The Metropol Drama
@ Smart Museum of Art
5550 S Greenwood Ave, Chicago, IL 60637
Opening Thursday, February 23rd, from 5PM - 7PM
On view through Sunday, July 9th
The things we call art can, at their best, provide a way to peek a sideways glance at the emotions behind someone else’s human experience. In this relating to others—be they friends, family, strangers, or the citizens of a different time and place—facts and truth go only so far.
The Metropol Drama proposes another way of looking at our aesthetic, economic, and emotional history—one that it rooted in the contradictions of interaction that produce peoples and states that are smudged and complex, hybrid and tragic. Having gone by many names, today we call this social and economic amalgam “cosmopolitanism.” The term can best be thought of as a kind of shorthand for a sensibility where the exchange of capital, ideas, and people have provided fertile ground and vulnerabilities for ways of feeling and living.
This exhibition is a case study in how the things we call art speak to and embody values. It presents a terrain comprised of traditionally-defined works of art and artifacts, as well as objects such as legal documents and currencies—forms of negotiation between peoples. The diversity of objects within the exhibition space reflects the ways in which we form the complex subjectivities of selfhood across cultures since the time of the ancients up until the present moment within ourselves.
Curators
Geof Oppenheimer, Associate Professor of Practice, Department of Visual Arts, in coordination with Berit Ness, Associate Curator for Academic Engagement
Official Website
More events on this date
Tags: Chicago, Hyde Park, Smart Museum, The Metropol Drama, The University of Chicago
« previous event
next event »