2021 New York

Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019 foregrounds how visual artists have explored the materials, methods, and strategies of craft over the past seven decades. Some expand techniques with long histories, such as weaving, sewing, or pottery, while others experiment with textiles, thread, clay, beads, and glass, among other mediums.

While artists' reasons for taking up craft range widely, many aim to subvert prevalent standards of so-called "fine art," often in direct response to the politics of their time. In challenging accepted ideas of taste—whether by embracing the decorative or turning away from traditional painting and sculpture in favor of functional items like bowls or blankets—these artists reclaim visual languages that have typically been coded as feminine, domestic, or vernacular. By highlighting marginalized modes of artistic production, these artists challenge the power structures that determine artistic value.

Drawn primarily from the museum's collection, the exhibition includes over eighty works by more than sixty artists, including Anni Albers, Ruth Asawa, Eva Hesse, Mike Kelley, Liza Lou, Ree Morton, Howardena Pindell, Robert Rauschenberg, Elaine Reichek, and Lenore Tawney.

2021 Chichester, England

Degas to Picasso: International Modern Masters includes the work of more than fifty artists from the late 19th to the end of the 20th century. Featured artists include Josef Albers, Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Paul Klee, Käthe Kollwitz, and Édouard Vuillard, among many others.

2021 Charlotte, North Carolina

Josef Albers: The Interaction of Color is inspired by the Bechtler Museum's rare German edition of The Interaction of Color, featuring 81 silkscreen color studies that serve as a record of Albers's experiential way of studying and teaching color. Born in Germany in 1888, Josef Albers was one of the most influential artist-educators of the twentieth century. Best known for his iconic color square paintings, his exploration and expansion of complex color theory principles and dedication to experiential education based on observation and experimentation, radically altered the trajectory of arts education in the United States.

Forty-five years after the artist's death, this exhibition presents a selection of works from The Interaction of Color, which was originally conceived of as a handbook and teaching aid for artists, educators, and students. On view in the Bechtler's second-floor gallery, the exhibition features 42 double-page screen prints, each demonstrating the ways in which colors can interact and influence each other. Albers suggested that color is best studied via experience, underpinned by experimentation and observation. Visitors see examples of different color study exercises that demonstrate principles including color relativity, vibrating and vanishing boundaries, and illusion of transparence and reversed grounds.

2021 Asheville, North Carolina

Connecting Legacies features archival objects from the Theodore Dreier Sr. Document Collection presented alongside artworks from the Museum's Black Mountain College Collection to explore the connections between artworks and ephemera.

2021 Knoxville, Tennessee

A Lasting Imprint: Rendering Rhythm and Motion in the Art of Black Mountain College explores how movement and music influenced visual artists. Black Mountain College's interdisciplinary approach encouraged a cross-polination of music, movement, visual art, and a range of other disciplines. The exhibition, featuring selections from the Asheville Art Museum's Black Mountain College Collection, includes work by Josef Albers, Lorna Blaine Halper, Clemens Kalischer, Barbara Morgan, and Sewell Sillman, among others.

2021 San Diego [online-only]

Experiments on Stone: Four Women Artists from the Tamarind Lithography Workshop explores the prints produced by a group of artists at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop. Anni Albers, Ruth Asawa, Gego, and Louise Nevelson each completed two-month fellowships at Tamarind during the 1960s. Though they did not overlap with one another during their residencies, the connective thread between their varied bodies of work is the workshop itself.

These four artists all worked primarily in media outside of printmaking for a majority of their careers—Albers is known for her textiles and weaving while Asawa, Gego, and Nevelson each developed unique sculptural practices. The fellowship at Tamarind proved to be a fruitful period for developing each of their practices, using lithography to work through their three-dimensional concerns and ideas on a two-dimensional surface. Situating these lithographs alongside sculptural or textile examples, this exhibition places this period of work in direct dialogue with each artist's larger œuvre. Experiments on Stone explores each artist's distinct inquiry into printmaking, underscoring the importance of this experimental time in each of the artists' respective careers.

MCASD Digital exhibition: https://www.mcasd.digital/experiments-on-stone