See a list of all works in the collection now on view >>
The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum presents some of its collection of photography, sculpture, installation, and painting throughout the main Saligman Family Atrium space, May Department Stores Foyer, and Florence Steinberg Weil Sculpture Plaza. In addition, the Bernoudy Permanent Collection Gallery is a dedicated space that remains on view on the Museum's second floor, and houses the Teaching Gallery.
The Bernoudy Permanent Collection Gallery presents an installation which focuses on the ways that artists in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries have negotiated the upheavals of modernization -- new technologies, radical political changes, rapid urbanization, increased consumerism, the spread of the mass media -- and the subsequent challenges to notions of artistic creativity, originality, and authorship. The gallery is organized thematically into Landscape, Portrature, Abstraction, and the Everyday.
According to the Museum's Director and Chief Curator Sabine Eckmann, "The installation in the Bernoudy Permanent Collection Gallery generates new ways of considering well-known artworks, such as Saturday Night by Willem de Kooning; The Eye of Silence by Max Ernst; Women of Algiers, Variation 'N' by Pablo Picasso; and Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap by George Caleb Bingham. We are very excited that the new building allows us to keep an exhibition of our outstanding collection always on display."
The elevated Florence Steinberg Weil Sculpture Garden extends the Museum's exhibition space outdoors from the May Department Stores Foundation Foyer on the building's north side. Alongside works from the collection including the Museum's signature Five Rudders (1964) by Alexander Calder, the sculpture plaza features one of the Museum's newest acquisitions, a site-specific installation commissioned from Chicago artist Dan Peterman. Peterman employs a post-minimalist aesthetic to create functional objects made of post-consumer materials.
Other recent acquisitions purchased specifically for the new building are installed in the atrium. These includeOlafur Eliasson's spectacular Your Imploded View (2001), a highly-polished, 600-pound aluminum sphere that hangs from the atrium's vaulted ceiling. Eliasson's installation, through its reflective and distorting qualities, implicates viewers in both the art and the surrounding architecture. It shows us caught in the act of seeing ourselves see.
