The Renaissance Society is a non-collecting museum founded in 1915 to encourage the growth and understanding of contemporary art. From 1929 to 1935 the Society was led by important photographer and artist Eva Watson-Schütze, who helped create groundbreaking exhibitions of modernists including Braque, Arp, Brancusi, Miró, and Picasso. Important one-person exhibitions organized by the Society included Henri Matisse (1930); Alexander Calder (1934); Fernand Léger (1936); Lazlo Moholy-Nagy (1939); John Sloan (1942); Käthe Kollwitz, Paul Klee (1946), Mies van der Rohe (1947); Diego Rivera (1949); Jose Clemente Orozco (1951); Marc Chagall (1958); Réné Magritte (1964) and Henry Moore (1967). A distinguished history of educational programs featured luminaries such as Sergei Prokofiev, Alfred Barr, Leonard Bernstein, Gertrude Stein, Zora Neale Hurston, and Paul Tillich.
Since 1974, Executive Director Susanne Ghez has led the Society to explore every major avant-garde art movement since the mid-70s, introducing Chicago audiences to leading contemporary artists such as Robert Smithson, Louise Bourgeois, Anselm Kiefer, Georg Baselitz, Daniel Buren, On Kawara, Gunther Forg, Juan Muñoz, Hanne Darboven, Jean-Marc Bustamante, Thomas Struth, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Kara Walker, Arturo Herrera, Darren Almond, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Mark Manders.
The Society encourages artists to present new work and often acts as a producer. In recent years, The Society has commissioned new work and film/video projects by Su-Mei Tse (The Ich-Manifestation, 2005); Yang Fudong (Seven Chinese Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest: Part II, 2004); Joan Jonas (The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things, 2004); Amar Kanwar (Of Poetry and Prophesies, 2002); Catherine Sullivan (Five Economies big hunt/little hunt, 2001); Kataryzna Kozyra (Rite of Spring, 2000); Pierre Huyghe (The Third Memory, 1999); Willie Doherty (True Nature, 1998); Katy Schimert (The Drowned Man, 1997); Diana Thater (China, 1995) and Stan Douglas (Evening, 1995). Mark Manders, Helen Mirra, Thomas Hirschhorn, Moshekwa Langa, Raymond Pettibon, Shahzia Sikander, Arturo Herrera, Kara Walker, Ben Nicholson, Heimo Zobernig, Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Narelle Jubelin all completed major site-specific installations at The Renaissance Society.
The Renaissance Society is located on the campus of The University of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois, and is one of the nation's oldest museums devoted exclusively to contemporary art.
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