1930 Dessau

1938 New York

1945 New York

1946 New York

1949 Houston, Texas

1950 New York

1953 Bloomfield Hills, Michigan

1953 Urbana

1956 Manchester, New Hampshire

1958 Dallas

1961 Darmstadt

1964 Darmstadt

1966 Paris

1968 New York

1968 Stuttgart

1969 Los Angeles

1969 Washington, D.C.

1970 Zürich

1971 Cambridge, Massachusetts

1973 Pomona, California

1976 Mönchengladbach

1976 Raleigh, North Carolina

The survey exhibition Two Hundred Years of the Visual Arts in North Carolina included works by Anni and Josef Albers. From the catalogue: "In the early 1930s a major art phenomenon occurred in North Carolina: the establishment of Black Mountain College by a group headed by John Rice, classics professor from Rollins College in Florida. The ideas of Black Mountain College attracted Josef and Anni Albers and seventeen other Europeans, all experts in various fields. The interrelation of the fine arts, decorative arts, and science, with the combination of progressive American educational thought and Bauhaus philosophy, made Black Mountain College unique in America. The school ran its cycle cycle and closed in 1956."

"Notes on Twentieth-Century Decorative Arts in North Carolina"
Ben F. Williams and Michael W. Brantley

1980 New Orleans, Louisiana

1980 New York

1984 New York

1985 Basel

1985 Paris

1986 New York

1987 Annandale-on-Hudson, New York

1988 Dessau

1988 New York

1988 New York

1988 Philadelphia

1996 Milan

1998 Berlin

2000 Essen

2001 Basel

2001 Madrid

2002 Madrid

2005 Bristol, UK

2008 Northampton, Massachusetts

2009 Antwerp

2009 Berlin

2009 New York

2009 Weimar

2010 Barcelona

2010 Berlin

2010 Saratoga Springs, NY

The Jewel Thief explores new ways to think about and experience abstract art. Using divergent forms of display, the exhibition focuses attention on art's intersection with the decorative and functional elements of architecture. Beginning in the museum's atrium, the exhibition continues into the large Wachenheim gallery, filling the space with a diverse range of artwork, including painting, sculpture, textiles, wallpaper, chandeliers, video, and photography. 

Artwork is presented through the lens of several opposing yet fluid categories that exist in our everyday lives, such as private and public, intimate and spectacular, and hot and cold, the exhibition explores how artworks negotiate the distance between these constantly shifting categories and how space affects this negotiation.

Discarding the notion that abstract works are devoid of content, The Jewel Thief maintains that beauty and pleasure in artworks are full of meaning. The exhibition draws parallels between questions and attitudes seen within individual artworks and various means of display our culture traditionally uses. Defining boundaries and edges determines how we understand the limit of an object and experience. The establishment of such definitions requires a kind of invention—a shared abstraction—that alters what is possible for us to do, think, and be. These abstractions lead to the building of fences—real lines being drawn around things—and to shared understandings about the distance required for personal space.

2011 Cambridge, Massachusetts

2012 London

2012 Salzburg

2012 Venice

2013 Asheville, North Carolina

Black Mountain College: Shaping Craft and Design rethinks the Black Mountain College story through the lens of craft and design. From the Bauhaus workshop-model foundation introduced by Josef and Anni Albers in 1933, to forward-thinking designers like Alvin Lustig and Buckminster Fuller, who taught in the 1940s, to the early growth of the studio pottery movement in the 1950s, Black Mountain College played a significant role in shaping craft and design ideas and practices of the twentieth century. The exhibition features work by Anni and Josef Albers, Ruth Asawa, Karen Karnes, Lawrence Kocher, and Shoji Hamada, among many others, as well a loom from the weaving studio and textiles by students of Anni Albers.

2013 Bielefeld

Art and Textiles from the Bauhaus to the Present celebrates Bielefeld's 800th anniversary as home to the linen weaving industry, Beginning with woven works based on paintings by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and fabric designs by Sonia Delaunay, one focus of the exhibition is on tapestries, fabric patterns, and designs by artists from the Bauhaus, especially by Anni Albers, whose work was greatly admired by Philip Johnson, the Kunsthalle Bielefeld's architect. The work of Bauhaus student, Benita Koch-Otte, who spent twenty years of her life as the director of the weaving department at the Bodelschwingh Foundation in Bielefeld is also a focus. The works on display range from textile works of art from the 1960s and 1970s, to works by contemporary artists who have rediscovered the "craft" of textiles for themselves, re-examining it and experimenting with new forms of expression.

