Early years The Renaissance Society was founded in the wake of the
Armory Show of 1913's contentious time in New York. Then called the International Exhibition of Modern Art, the show was met with outrage and incomprehension in New York, leading to a similarly fervent uproar when it traveled to Chicago. In the aftermath, it was clear that the city, and the American populace as a whole, were generally opposed to the post-impressionist, cubist, and futurist art that was presented. The Society was founded shortly after in 1915. Member and secretary of the University of Chicago Board of Trustees, James Spencer Dickerson, felt it would be a nice to have particular portrait of poet Robert Browning in Harper Library, but there was no fund for such an acquisition. Consequently, he proposed an organization called “Friends of Art of the University of Chicago” which could provide said funding. On April 20, 1915, ten professors of the university convened at the Quadrangle Club in an exploratory meeting; and subsequently, a larger meeting was held on June 3 in Harper Assembly Hall of Cobb Hall to garner broader support for this organization. To the academics, the modernists were radical in promoting self-expression in art-making rather. Thus, the Society attacked the artists of the early twentieth-century avant-garde, "bringing to the University some of the most beautiful things in the world."
The 1930s Throughout the 1920s, modernism was scarce in the city. Only a handful of exhibitions and few commercial galleries displayed avant-garde works. In the dearth of progressive leadership, The Arts Club, under the direction of Rue Winterbotham Carpenter, became the Midwest center for the examination of twentieth-century art. Schütze knew Carpenter and The Renaissance Society began to exchange programs with The Arts Club. In the 1930–31 season, the Club brought
Fernand Léger to Chicago to screen his film
Le Ballet Mecanique and subsequently lent it to the Society. Under Schütze, The Renaissance Society expanded its curatorial programming into other art forms. The 1930 exhibition of modern American architecture was a pioneering example of a visual art institution investigating this art form. And In 1933, two film series were presented on campus: "Movies of Today and Yesterday" included D.W. Griffith’s
The Birth of a Nation and
The Brahms Symphony, and "foreign talking motion pictures" included four works by French director
René Clair. The Society’s events also explored dance and music. In the last years of Schütze’s leadership, curtailed by her failing health, the Society introduced Chicago’s audience to avant-garde art that was seldom or never before seen before in the United States. Among the most groundbreaking exhibitions at The Renaissance Society, a solo show presenting
Alexander Calder’s early mobiles was his first in the country. However, it was James Johnson Sweeney who presented the Society’s boldest curatorial statements in his exhibition
A Selection of Works by Twentieth-Century Artists. Non-representational works by seminal abstractionists—
Jean Arp,
Constantin Brâncuși, Alexander Calder,
Juan Gris,
Jean Hélion, Fernand Léger,
Joan Miró,
Piet Mondrian, and
Pablo Picasso—were included in the comprehensive catalog of which much material had never before been exhibited in the country. Building on the founding principles of the Society, Schütze initiated a publishing program to expand the Society’s role as "an independent, experimental laboratory for search of legitimate meaning in art." In her ultimate act as president of the Society, Schütze organized the 1936 exhibition of Léger, which she believed to be the institution's crowning achievement. The massive undertaking almost did not happen. In a feat of miscommunication, Léger had sent a costly, unauthorized, and uninsured shipment of works with collect on delivery to the Society in March 1935. Though Sweeney had met with Léger in Paris the summer prior and explained that Schütze had decided to hold a show for him, the exhibition date had not been set. Eva Watson Schütze died before the plans were complete. Eventually, the show would open at The Renaissance Society and then travel to the
Museum of Modern Art, the
Art Institute of Chicago, and the
Milwaukee Art Institute, before Léger was regarded as one of the most important abstractionists of his generation. Included in the exhibition was The City—widely regarded as a revolutionary work from his mature period. After Schütze’s tenure, the Renaissance Society continued to pioneer groundbreaking exhibitions in her footsteps. In the 1936-37 season,
Paintings and Sculpture by American Negro Artists became the Society’s first show to prominently feature African-American artists. The next season, they showcased works by refugees from Europe in
Paintings by Josef Albers and E. Misztrik de Monda. In 1939,
László Moholy-Nagy, who had just moved to Chicago to direct The New Bauhaus (renamed the School of Design in Chicago, and then eventually the
IIT Institute of Design), exhibited for the first time in America in the month-long show
Paintings by László Moholy-Nagy. A decade later, another great
Bauhaus figure, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who was then teaching at the Illinois Institute of Technology, was shown in an architecture exhibition at the Society. The following year, he personally installed an exhibition of
Theo van Doesburg: Paintings, Drawings, Photographs, and Architectural Drawings.
