Department of Art History

Congratulations to Orianna Caccione and Christine Mehring, whose exhibition Monochrome Multitudes at the Smart Museum of Art has been featured on Chicago's WTTW Network.

Their co-curated 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.

The exhibition complicates the traditional narrative of monochrome exploration as a 20th century US male artist phenomenon by including works from international artists, artists of color, and female artists. Speaking to WTTW about the variety of perspectives included in their exhibition, Prof. Mehring said, “close to 40 of the labels have been written by faculty members across campus — and not just us boring art historians — but a mathematician, an astrophysicist, a legal historian. Those types of perspectives that are usually never brought into museums, outside of a university context.”

Read the full article here and watch the report.

Monochrome Multitudes is at the Smart Museum of Art from Sept. 22nd, 2022, to Jan. 8th, 2023. It is is curated by Orianna Cacchione, Curator of Global Contemporary Art at the Smart Museum of Art and Lecturer in the Department of Art History; and Christine Mehring, Faculty Adjunct Curator at the Smart Museum of Art, Mary L. Block Professor in the Department of Art History and the College, and Affiliate Faculty in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago.