Reading Room Exhibition | The Art Institute of Chicago

The notion of a worldview, or a holistic view of life, seems at odds with the clips, cuts, memes, and fragmentation that shape 21st-century communication. In an age where there seems to be no mainstream—only streaming—the idea of ​​a worldview can evoke nostalgia for the big ideas that connect how people perceive the world around them.

Students, curators, professors, and visiting scholars visit the Franke Reading Room to trace established ideas that can shape new directions in the study of art. They explore these ideas beneath an entablature naming historical figures—Vasari, Leonardo da Vinci, Winckelmann—who helped shape early debates about art but could never have conceived of the technological, interconnected world we live in today.

Drawn from the Art Institute’s collection of modern and contemporary art, the works featured in Worldviews exploring different points of view on landscapes, psychic and terrestrial, and natural phenomena in an exploration of subjectivity and what connects us to the past.

Schedule a visit today to discover how the works encourage us to look outward as well as inward, and to consider our own positions as researchers, as viewers, and as people present in this moment, here and now.

Worldviews features paintings by Eleanor Coen, Kurt Seligmann, Bob Thompson, Judith Godwin, Ellen Lanyon, Miyoko Ito, Irving Petlin, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Amy Sillman, Alex Katz, Roger Brown and Max Ernst.

Find out what’s on display.