War years through the 1960s The war years proved to be a prolific period for the Society. From 1941 to 1962, artist Francis Strain Beisel was director of the Renaissance Society, which became the "preeminent site for exhibitions in the Chicago area in the 1940s and 1950s." In 1939, the Society held the
Exhibition of Hand-Woven Textiles produced by the Federal Art Project of Milwaukee; in 1940,
Book Illustrations by Modern American Artists; and three exhibitions in 1941:
Fifteen American Sculptors and Contemporary American Lithographers, the conceptually pioneering show of
American Humor: Cartoons from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Present, and
Works by Chicago Artists Loaned by Chicago Collectors. In October 1944, a second exhibition of African-American artists was held, organized out of the Hampton Institute and featured several artists then serving in the military. A significant show during this period was
War Art, which opened April 12, 1942. Locally organized, the exhibition particularly drew upon the School of Design’s interest in practical art that responded to the present emergency. After the war, the Society did not exhibit New York artists who emerged in the late 1940s; instead, it showed
Ben Shahn and
I. Rice Pereira. The Society even ignored
Pollock and
de Kooning (who were already recognized as innovators) in its 1955
Eleven Pioneers of the Twentieth Century, opting instead to include
William Glackens,
Marsden Hartley,
Robert Henri,
John Sloan, and
Maurice Prendergast. It was not until 1964 that
Richard Lippold finally became the first New York artist to have a post-war solo exhibition at the Renaissance Society. Lectures often accompanied exhibitions. Most notably in 1957,
Marc Chagall gave his only American lecture. That same year,
Leonard Bernstein, in his newly minted stardom, did not appear at his talk until the very last moment to a large crowd. The Society invited
Frank Lloyd Wright—who was incredibly expensive—and Arnold Schoenberg among many others.
Conceptual art Susanne Ghez assumed role of Director in 1974. During her tenure, the Renaissance Society shifted its focus to conceptual art. Beginning with its exhibition "
Joseph Kosuth" in early 1976, the Society engaged in a discussion with contemporary art that rejected "traditional pictorial and sculptural definitions." In 1978,
Lawrence Weiner’s eponymous show contrasted Kosuth’s approach by using language itself as material. Other artists exhibited during this period include Daniel Buren and John Knight. Exhibitions at the Renaissance Society in the 90s shifted from the larger institutional critique that dominated the 70s and 80s to more inward contemplation through site-specificity. In 1990, both
Michael Asher and
Niele Toroni exhibited in solo shows. The following year,
Jessica Stockholder opened the season with
Skin Toned Garden Mapping. Some significant artists who showed at the Renaissance Society in the 1990s include
Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1994),
Kara Walker (1997),
Kerry James Marshall(1998), and
Raymond Pettibon (1998). The Renaissance Society inaugurated the 21st century with
Thomas Hirschhorn: World Airport. In 2004,
Laura Letinsky: Hardly More Than Ever, Photographs 1997–2004 reinterpreted the traditional male gaze of still life paintings, using the ideas of domesticity and the camera lens to explore intimate, often overlooked moments. In 2008,
Black Is, Black Ain’t explored a shift in the rhetoric of race and identity, exhibiting 26 black and non-black artists. After 40 years as Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Renaissance Society, Ghez ended her tenure in 2013 her final show
William Pope.L: Forlesen. Pope.L’s new installation explored the demarcation of differences politically, economically, socially, and culturally. This show underscored Ghez’s commitment to refocusing the Society around Schütze’s mission in becoming a laboratory for new art and ideas. Under her leadership the Renaissance Society developed an international distinction for its ground-breaking curatorial programming.
Today at the Ren Solveig Øvstebø assumed Ghez’s position as Director of the Society in 2013. Previously at Bergen Kunsthall Norway, Øvstebø has since overseen the curatorial efforts at the Society. With a renewed focus on commissioning new works, allowing artists to a have a space where they are able to create works not possible in more traditional art spaces, the Renaissance Society has been programming exhibitions, lectures, performances, and other formats. In 2015, the Society celebrated its centennial. Matthias Poledna removed the overhead truss grid that had defined the gallery space, giving future artists more spatial freedom than in previous decades. Hamza Walker was Associate Curator and Director of Education from 1994 to 2016. He has been called by
The New York Times one of the "seven most influential curators in the country", as well as "one of the museum world's most talented essayists." Walker won the
Ordway Prize in 2010, in recognition of his innovative curatorial work and his wide-ranging thinking and writing about contemporary art. In February 2019, the Renaissance Society announced a $1 million gift from the Mansueto Foundation in support of its publications program. This gift secures the institution's publishing activities for 10 years and marks the largest single commitment in its history. In April 2020 it was announced that
Myriam Ben Salah would become the next executive director and chief curator of the Renaissance Society. ==Separation from the University==