Permanent Collection Show: How Do We Heal?
about exhibition
What can artworks tell us about how people have sought to heal from past traumas and grief? How can the process of making art become therapeutic? In what ways can objects facilitate healing and protection? This exhibition How Do We Heal? addresses the connections between art and healing. It explores these timely questions as we grapple today with continued societal healing from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, international wars, and reckoning with racial injustices among others.
How Do We Heal? takes an expansive view of healing from different challenges and considers the role of art in these processes through the Smart’s permanent collection. It is organized into six thematic areas spanning the front and back galleries: health, grief, displacement, trauma, mindfulness, and protection. This thematic exhibition brings together artworks from across time, geography, and artistic media to consider the relationship between art and healing both historically and into the present today. As you walk through the galleries, we encourage you to reflect on these questions and find connection to artworks that resonate with your own healing journey.
Images:
Hollis Sigler, There is Healing to be Done, 1985, Vitreograph. Smart Museum of Art, the University of Chicago. Gift of Dennis Adrian in honor of Bob Hiebert, 2001.450 © The Estate of Hollis Sigler.
Yeesookyung, Translated Vase, 2007, Ceramic fragments, epoxy, and gold leaf. Smart Museum of Art, the University of Chicago. Purchase, Gift of Gay-Young Cho and Christopher Chiu in honor of Richard A. Born, 2010.4 © 2013 Yeesookyung
Jo Sandman, Untitled (self portrait), ca. 1998–1999, Platinum/palladium print. Smart Museum of Art, the University of Chicago. Gift of the artist, 2025.404 © Jo Sandman