2013 London + New York

Mingei: Are You Here? explores the legacy of Mingei, a Japanese folk craft movement led by philosopher and critic Sōetsu Yanagi and questions the presence of craftsmanship in contemporary art. The exhibition features eighty works and special commissions by more than twenty-five artists, including paintings, sculptures, works on paper, ceramics and textile shown in a vitrine inspired by ethnographic exhibitions. Systems of display and practical aspects of museum work are one of the central themes of the exhibition. Curated by Nicolas Trembley, this exhibition juxtaposes historical works by Japanese Mingei artists with modern and contemporary artists, designers and architects inspired by the philosophy of Mingei.

2013 Mönchengladbach, Germany

2013 New York

2013 New York

20th-century design was profoundly shaped and enhanced by the creativity of women—as muses of modernity and shapers of new ways of living, and as designers, patrons, performers, and educators. This installation, drawn entirely from MoMA's collection, celebrates the diversity and vitality of individual artists' approach to the modern world, from Loïe Fuller's pulsating turn-of-the-century performances to April Greiman's 1980s computer-generated graphics, at the vanguard of early digital design. Highlights include the first display of a newly conserved kitchen by Charlotte Perriand with Le Corbusier (1952) from the Unité d'Habitation housing project; furniture and designs by Lilly Reich, Eileen Gray, Eva Zeisel, Ray Eames, Lella Vignelli, and Denise Scott Brown; textiles by Anni Albers and Eszter Haraszty; ceramics by Lucy Rie; a display of 1960s psychedelic concert posters by graphic designer Bonnie Maclean; and a never-before-seen selection of posters and graphic material from the punk era. The gallery's "graphics corner" first explores the changing role and visual imagery of the New Woman through a selection of posters created between 1890 and 1938; in April 2014 the focus of this section will shift to Women and War, an examination of the iconography and varied roles of women in times of conflict, in commemoration of the centennial of the outbreak of World War I.

2013 Paris

Focusing on carpets and tapestries by modern and contemporary artists, DECORUM includes, as well ancient and anonymous pieces and aims to create connections, uncover influences and provoke confrontations. The rugs and tapestries in the exhibition transcend the usual boundaries between decorative, applied, and fine arts, always oscillating between traditional and radical forms.

2013 Wolfsburg + Stuttgart

Art and Textiles includes more than 200 works by both well-known artists such as Gustav Klimt, Vincent van Gogh, Edgar Degas, Henri Matisse, Paul Klee, and Jackson Pollock as well as works whose creators' remain nameless as, for example, a pre-Columbian textile fragment from the collection of Anni Albers. it explores the significance of textiles in a kind of "re-reading" of the history of modern art from Art Nouveau to the present. The modern separation of applied and fine art resulted in the systematic, decades-long exclusion of all handicrafts from the art historical canon. In the process, modernism drew decisive impulses from the ties between art and craftsmanship.

2014 Brooklyn

Black Mountain Art: An Interdisciplinary Approach acts as companion exhibition to, and contextualizes the performance of, Black Mountain Songs. Through physical examples of work by Black Mountain College faculty and alumni, including Anni Albers, the exhibition seeks to illuminate the experimental nature of Black Mountain College.

2014 London

Abstract Drawing, organized by Richard Deacon, is the Drawing Room's fourth artist-curated exhibition. Featuring work by international artists from different generations—including Anni Albers—the exhibition explores the idea of abstraction in drawing. Richard Deacon writes: "This exhibition has no ambitions to be a universal survey, but in selecting a show around the idea of abstract drawing, these various strands—inscriptive, calligraphic, ornamental, generative, individuating, and identifying—have all featured. In recalling that very old piece of ochre something else also becomes clear. The mark invents the object and makes it real."

2014 New York

What Would Mrs. Webb Do? A Founder's Vision celebrates the enduring legacy of Aileen Osborn Webb, the founder of the Museum of Arts and Design. As a patron and philanthropist, Webb pioneered an understanding of craftsmanship and the handmade as a creative driving force behind art and design. The first half of the exhibition features work by American makers from the 1950s to the late 1960s whose practice directly benefitted from the support of Webb and others who shared her vision, while highlighting the many crafts-related institutions that Webb launched. The exhibition includes groundbreaking works by early masters such as Anni Albers, Wharton Esherick, and Harvey Littleton, as well as new creations by Joris Laarman, Judith Schaechter, and Hiroshi Suzuki, among others.

