Avant-Garde Art in Everyday Life
Art Institute of Chicago
June 11 – October 9, 2011

Beginning around 1910, a group of vanguard artists working in Europe advanced the radical idea that art had a mandate to transform daily life, from silverware to postage stamps to buildings. This theory would eventually take hold in the wider world, where it merged enthusiastically with the demands of the industrial marketplace, the nascent mass media, and urban popular culture. This vibrant and critically important moment in east-central European modernism is comprehensively explored in Avant-Garde Art in Everyday …

The Art Institute of Chicago announces that Zoë Ryan has been named the Chair and John H. Bryan Curator of Architecture and Design, effective July 1, 2011 . Ryan’s career at the Art Institute began in 2006 when she was chosen as the first Neville Bryan Curator of Design in the museum’s Department of Architecture and Design, and she has remained with the department since, becoming Interim Chair in July 2010 after the departure of curator Joseph Rosa. Among Ryan’s first responsibilities will be finding her replacement as the Neville Bryan Curator of Architecture and Design, a position that will focus on contemporary architecture, and completing the preparation for the Art Institute’s major fall exhibition devoted to the Chicago architect Bertrand Goldberg.

Altered and Adorned: Using Renaissance Prints in Daily Life
Art Institute of Chicago
April 30 through July 10, 2011
Today’s scrapbookers weren’t the first to abuse paper products–Renaissance print owners were regular vandals who cut, pasted, adored, and adorned their personal print collections, the same ones that are stored in museum vaults today. The exhibition Altered and Adorned: Using Renaissance Prints in Daily Life–on view April 30 through July 10, 2011, at the Art Institute of Chicago–takes a long-overdue look at these well-handled works, demonstrating how their condition today reflects their various uses and functions in the past.

Kings, Queens, and Courtiers: Art in Early Renaissance France
Art Institute of Chicago
February 27–May 30, 2011
The extraordinary quality and dynamism of the visual arts in France at the dawn of the Renaissance receives the royal treatment this winter at the Art Institute of Chicago. Kings, Queens, and Courtiers: Art in Early Renaissance France–on view February 27 through May 30, 2011 , in the museum’s Regenstein Hall –is the first exhibition in the United States to be devoted to this fascinating period in French art, when late Gothic exuberance encountered the energy and harmony of the Italian Renaissance.

The Art Institute of Chicago announces one of the most significant acquisitions in its history: Kazimir Malevich‘s Painterly Realism of a Football Player–Color Masses in the 4th Dimension (1915).