This article was originally posted on UChicagoArts on 8 May 2017.

Documenta 14 has announced University of Chicago faculty and alumni are among the over 160 international artists showcasing work at the 163-day exhibition of contemporary art that takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany, and for the first time in Athens. Participating artists with UChicago affiliations include William Pope.L and David Schutter(MFA’03), associate professors in the Department of Visual Arts (DoVA), and Dan Peterman (MFA’86), a DoVA alumnus.

The 14th edition of documenta opened on April 8 in Athens, extending throughout the city to more than 40 public institutions, squares, cinemas, universities, and libraries. The exhibition runs through July 16, 2017 in Athens and from June 10 – September 17, 2017 in Kassel, Germany.

Pope.L's sound performance work Whispering Campaign takes place in both Athens and Kassel and involves 12 performers, 26 sound installations, and 9,438 hours of sound running 24/7 for 200 days. The Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry is a major supporter of Pope.L's work in documenta 14.

Schutter’s quasi-monochrome gray paintings and drawings will be on view in Kassel. Peterman unveiled a two-part project, Athens Ingot Project (Copper) (2017), currently on view at the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) in Athens.

Jessica Stockholder, Raymond W. & Martha Hilpert Gruner Distinguished Service Professor, and Chair in the Department of Visual Arts said, “It is lovely for all of us to see our colleagues and alumni in the Department of Visual Arts garner this kind of recognition, and we all share in the expanded dialogue that such an international show engenders. I am proud to be part of this community and department working alongside such great colleagues.”

As part of a traveling seminar, UChicago students in the Master of Fine Arts and Art History programs will visit documenta 14 in June with Stockholder and Christine Mehring, chair and professor in the Department of Art History and the College. A number of the students attending documenta 14 participated in Pope.L’s course on the work of Brothers Grimm and their collecting and publishing of fairy tales, and others will enroll in Mehring’s course on large-scale, global exhibitions in the fall.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

William Pope.L
An acclaimed and prolific interdisciplinary artist, William Pope.L is the recipient of many prestigious grants and awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship, NEA fellowships, and the USA Fellowship in Visual Arts. He shows his work at Mitchell-Innes & Nash in New York and Susanne Vielmetter in Los Angeles, and was included in the 2002 and the 2017 Whitney Biennial, now on view. He is perhaps best known for his provocative performances, such as ATM Piece, and his decades-long series of crawls across New York City, commemorated in eRacism, a retrospective which showed at several prominent museums and galleries. Baile (2016), his most recent project, was a 72-hour dance through the streets of São Paulo, Brazil.

Before coming to the University of Chicago, Pope.L was Lecturer of Theater and Rhetoric at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, and he earned his Master of Fine Arts from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.

David Schutter 
David Schutter has had solo exhibitions at the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin; the National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; the Istituto Centrale per la Grafica, Palazzo Poli, Rome; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; with Aurel Scheibler, Berlin; Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York; and Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago. His work has been included in group exhibitions at Le Magasin, Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Grenoble; the David Roberts Art Foundation, London; Fondazione Memmo, Rome; the American Academy in Rome; The Goma, Madrid; the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the 5th Glasgow International Biennial. Schutter is the recipient of a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, is a German Chancellor Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and is a Fulbright Scholar.

Schutter’s practice is a form of phenomenological study that discusses the distances and problems encountered when making a painting. His works are as much performative re-enactments of specific canonical sources as they are discrete paintings and drawings, and as such form a painter’s repertory of extended rehearsals. In his approach to his subjects, Schutter locates his practice within the traditions of philosophical inquiry by beginning with the surfaces of things. His questions elicit responses to how we re-stratify our knowledge of the past while developing representations of the present, and how we can uncover circumscribed categories and make new knowledge from the experience.

Dan Peterman 
Exploring the intersection of art and ecology, Dan Peterman employs a wide variety of strategies for developing projects and installations that engage social and economic considerations. Peterman’s transformations of natural and synthesized materials throw into relief systems of manufacturing. Peterman has used the post-consumer life of recycled materials such as plastic, aluminum, and glass to examine complex issues within storage and exchange. Natural and chemical systems of recycling, such as composting, water purification, and sulfur dioxide cycles have also been explored by the artist to examine the liabilities inherent in the production and management of materials that are in states of continuous transformation and commodification.