2014 New York

Robert Gober: The Heart Is Not a Metaphor is the first large-scale survey of Robert Gober's career to take place in the United States. Gober (American, b. 1954) rose to prominence in the mid–1980s and was quickly acknowledged as one of the most significant artists of his generation. Early in his career he made deceptively simple sculptures of everyday objects—beginning with sinks before moving on to domestic furniture such as playpens, beds, and doors. In the 1990s, his practice evolved from single works to theatrical room-sized environments. The loosely chronological presentation traces the development of this remarkable body of work, highlighting themes and motifs that emerged in the early 1980s and continue to inform Gober's work today. The exhibition features around 130 works across several mediums, together with selections from the artist's collection and works by other artists, including Anni Albers.

2014 New York

Making Music Modern: Design for Ear and Eye gathers designs for auditoriums, instruments, and equipment for listening to music, along with posters, record sleeves, sheet music, and animation. The exhibition examines alternative music cultures of the early 20th century, the rise of radio during the interwar period, how design shaped the "cool" aesthetic of midcentury jazz and hi-fidelity culture, and its role in countercultural music scenes from pop to punk, and later 20th-century design explorations at the intersection of art, technology, and perception.

2015 Berlin

Black Mountain: An Interdisciplinary Experiment 1933–1957 is the first exhibition in a German museum to examine the legendary American art college near Asheville, North Carolina. Black Mountain was conceived as an interdisciplinary and above all experimental college that promoted collaboration. At the recommendation of architect Philip Johnson, Bauhaus teacher Josef Albers was appointed artistic director. Thanks to the commitment of Josef and Anni Albers and of other emigrants from Germany who taught at Black Mountain, the college profited from the educational principles and practical, applied-arts orientation of the Bauhaus and from the academic and artistic achievements of European modernism. The exhibition offers a historical retrospective on Black Mountain and further considers its influence, highlighting current debates on the education and training of artists today. Featured artists include Anni and Josef Albers, Hazel Larsen Archer, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, and Elaine and Willem de Kooning, among others.

2015 Boston + Los Angeles + Columbus

Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College, 1933–1957 features individual works by over fifty artists, an acoustic soundscape, examples of student work, archival documents such as class notebooks and exams, documentary photographs of life at the college, and contemporary magazine and newspaper coverage of the college. This exhibition offers new insights into the history of Black Mountain College and its lasting influence on contemporary endeavors in art education, radical pedagogy, collectivism, and experimental artistic practice.

In the history of Black Mountain College no decision was more important or more fateful than John Andrew Rice's invitation to Josef Albers to teach in North Carolina. The Alberses brought with them an ineluctable mix of new ideas about art, learned, taught, and perfected at the Bauhaus, as well as a distinctly old-world sensibility about culture and the crucial and transformative role it played in society. These two seemingly contradictory aspects of the Alberses' gift would permanently shape the character of the College and, though they could not have known it at the time, it would lay the groundwork for the development of both art and art schools in America during the second half of the century. The second room of the exhibition is dedicated entirely to the work of Anni and Josef Albers in acknowledgement of their centrality to the Black Mountain College story.

Reviews

"Learn By Painting" by Louis Menand, The New Yorker, October 27, 2015

2015 Brooklyn

Fiber Optic, highlights several generations of artists working at the intersection of geometry and fiber. The exhibition features works by fifteen artists from across the country, including Anni Albers, Joell Baxter, Samantha Bittman, Chris Bogia, Martha Clippinger, Gabriel Dawe, Michelle Grabner, Lynne Harlow, Linda King Ferguson, Victoria Munro, Gabriel Pionkowski, Carrie Pollack, Sue Ravitz, Stephen Westfall, and Emi Winter.

Over the past decade, there has been a strong resurgence of interest among contemporary artists in traditional forms associated with fiber and textiles. Fiber Optic features geometric, patterned, and color-based work across a wide array of media, including weaving, needlepoint, photography, painting, print, sculpture, and installation. As a spiritual and material touchstone for many of the participating artists, the exhibition begins with a single, patterned gouache on paper study by the late, legendary Bauhaus artist and weaver Anni Albers (1899–1994).

