This interactive installation combines older and more recent works, giving an introduction to the group’s artistic practices while presenting new material. Works in the exhibition include Designated Drivers, a project involving 20 artists who have been invited to contribute work loaded onto flash drives that can be viewed or downloaded by visitors, and Self-Reliance Library, which includes many of Temporary Services’s own publications on creativity and alternative living.

I Myself Have Seen It: Photography and Kiki Smith explores the ways Smith thinks and articulates her ideas visually, through the camera. The more than 200 objects in the exhibition include photographs Smith has used as source material for her work in other media, photos the artist has taken that evoke fresh responses to and suggest new meanings for her art as well as her explorations of photography as an independent art form—from single images to manipulated and collaged pictures. The exhibition also includes two video works and examples of Smith’s sculptures.

Leffmann’s 40-year-career coincided with a revolution in textile art in the mid-20th century, as divisions between “high art,” such as painting and sculpture, and craft diminished.

This display of Leffmann’s colorful, richly textured, and playful weavings, wall hangings, and sculptural objects is drawn from the Block Museum’s permanent collection. The works are generous gifts of her husband Paul Leffmann.

Influential art critic Arthur Danto has called Rapture (1999), an 11-minute video and sound installation, Neshat’s masterpiece. Projected onto opposite screens, the highly-stylized Rapture shows what Neshat has called “an allegorical duel” between white-shirted men occupying a seaside fortress on one side and, on the other, black-veiled women moving from a desert to the beach outside the fortress. The stark beauty of the landscapes, the contrasting poses and actions of the actors, and the layered soundtrack create a hypnotic, encompassing experience.

Live & Die Like a Lion? is the first major museum exhibition to focus on drawings from the last five years of Golub’s life, as declining health prevented him from working on large canvases. With bold text, erotic imagery, and depictions of human figures, lions, dogs, and mythic creatures, the small but dramatic and colorful works bring the themes of Golub’s career to a more intimate level.

The exhibition also includes the only existing unfinished Golub painting as well as examples of the artist’s source materials from a variety of magazines and publications.

Influenced by her teacher, the modernist sculptor Alexander Archipenko, while studying at Chicago’s New Bauhaus (now the Illinois Institute of Technology), Leffmann experimented with processes, textures and media throughout her career. Working on and off the loom, she employed techniques from traditional weaving and braiding to wrapping and crocheting and incorporated yarn, wool, metal, leather and other tactile materials.

This selection of Leffmann’s colorful, richly textured, and playful weavings, wall hangings, and sculptural objects are drawn from the Block Museum’s permanent collection, gifts of her husband Paul Leffmann.

Work by Sterling Ruby, Jacqueline Goss, Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby, Steven Matheson and Brendan Fernandes. Programmed by Crystal Heiden and Christine Negus.

Accidental Publics is organized by Northwestern University’s Department of Art Theory and Practice and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Sculpture Department, and co-sponsored by the Departments of Performance and Arts Administration at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. It will include presentations by invited artists as well as faculty, students, and alumni of area colleges and universities. Presentations will focus on specific works that have been realized and have had a public life. Please visit the website of Northwestern’s Department of Art Theory and Practice for additional information as the event approaches.