Rodney Graham, School of Velocity and Parsifal notebook sketch, 1995.
Rodney Graham’s 1995 Renaissance Society exhibition featured two time-based musical installations, School of Velocity (1993) and Parsifal (1990). The former combined the piano exercise of the same name with Galileo’s equation of the acceleration of falling objects to create a piano piece that grows progressively slower. Based on a few bars of music from Wagner’s composition of the same name,...
Kevin Beasley, Your face is/is not enough (detail), 2016. Commissioned by the Renaissance Society for Between the Ticks of the Watch, Apr 24–Jun 26, 2016. Courtesy of the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York. Photo: Tom Van Eynde
We are delighted to announce that the Renaissance Society has received three leading gifts to its Next Century Fund, a campaign to underwrite the production of ambitious new artworks.
The Edlis Neeson Foundation, the Pritzker Traubert Family Foundation, and the Zell Family Foundation have each pledged $500,000 for a total of $1.5 million. These donations represent the largest gifts in the...
Today, December 1st, the Renaissance Society is participating in #GivingTuesday, joining thousands of individuals and organizations around the world in a global movement that celebrates and supports giving.
Over our 100-year history, the support of our community has been crucial to making the Renaissance Society the platform for ambitious contemporary art that it is today. This...
Photo, Jarrod Turner; art direction, Ria Roberts; styling, Bettina Yung
We’ll have a selection of Renaissance Society publications new and old available next weekend at Medium Cool, a temporary gift shop featuring “a cornucopia of thoughtfully designed objects and printed matter.”
Saturday, November 21, 12-6PM
Sunday, November 22, 11AM-5PM
Prairie Productions, 1314 W. Randolph St., Chicago, IL 60607
Other exhibitors include: Amigos Publishing, Candor Arts,...
Nora Schultz, Parrot’s Mind Model Magazine (1), 2014
During Parrot’s Mind Model Magazine—Performance, which took place in February 2014 on the final day of Nora Schultz’s solo exhibition at the Renaissance Society, the artist produced a series of unique works that are available to purchase this week at EXPO CHICAGO.
Working with five assistants, Schultz repurposed materials from her installation by pulling individual elements into an...
We are pleased to announce the launch of a new website that showcases the Renaissance Society’s exhibition, event, and publishing activity both past and present. We’ve worked with Project Projects, a New York-based design firm, to develop a site that we hope is a resource for those interested in learning more about our program, researching our history, or planning a visit.
The website is one...
If you’re on our mailing list, you’ll soon be receiving our Centennial program booklet, the first piece of print in our new visual identity designed by New York-based Project Projects, winner of the Cooper Hewitt’s 2015 National Design Award for Communication Design.
We’re also hard at work on a new website, which we’re excited to share with you in early September. Check back then, or sign up...
Cover of The New World 2, Travels in Turtle Island
Just arrived: the second of our two Josef Strau publications, The New World 2, Travels in Turtle Island. This volume features texts by Jay Sanders, Bernadette Van-Huy, Stefan Tcherepnin, Antek Walczak, Fernando Mesta, José Rojas, Solveig Øvstebø, and Josef Strau, plus full color images documenting the exhibition.
Visit our online bookshop to purchase it for $35, or with The New World 1,...
1915 invitation to the first public meeting of the Renaissance Society. Courtesy the Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
A hundred years ago today, on June 3, 1915, University of Chicago faculty members met to establish “a society to stimulate the love of the beautiful and to enrich the life of the community through the cultivation of the arts.”
Little did they know that the institution would go on to become one of the leading international platforms for contemporary art. We hosted one of the first exhibitions...
Case containing VHS documentation of Pierre Huyghe’s 2000 Renaissance Society exhibition, The Third Memory
This year the Renaissance Society reaches our 100th anniversary. What began in 1915 as a group of University of Chicago academics has since grown into a rigorous platform for risk-taking, boundary-pushing contemporary art. The original intentions of the Renaissance Society still ring true: to present art that engages with key questions of our times, to support ambitious artistic...
