The History of Perception explores the historically contingent ways that human beings have understood their bodily sensations and made them intelligible from one body to another.

Drawn from the Smart Museum’s collection, the works on view range from optically focused color abstractions by Josef Albers and Kenneth Noland to seductively tactile works by Magdalena Abakanowicz to large light-based sculptures by Charles Biederman, Robert Irwin, and Antony Gormley.

The exhibition was first incubated during a class visit to the Smart’s study room and serves as primary source material for a course of the same title offered through the University of Chicago’s Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge. It is one of several concurrent exhibitions that showcase the ways in which the Smart Museum engages with and shares the intellectual life of the University with the broader public.