CHICAGO. IL.- The Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, continues its 40th Anniversary season with Objects and Voices: A Collection of Stories (February 12–June 21, 2015) showcasing 17 micro-exhibitions—curated by distinguished professors, young scholars, Smart alumni, and other collaborators—that offer a range of personal and professional perspectives and reveals the multiple ways one works with, learns from, and enjoys objects of art.

“Throughout its 40-year history, the Smart has been shaped by deep collaborations with members of the University community and beyond,” states Anthony Hirschel, the Dana Feitler Director of the Smart Museum of Art. “Through a multitude of projects, Objects and Voices reveals how these rich, diverse collaborations open up new perspectives and tell compelling stories—showing how we all can connect with and be inspired by our experiences with art.”

Anne Leonard, Smart Museum Curator and Associate Director of Academic Initiatives, added: “Every day people come into the Smart and engage with the art on view, bringing perspectives that are utterly distinctive, depending on who they are and the experiences they’ve had. For this exhibition, we thought it would be enormously worthwhile to capture some of these varied points of view and put them front and center, taking the place of the expected ‘institutional voice’ of the Museum. Based on the interpretations of our guest collaborators-as-curators, we don’t expect these works from the collection ever to look the same to us again.”

Objects and Voices takes over the entirety of the Smart Museum and mixes traditional and non-traditional presentations of the Smart’s collection of Modern, Asian, European, and Contemporary art. It is divided into a series of micro-exhibitions, each overseen by different guest curators. The vignettes reveal how objects and stories are intertwined, preserved, and re-invented at the Smart.

Among the mini-exhibition highlights is The Naked and the Dead, curated by Chicago artist Kerry James Marshall, which considers representations of death and the body through four powerful and provocative works created over the last 125 years in a variety of media; The Museum Classroom, in which a fifth-grade class from the Beasley Academic Center on the city’s South Side works with a teaching artist to create their own works of art in response to four objects in the Smart’s collection; War Portfolios in Teaching, in which a UChicago professor reflects on using powerful works of art in the classroom; and Paintings and Evidence, organized by two UChicago graduate students, which considers the material and documentary evidence—inscriptions, labels, condition, provenance, exhibition history—that art historians bring to bear in authenticating and studying works of art, including a lush painting attributed to Wassily Kandinsky on view for the first time at the Smart.