Expanding the 50th: Shared Stories offers an updated presentation of the institution’s anniversary exhibition to explore the histories that have made up the Smart Museum over the last five decades. Drawn entirely from the permanent collection—which has grown from nearly 2,500 works in 1974, when the Smart opened its doors, to over 17,000 objects today—the exhibition is organized loosely chronologically to illuminate how the institution, its mission, and collection, have continued to change.
In honor of its anniversary, the Smart has commissioned four artists to create new works as interventions in the Museum’s and our collective histories. These new works by Andrea Carlson, Bethany Collins, Caroline Kent, and Mary Mattingly, will be presented during Expanding the 50th and serve as models for the way the Museum can continue to elevate new voices and engage a variety of stories.
To that prompt, through a newly designed gallery space, Expanding the 50th also asks what it would mean to change a museum’s approach to storytelling, the way it narrates art to be meaningful, and the way we all communicate about the role of art within the world at large. Inspired by the work of the Smart’s Feitler Center for Academic Inquiry, which was established in 2018 to develop a deeper relationship with university life in and outside the classroom, the exhibition’s interactive gallery features a selection of the Museum’s recent acquisitions and invites all visitors to participate and suggest their ideas for how we should share stories.