2015 Cork, Ireland

Stitch in Time: The Fabric of Contemporary Life looks at the ways in which artists have used traditional textile mediums to explore ideas of gender, community, labor and race. Presenting works by Irish and international artists, the exhibition reveals how woven designs have been created to link conventional craft with radical expressions of identity. From protest banners to embroidered passports, abstract fabric designs to narrative tapestries, Stitch in Time demonstrates how artists employ textiles and its associations of a popular, vernacular culture to shape and comment on contemporary life. Featured artists include Anni Albers, Sarah Browne, Jeremy Deller, Sissi Farassat, Angela Fulcher, Grayson Perry, and Slavs and Tatars.

2015 London

Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915–2015 brings together over 100 works by 80 modern masters and contemporary artists including Anni Albers, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Piet Mondrian, Gabriel Orozco, and Aleksander Rodchenko. The exhibition traces a century of abstract art from 1915 to today, shedding new light on the evolution of geometric abstraction. Highlights include photographs documenting the radio towers of Moscow and Berlin by Aleksandr Rodchenko and László Moholy–Nagy, archival images of iconic exhibitions running through the history of abstraction, and a selection of magazines which convey revolutionary ideas in art and society through typography and graphic design.

2015 New York

Common Thread celebrates the expansive potential of abstract painting and its relationship to and reliance on textiles. Two pieces set the historical and political stage for the exhibition: an Anni Albers study and an Ellen Lesperance gouache knitting pattern of a sweater that Anni Albers (née Fleischmann) wore a year before meeting Josef Albers. The grid, a basic ruling principle of the Bauhaus where Anni Albers studied weaving, is the dominant visual force in her study. Lesperance, in turn, deconstructs Albers's sweater into a geometric grid pattern. The exhibition features paintings by Wendy Edwards, Tamara Gonzales, Michelle Grabner, Sarah Harrison, Danielle Mysliwiec, Sasha Pierce, Angela Teng, Leslie Wayne, and Summer Wheat. All of the artists address the fluidity of gendered territories and eschew the "iconic brushstroke" in favor of fiber art's poetic possibilities.

2015 New York + Washington, D.C.

Pathmakers: Women in Art, Craft and Design, Midcentury and Today considers the important contributions of women to modernism in postwar visual culture. In the 1950s and 1960s, an era when painting, sculpture, and architecture were dominated by men, women had considerable impact in alternative materials such as textiles, ceramics, and metals. Largely unexamined in major art historical surveys, either due to their gender or choice of materials, these pioneering women achieved success and international recognition, establishing a model of professional identity for future generations of women.

Featuring more than 100 works, Pathmakers focuses on a core cadre of women—including Ruth Asawa, Edith Heath, Sheila Hicks, Karen Karnes, Dorothy Liebes, Alice Kagawa Parrott, Toshiko Takaezu, Lenore Tawney, and Eva Zeisel—who had impact and influence as designers, artists, and teachers. The exhibition also highlights contributions of European émigrés, including Anni Albers and Maija Grotell, who brought with them a conviction that craft could serve as a pathway to modernist innovation. The legacy of these women is conveyed through a section of the exhibition that presents works by contemporary female artists and designers, including Polly Apfelbaum, Vivian Beer, Front Design, Christine McHorse, Michelle Grabner, Hella Jongerius, Gabriel A. Maher, Magdalene Odundo, and Anne Wilson.

2015 Purchase, New York

Interwoven: Prints and Process considers the work of artists who experiment with and interweave elements of abstraction, repetition, and color in their printmaking. Featured artists include Anni Albers, Polly Apfelbaum, Ann Aspinwall, Joell Baxter, Louisiana Bendolph, Sanford Biggers, Willie Cole, Stella Ebner, Elana Herzog, Emil Luks, and Richard Tuttle.

2015 Reykjavik

Textile Art by Júlíana Sveinsdóttur and Anni Albers: Vertical/Horizontal considers the work of the prominent pioneer artist Júlíana Sveinsdóttir (1889–1966). In parallel with her painting career, Sveinsdóttir enjoyed a successful and interesting career as a textile artist. Her textiles are shown here alongside the works of the German Bauhaus weaver/artist Anni Albers, who was one of the most influential weavers of the twentieth century. Both Júlíana and Anni took up weaving by chance and instead of being limited by the traditional technique, the artists discovered freedom to experiment with conventional and unconventional materials, weaving forms and compositions that were abstract and modern. The exhibition commemorates the centenary of Icelandic women gaining the right to vote.

