Conversations with the Collection: Belonging

As part of our annual Conversations with the Collection series, the Smart presents an experimental installation on the theme of belonging.

The project mixes works from across cultures and eras, from Rococo painting and Japanese hanging scrolls to contemporary sculpture and the dining room furniture designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for his Robie House. 

These works raise complicated questions about what it means to belong—to a place, a culture, a family, or a group. They present rituals, spaces, and symbols that conjure shared experience and investigate the relationship between collective and individual identity. The artworks also call into question what happens when people, as well as objects, move across these spaces or are expelled from them. By juxtaposing these artworks from different cultures and eras we hope to explore the many ways we understand our place in the ever-shifting world around us, while also reflecting on the implications of “belonging” for museum display itself.

Additional works of art related to this core installation are placed throughout the Asian, Contemporary (until December 30, 2016), European, and Modern galleries. The labels for these objects feature the Conversations with the Collection logo. 

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website