Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph, 1964-1977 is the first exhibition to explore the pivotal role that photography played in this movement. The opening of the exhibit is marked by an outdoor screening of Andy Warhol's Empire (1964) on Friday, December 9, 2011. This one-night event projects Warhol's eight-hour single-shot film onto 12 upper stories (150 feet tall) of the Aon Center in downtown Chicago. It marks the first outdoor, large-scale presentation of this landmark experimental work in the United States. The projection in Chicago—birthplace of the modern skyscraper—is in keeping with key themes in Conceptual uses of photography, foremost among them the desire to test whether an image of a thing can not just depict but somehow “stand in for” that thing.

Matthew S. Witkovsky, Richard and Ellen Sandor Chair and Curator Department of Photography, joined the Art Institute of Chicago in January 2009. He came from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where he had worked since 2002, most recently as the Associate Curator of Photographs. Prior to that he worked for several years at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, serving in 1998-1999 as the museum's acting curator of photographs. During his career, he has worked on a number of projects in modern art, including Constantin Brancusi (Philadelphia, 1995) and Dada (Washington, 2006). The catalogue to his traveling exhibition Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918-1945 (Washington, 2007) received the Kraszna-Krausz Award and the Vienna Artbook Award. He has lectured and published in October, The Art Bulletin, History of Photography, and Etudes Photographiques, among other publications. Since joining the museum, he has organized a number of groundbreaking exhibitions including Lewis Baltz: Protoypes/Ronde de Nuit (2010), Avant-Garde Art in Everyday Life (2011), and the upcoming Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph, 1964-1977 (2011-2012).

Founded in 1879, the Art Institute of Chicago collects, preserves, and interprets works of art of the highest quality, representing the world’s diverse artistic traditions, for the inspiration and education of the public and in accordance with the museum profession’s highest ethical standards and practices. Containing more than 270,000 objects in 11 curatorial departments, the museum’s permanent collection is renowned for its French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist holdings and includes one of the most comprehensive museum collections of international modern art ranging from early works by Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky, and Constantin Brancusi to Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Alberto Giacometti, and the surrealists. Its photography collection spans the history of the medium from its formal beginning in the 1830s to the present and is widely recognized as one of the strongest in the world. The museum is also home to iconic works in the history of American art and boasts an extensive contemporary collection.