2015 Weil am Rhein, Germany

Bauhaus: Design is a major exhibition presenting a comprehensive overview of the Bauhaus concept of design. The Bauhaus was one of the most influential cultural institutions of the twentieth century, a place where the leading tendencies of the European avant-garde converged and melded. Stylized into a myth, the Bauhaus also came to epitomize the modern design cliché: geometric, industrial, cool. Bauhaus: Design presents a multiplicity of rare, in some cases never-before-seen works from the fields of design, architecture, art, film, and photography, and documents underlying developmental processes and societal models. At the same time, the exhibition considers the influence of the Bauhaus as it relates to current developments in design, such as the digital revolution, and features works by contemporary designers and artists. Viewed from this present-day perspective, the Bauhaus reveals an array of new facets with surprising contemporary relevance. Featured designers and artists include Josef and Anni Albers, Marianne Brandt, Marcel Breuer, Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, Lyonel Feininger, Joseph Grima, Walter Gropius, Enzo Mari, Olaf Nicolai, Open Desk, Adrian Sauer, Oskar Schlemmer, among many others.

2016 London

Albers and the Bauhaus brings together design and art from the Bauhaus in the most comprehensive display of such material at a commercial gallery to date. Furniture and objects by Marianne Brandt, Marcel Breuer, and Otto Lindig tell the story of this unique and short-lived incubator, which helped create some of the most influential architects, designers, and artists of the twentieth century. A special focus of the exhibition is Josef Albers's creative output at the Bauhaus. Archival materials, paintings, drawings, and glassworks chart his significant contribution to the moment. In Albers's work from the 1920s, we witness the first sure steps of modernism. Blurring the boundaries between art and design, these works prefigure and begin to define some of the hallmarks of his later practice. Nearly one hundred years after its inception, the Bauhaus principles and its protagonists have an enduring influence over how we live, see art, and view the world around us.

2016 London

Making and Unmaking, organized by the artist Duro Olowu and comprising painting, sculpture, fabric, photography, objects, and video, traces geographical movements and the legacies associated with cloth and pattern, with a particular focus on European and West African aesthetics. The exhibition features colorful and formal compositions alongside representations of costume and the body in portraiture. Historical pieces and works by artists such as Anni Albers are presented together with new works by contemporary artists including Hurvin Anderson, Polly Apfelbaum, David Hammons, Glenn Ligon, Brice Marden, and Wangechi Mutu, among others.

2016 New York

How Should We Live? explores the complex collaborations, materials, and processes that have shaped the modernist interior, with a focus on specific environments—domestic interiors, re-created exhibition displays, and retail spaces—from the 1920s to the 1950s. The exhibition brings together over 200 works, drawn from MoMA's Architecture and Design collection as well as the Library, Drawings and Prints, Painting and Sculpture, Film, and Photography. Rather than concentrating on isolated masterworks, attention is given to the synthesis of design elements within each environment, and to the connection of external factors and attitudes—aesthetic, social, technological, and political—that these environments reflect.

The exhibition looks at several designers' own living spaces, and at frequently neglected areas in the field of design, including textile furnishings, wallpapers, kitchens, temporary exhibitions, and promotional displays. Highlights include recent acquisitions from projects directed by major women architect-designers—Eileen Gray furnishings for the house E-1027 (1929), and Charlotte Perriand's study bedroom from the Maison du Brésil (1959), for example. Designs from other noted partnerships include Lilly Reich and Mies van der Rohe's Velvet and Silk Café (1927), Grete Lihotzky's Frankfurt Kitchen (1926–27), and collaborations between Aino and Alvar Aalto, Ray and Charles Eames, Florence Knoll and Herbert Matter, and Charlotte Perriand, Pierre Jeanneret and Le Corbusier, as well as individual works by Anni Albers and Clara Porcet, among many others.

2016 Paris

L'Esprit du Bauhaus traces the periods and forms of art that forged the Bauhaus spirit: the Middle Ages and the construction of cathedrals, the arts of the Asian and Islamic worlds, and the British Arts and Crafts movement that abolished the frontiers between art and craftsmanship. From 1919 to 1933, in Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin, the Bauhaus established a new kind of school where painters, architects, artisans, engineers, actors, musicians, photographers, and designers worked together to forge a new concept of daily living through a synthesis of the visual arts, craftsmanship, and industry. The Musée des Arts Décoratifs is paying tribute to this spirit of invention, freedom, creation, and the passing on of knowledge and skills that the great artists, architects, and designers who taught and studied at the Bauhaus went on to propagate throughout the twentieth century. Featured works include historic Bauhaus pieces, together with contemporary counterparts including works by Székély, Matthieu Mercier, Karen Bisch, Sheila Hicks, and Ulla von Brandenburg.

