Looking to Learn

Looking to Learn, an exhibition at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, challenges the decontextualized approach to images and learning by setting ritual, functional, and intentionally aesthetic objects side by side, together with inventories, technical viewing devices, photographs of ceremonial practices deploying the objects, printed materials representing them, and records and fragments of some of the environments to which they have belonged. The resulting installations probed the ways in which objects, artifacts, and images have been collected, deployed, and exhibited in teaching, research, and self-representation from the earliest days at the University.