead in the Ancient Middle East
Oriental Institute
Oriental Institute
Exhibition Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
All cultures across time have tried to honor and commemorate their dead. In Remembrance of Me: Feasting with the Dead in the Ancient Middle East shows how the living cared for the dead and how the ancients conceptualized the idea of the human soul in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Levant. The show is built around two themes: the offering of food and drink on regular occasions to nourish the dead in the afterlife, and the use of two or three-dimensional effigies of the dead, often made of stone, to preserve their memory and to provide a means of interaction between the living and the dead.
Szalon
Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts
Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts
This exhibition takes its inspiration from the heterogeneous social milieus of the salon and the studio, gathering diverse artists' works, which will remain open and multivalent, sparking performed and informal conversations even as they relate intimately in space.
Josef Strau solo exhibition
Renaissance Society
Renaissance Society
Exhibition Hours: 12 p.m. to 5 p.m.
Austrian artist Josef Strau’s work mines the interplay between language, form, and environment, resulting in concise and highly symbolic sculptural installations. These are intimately related to, and often feature, his characteristic stream-of-consciousness writing, which merges the diaristic, the theoretical, and the fictional. Central to Strau’s multifaceted practice is an interrogation of authorship, and his presentation of new work at the Renaissance Society considers the literary motif of rewriting existing texts and the possibilities of ongoing, collective composition. This is Strau’s first solo exhibition in an American museum, and it is accompanied by two related publications.
Tour of Joe and Rika Mansueto Library
Guided tour at 9:30 a.m. Registration is required.
The Mansueto Library creates new spaces and tools for collections, preservation, and collaboration. Designed by Helmut Jahn, its inviting research space includes the Grand Reading Room, where scholars from all disciplines can work under a soaring elliptical glass dome with views of the historic campus. The Mansueto Library can hold the equivalent of 3.5 million volumes, giving scholars and students immediate access to the materials they need for research. Mansueto’s high-density automated storage and retrieval system (ASRS) requires just one-seventh of the space of regular stacks. When users request an item, a robotic crane retrieves the material within minutes.
Tour of the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts
Building hours: 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Guided tours at 12:15 p.m. and 1:00 p.m. Registration is required.
Students and staff will lead guided tours of the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, offering the opportunity to experience firsthand the groundbreaking work of architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. Building highlights include the 474-seat Performance Hall, DelGiorno Deck and Mezzanine, Terrace Seminar Room, Gidwitz Lobby, a gallery space, fourteen arts classrooms, a film screening room, and over 90 individual arts studios, rehearsal rooms, and digital media labs. Visit the Logan Center online for more information about the many events and resources that the facility offers.
The following events are not a part of Humanities Day, but will be taking place on or near campus and may be of interest to those in attendance.
Open House Chicago—October 18–19, 2014
The Chicago Architecture Foundation (CAF) presents the fourth-annual Open House Chicago: a free, city-wide, behind-the-scenes look at many of the city’s great places and spaces. 150 buildings will be open, including three sites in Hyde Park. Site hours are typically from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m; check individual site listings for times. Explore repurposed mansions, hidden rooms, sacred spaces, private clubs, iconic theatres, offices, hotels and more. CAF inspires people to discover why design matters. Open House Chicago (OHC) gives you access to buildings that tell the stories of Chicago communities and cultures. By venturing into diverse neighborhoods for self-guided exploration, OHC participants come together to discover community and place. OHC is completely free-of-charge—no registration or tickets are needed for most buildings. Visit Open House Chicago for more information.
