MADISON (WKOW) — The Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin–Madison opened “Recollection: Exhibiting the Collection” on Monday. It celebrates five decades of collecting ahead of the newly designed permanent collection galleries debuting later in the fall.
The exhibition runs through Dec. 23 and features works from the museum’s inaugural 1970 exhibition alongside pieces spanning 50 years of collecting. It offers historical context for the Chazen’s holdings and demonstrates how collections and exhibitions have shaped the museum’s evolution.
The Chazen opened as the Elvehjem Art Center in 1970 with fewer than 5,000 objects. Its inaugural temporary exhibition brought together artworks already donated to UW–Madison alongside works lent by alumni and friends. Since then, 30 of those original loaned objects have officially entered the Chazen’s collection, which has grown to more than 25,000 works.
“Recollection” includes a partial recreation of that first exhibition, “19th and 20th Century Art from Collections of Alumni and Friends” from 1970, alongside a miniature version of “Tradition and Innovation: The Human Figure in Contemporary Chinese Art” from 2015. With interpretive text drawn from the original labels, the installations demonstrate how language and tone have shifted over time.
Other sections in the exhibition offer a closer look at the Chazen’s collection. The first includes artworks that made their Chazen debut in a temporary exhibition and later became part of the collection. Among them are Gronk’s “Fragments of a Landscape,” added to the collection in 1995, and Gillian Jagger’s “Whorl,” added in 2003.
The next section explores how the Chazen’s holdings helped spark ideas for major exhibitions across the institution’s history. The exhibition includes several African artworks the Chazen collected in the 1990s and works featured in the recent “Insistent Presence: Contemporary African Art from the Chazen Collection” from 2023.
Pierre Paul Prud’hon’s “Female Nude: Study for ‘The Soul Breaking the Ties That Bind It to Earth'” from 1821-1823 was presented more than 40 years ago in “A Director’s Legacy,” a 1983 exhibition honoring the work of Katherine Harper Mead. Mead was killed in a car accident just two years after becoming the museum’s director.
“The Chazen Museum of Art’s building, collection and exhibition program have all experienced immense growth since opening as the Elvehjem Art Center more than five decades ago,” said Amy Gilman, director of the Chazen Museum of Art and senior director for the arts and media at UW–Madison. “That growth continues with the reinstallation of the permanent collection.”
The Chazen returned to pre-closure hours: Monday–Friday 8 a.m.–7 p.m. with the gallery opening at 10 a.m., and weekends 11 a.m.–5 p.m. The museum will unveil its reinstalled permanent collection across 24 newly designed gallery spaces later in the fall.