Much Unseen is Also Here, an initiative of Toward Common Cause, brings together the works of two major artists who both consider the theater of the landscape, monumentality, cultural history, and representation.
Probing monuments and identity, An-My Lê and Shahzia Sikander explore history’s embeddedness in our present. Lê’s Silent General (2015 - ongoing) presents large-scale views of places and people in the contemporary American landscape, while Sikander’s uses sculpture, drawings, and animation to examine representations of intersectional femininity that is prompted by questions of who monuments historically depict.
Much Unseen is Also Here is a collaboration between the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago. The exhibition is part of Toward Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and The MacArthur Fellows Program at 40 initiative, organized by the Smart Museum of Art in collaboration with exhibition, programmatic, and research partners across Chicago.