Gallery artist William Turnbull is included in the Smart Museum's new exhibition Monochrome Multitudes, running from 22 September 2022 - 8 January 2023.
This exhibition traces “the monochrome” as a fundamental if surprisingly expansive artistic practice. Revisiting classic modernist ideas about flatness, idealized form, and colors, Monochrome Multitudes opens up this seemingly reductive art to reveal its global resonance and creative possibilities while working toward a more expansive narrative of 20th and 21st century art.
Art is presented in monochromatic groupings—rooms of blue, white, yellow, gray, black, and red works respectively—alternating with thematic sections where single colors engage concerns with the body, urban space, sound, and other topics. Switching between these two types of spaces, the exhibition suggests that works that look alike are often quite different, and that works that look different can share historical, thematic, or conceptual propositions. Throughout, Monochrome Multitudes engages North American art in a global dialogue and emphasises the significance of multiple media ranging from weaving to wall-painting to video, and multiple materials including footballs, pantyhose, and Vinylite.
Monochrome Multitudes is part of the Smart Museum’s ongoing “Expanding Narratives” series that mobilizes collection installations to reevaluate canonic histories and curatorial strategies. The majority of the approximately 120 works on display are drawn from the Smart Museum’s collection. They are supplemented by a number of loans from UChicago alumni, Chicago-area collections, and beyond.
In the installation image to the right, William Turnbull's 1963 painting, 17-1963 (Mango) is shown alongside works by five American artists:
Beauford Delaney, 1901–1979, Untitled, 1967; Charles and Ray Eames, 1907–1978; American 1912–1988, Fiberglass Rocker, 1950 (design), 1975 (manufacture); Sheila Hicks, b.1934, Evolving Tapestry—Soleil, 1984; Lyman Kipp, 1929–2014, Yellow Throat, 1973; Anne Truitt, 1921–2004, Sun Flower, 1971/1984.
Click here to view 18 works by Turnbull, held in the museum's collection:
