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 Fargo, North Dakota

Even Light Itself: Highlights and Recent Acquisitions from the Collection illuminates artworks and objects by local and internationally known artists from the permanent collection of Plains Art Museum, and reflects on the properties of light and color. Artists include Josef Albers, Keith BraveHeart, Dale Chihuly, Helen Frankenthaler, Luis Jimenez, Truman Lowe, Mary Sherman, Kathryn Lipke Vigesaa, and Adja Yunkers.

2021 New York

Artist's Choice: Yto Barrada—A Raft is an exhibition of works from MoMA's collection selected by Barrada (b. 1971), an artist known for her multidisciplinary investigations of cultural phenomena and historical narratives.

Barrada has gathered works from the museum's collection that resonate with the ideas and work of French social work pioneer and writer Fernand Deligny (1913–1996). Barrada's exploration centers on Deligny's work from the late 1960s, when he lived together with other volunteers and children with intellectual and developmental disabilities in an informal network in rural France; this was an attempt to create a new way of living "outside language," adapted for the nonverbal children. Deligny called this independent project "a raft," envisioning it as lightweight and maneuverable, and requiring constant maintenance—an alternative to the "cargo ships" of the psychiatric institutions. Particularly resonant today, Deligny's emancipatory ideas are being rediscovered widely, by philosophers, psychoanalysts, anthropologists, filmmakers, and artists.

Renewed interest in Deligny's life's work is largely due to his publishers Sandra Alvarez de Toledo and Anaïs Masson, Barrada's longtime friends with whom she has collaborated closely on this exhibition. For Barrada, "Deligny's search for new maps and modes of being represent a vital heritage for artists." In bringing together selected works by artists including Anni Albers, Vito Acconci, Louise Bourgeois, Lygia Clark, David Hammons, and Bruce Nauman with films, maps, writing, and photographs that document Deligny's revolutionary project, Barrada invites us to consider art in relationship to language in ways that might inspire us elsewhere in our lives.

2021 New York

Automania investigates the conflicted feelings—compulsion, fixation, desire, and rage—that developed in response to cars and car culture in the twentieth century. The exhibition showcases a total of nine cars from the museum's collection. Taking its name from the 1964 Oscar-nominated animation by Halas and Batchelor, Automania examines the car as a modern industrial product, transportation innovator, and style icon, as well as the generator of fatalities, traffic-choked environments, and ecological disaster in the oil age.

2021 Lexington, Kentucky

Coloring reveals how color can offer a range of physical and conceptual links—to the human body, nature, science, and popular culture. Drawn from the museum's collection and including several loans from regional collectors, the exhibition includes paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints whose dominant characteristic is color. For some, the exhibition title Coloring might bring to mind the childhood process of filling in—or not—the predetermined areas of an activities book. For our purposes, the word recognizes the serious play of adults, whose uses of various colors have more complex implications and consequences. Artists include Josef Albers, Ed Clark, Sonia Delaunay-Terk, Sam Gilliam, Hans Hofmann, Ralph Humphrey, Scott Ingram, Alfred Jensen, Judith Rushin, Judith Scott, among many others.

2021 Paris

Anni and Josef Albers: Art and Life features more than 500 works of art (paintings, photographs, graphic works and textiles, as well as a selection of furniture from the Bauhaus era) representing significant milestones in the evolution of these two artists. The exhibition focuses on the dialogue between Josef and Anni Albers as revealed in their abundant artistic production, which testifies to a shared and sensitive inspiration. Organized chronologically, the exhibition introduces this pair of major artists, who were pioneers of modernism in the twentieth century, to a broad audience.