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 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 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

2021 New York

Objects: USA 2020 surveys American handmade arts through a curated selection of 100 artists, including 50 of the most impactful contemporary makers working today and 50 historical artists, whose work viewed together is a testament to the diverse, pluralistic, and hybrid state of handmade objects in American culture today.

2021 Asheville, North Carolina

I am a Citizen of the World features historic works from Black Mountain College artists alongside contemporary responses from artists working locally and across the globe. Black Mountain College's identity was formed by its uniquely global influences, with students, faculty, and staff hailing from over 20 countries across Europe, Asia, Latin America, and the Mediterranean. First and second-generation immigrants carried with them their traditions, perspectives, and languages. Students were encouraged to participate in world affairs and to advocate for the greater good. To be a part of Black Mountain College was to be a citizen of the world.

Artists working today embrace increasingly global networks to unpack fraught notions of citizenship and national identity by imagining frameworks to implicate and navigate systems of violence, break down borders, and grapple with evolving notions of self. The contemporary responses featured in this exhibition ask us to examine our preconceived ideas of citizenship and our responsibility to one another.

The exhibition features works by Black Mountain College artists including Josef and Anni Albers, Leo Amino, Ruth Asawa, Ilya Bolotowsky, Jack Tworkov, Jean Varda, and more. Contemporary responses include works from Iván Argote, Onicas Gaddis, Steve Locke, Mateo López, Sherrill Roland, Southern Equality Studios (Liz Williams and Al Murray), Javier Téllez, and Grace Villamil.

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 Paris

Women in Abstraction highlights the contributions of women artists to abstraction, with 106 artists and more than 500 works dating from the 1860s to the 1980s. The exhibition provides an opportunity to discover artists who who were sometimes unjustly eclipsed from the history of art. Far from being a mere catalogue, the exhibition reveals the decisive turning points that marked this development, the specific contexts for creation, the research conducted by the artists, individually or in groups, as well as founding exhibitions. Transcending the traditional reductionist hierarchies between high and low art, the exhibition presents a history that includes dance, the decorative arts, photography, and cinema from around the world. Featured artists include Anni Albers, Louise Bourgeois, Judy Chicago, Barbara Hepworth, and Joan Mitchell, among many others.

2021 San Francisco

Open Field: Nine Artists Respond to the Ideals of Black Mountain College considers Black Mountain College's direct and implied ideals, featuring contemporary projects by Jen Bervin, Lenka Clayton, LigoranoReese, Mary Muszynski, Reniel Del Rosario, Stephanie Syjuco, Leilah Talukder, and Amy Trachtenberg. The exhibition is complemented by historic and contemporary works throughout the gallery that directly reference Black Mountain College and its influence, including sculptures and multiples by Anni Albers, Ruth Asawa, John Cage, Larry Edman, Kota Ezawa, and Lonnie Holley.

Due to Covid-19 many museums are closed; please check the websites of these institutions for information on closings and resources.