Widely regarded as one of the nation’s leading academic art museums, the Smart Museum of Art takes a distinctly interdisciplinary approach to the collection, display, and interpretation of art.
An Art Museum at the University of Chicago
Through its commitment to ambitious public programming and close collaboration with University of Chicago faculty, the Smart Museum has established itself as a focal point of community engagement and as an engine of adventurous thinking about the visual arts and their place in society. Each year, the Museum works in partnership with artists, museums, and collectors from throughout Chicago and around the world.
Since its founding in 1974, the Smart Museum has provided a central repository for the fine arts collections of the University of Chicago, including departmental holdings that date to the University’s founding in 1890. In the past two decades, the Museum’s permanent collection has expanded significantly.
Collection Highlights
Today, the Museum houses over 10,000 objects spanning five thousand years of artistic creation, with particular strengths in twentieth-century painting and sculpture, postwar art from Chicago, Central European Expressionist graphics, small-scale bronze sculpture and works on paper since the Renaissance, and East Asian art ranging from ancient Chinese artifacts to contemporary Chinese photography.
Museum Mission
As with its collection, the scope of the Smart Museum’s mission has grown substantially. Having first served as a resource primarily for the University’s art history department, the Museum gained administrative autonomy in 1983 and adopted a new focus on public outreach, first within the campus community and then throughout the city.
In the 1990s, the Museum began a seminal phase of programmatic expansion, launching an innovative educational outreach program for local public schools, as well as a faculty-curated exhibition program funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Such initiatives have helped position the Smart Museum at the forefront of arts scholarship and have distinguished its community partnerships as models of their kind.
In an effort to make the arts accessible to all, the Museum today serves a diverse public audience of all ages, backgrounds, and abilities. It is open to the public FREE of charge.
