The Tragic Muse: Art and Emotion, 1700–1900

February 10 – June 5, 2011

From the sacrifice of classical heroines to the grief of ordinary people, the Smart Museum of Art's newest exhibition investigates art's power to express and elicit intense emotions.

Examining two centuries of European works filled with darker emotions, The Tragic Muse explores the ways in which the visual representation of tragedy—as well as art's cathartic power over new generations of viewers—has changed dramatically over time. The exhibition combines works from the Smart's collection with loans from national and international museums and features paintings, sculptures, and prints by artists including Edward Burne-Jones, Henry Fuseli, Édouard Manet, Anna Lea Merritt, Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso, Richard Redgrave, Auguste Rodin, George Romney, and Benjamin West.

Opening reception

Thursday, February 10, 5:30–7:30 pm
Join curator Anne Leonard for the lecture "What They Saw, What We Feel: High Emotion in Old Master Art" followed by a free reception celebrating the opening of The Tragic Muse.

For a full list of related programs, including lectures, hands-on workshops, performances, and more, see the sidebar or visit smartmuseum.uchicago.edu/calendar.

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• NICHOLAS KNIGHT
• Declaimed

January 14 - February 12, 2011
Opening reception: Friday, January 14 (7-10PM)

65GRAND is pleased to present Nicholas Knight in his second exhibition with the gallery. The show is comprised of three bodies of photographic work that present the picture as a screen, surface, or chimera, and examine framing and being framed.

Knight's focus ranges from the digitizing and re-scaling of a museumgoer's experience with a work of art (Taking Pictures), to the beguiling language and unstable imagery appropriated from commercial advertising (Disclaimers), to self-referential works made by staging, photographing, and then painting over the elegant lines of a piece of wire (White Outs). The show is tied together by his piercing scrutiny of originality and reproduction, which leads Knight to the very core of photography's function, and helps him to underscore, and, in equal measure, undermine it.

OPENING TONIGHT!!

HEADS ON POLES

Western Exhibitions:

119 N Peoria St, Suite 2A
Chicago, IL 60607
USA

January 14 to February 19, 2011
Opening reception, Friday, January 14, 5 to 8pm

The iconic display of a head, severed and mounted on a stick, is ubiquitous as a representation of ominous primordial savagery. Cliché in its references to cannibalistic ritual, human sacrifice or cautionary symbolism, its general structure also contains rich connotations to formal art- a 3-dimensional image-object, laden with material and conceptual possibility.

For the purposes of this project, curators Paul Nudd and Scott Wolniak have adopted the concept of Heads on Poles as an open guideline to direct broad responses from a large group of artists. Over four dozen artists, ranging widely in discipline and style, were invited to produce sculptures loosely based on the formula of Head On Pole, in any material. These totem-objects will be simply placed, as casually clustered bodies, throughout the main gallery space of Western Exhibitions.

westernexhibitions.com/current/2011/1a_Heads_Poles/index.html

Without You I'm Nothing: Art and Its Audience

Museum of Contemporary Art

NOW through May 1, 2011

Addressing the cultural shift toward a greater level of audience engagement and participation with works of art, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago, presents Without You I'm Nothing: Art and Its Audience on view through May 1, 2011. Featuring works drawn from the MCA Collection, Without You I’m Nothing charts the growth of this phenomenon over the past fifty years, where artists have increasingly involved the physical presence of their audience in the conception, production, and presentation of their work.

Museum Hours

Monday	Closed
Tuesday	10 am - 8 pm
Wednesday through Sunday	10 am - 5 pm
Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's Day: Closed Admission is FREE all day on Tuesdays year round.

http://www.mcachicago.org/index.php

http://www.artdaily.com/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=43766

ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO

http://www.artic.edu/aic/

Museum Hours
Monday–Wednesday, 10:30–5:00
Thursday–Friday, 10:30–8:00
Saturday–Sunday, 10:30–5:00

Now through January 17th

RICHARD HAWKINS

Description:

Franz Kafka, Francis Picabia and former Guns N' Roses guitarist Slash are among the inspirations for Hawkins's unclassifiable practice. Split between the Modern Wing and the museum's Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, 80 books, collages, drawings, paintings, dollhouse sculptures and other works trace the Los Angeles artist's engagement with the histories of art, literature —and teen idols. Through Jan 16.?
When
Today–Tomorrow 10:30am–5pm , Thu 10:30am–8pm , Fri 10:30am–5pm , Sat, Sun 10am–5pm


Read more: http://chicago.timeout.com/events/art-design/363198/4679322/richard-hawkins#ixzz1AkGQYj9K