2016 Philadelphia

Breaking Ground reveals the ways in which artists in the 1940s and 1950s pushed the boundaries of printmaking. Through a selection of prints as well as ceramics, textile, and sculpture—all drawn from the Museum's collection—this exhibition conveys the vibrant spirit and extraordinary growth of the arts during these decades. Among the artists represented are influential figures Anni Albers, Antonio Frasconi, Stanley William Hayter, Alice Trumbull Mason, Gabor Peterdi, Robert Rauschenberg, and June Wayne.

2017 Berlin

In the Carpet investigates exchanges between centers in Europe and in Morocco with the mutual influences between the practices of art and craft. The exhibition addresses stories with multiple time frames, from the Bauhaus to now, and unveils the resonances between traditional Berber carpets and contemporary art. The narration starts with the emblematic figure of Sheila Hicks who traveled to Morocco in the early 1970s to encounter traditional weaving practices. Historical pieces are exhibited as a testimony of the formal dialogue between Berber carpets (Zemmour and Béni Ourarain) and the Bauhaus figures of Anni Albers and Gunta Stölzl. Also featured is the Group of "L'Ecole de Casablanca," including the artwork of founding member Mohammed Melehi. Created in 1964, the Group of L'Ecole de Casablanca defines an aesthetic language liberated from a euro-centered art history by drawing its inspiration from the plural histories and cultures of Morocco. The exhibition engages with the polysemous definitions of carpets—object and representation, physical and mental space, territory, form and technique, gesture and performance, such as: Souvenir: la lecon de géométrie, 2015, created by Saâdane Afif. These works highlight the complex phenomena of superposition or fusion, the exchanges between cultures and countries and underline the overlaps between contemporary art and traditional practices.

2017 Bielefeld, Germany

Partners in Design: Alfred H. Barr Jr. and Philip Johnson. Bauhaus Pioneers in America focuses on the collaboration and friendship between Alfred H. Barr Jr., the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA), and Philip Johnson, the first curator of architecture at the MoMA, and examines their shared role as the most influential proponents of the Bauhaus in America.

From the beginning, the MoMA had a department of architecture and design that was on an equal footing with the fine arts, much like the Bauhaus Dessau, which was Alfred Barr's role model in the conception and founding of the museum in 1929. Besides exhibitions of modern art, the MoMA presented two groundbreaking shows in its early years: Modern Architecture (1932) and Machine Art (1934). Philip Johnson organized these two exhibitions in close collaboration with Alfred Barr. Following their presentations at the MoMA, both shows traveled to many other venues in the United States, as did the next exhibition Useful Objects. The goal, which could almost be called a mission, was to help make the citizens of the United States conscious of good, modern design. The exhibition features works by Anni Albers, Josef Albers, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and László Moholy-Nagy, among others.

2017 Dessau, Germany

Craft Becomes Modern investigates the role of craft at the Bauhaus, emphasizing the role of making, material, and pedagogic processes, within the broader cultural and economic contexts of Germany during the Weimar Republic, 1919–1933. Presented in the original Bauhaus building in Dessau, the exhibition considers the Bauhaus workshops as sites of negotiation for the pressing issues of modern culture: individual authorship versus anonymous production; intellectual endeavor versus manual work; visual versus haptic knowledge; free experiment versus economic exploitation; popular spirit versus expert knowledge. Ultimately, the Bauhaus debates pointed toward new models for collective learning, work, and production at a time in which the devaluation of qualifications, resource shortages, economic crises, and mass unemployment influenced the political and social climate. The exhibition draws from international loans and the collection of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, featuring furniture, drawings, and objects of everyday use, as well as a broad range of student work never before shown in public. Examples from the weaving workshop include pre-Columbian textiles collected by Anni Albers. The exhibition is an integral part of the Bauhaus Centenary 2019, a collaborative project of the three Bauhaus sites in Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin.

2017 Margate, England

Entangled: Threads and Making is a major exhibition of sculpture, installation, tapestry, textiles, and jewelry from the early twentieth century to the present day. It features over forty international female artists who expand the possibilities of knitting and embroidery, weaving, sewing, and wood carving, often incorporating unexpected materials such as plants, clothing, hair, and bird quills. The exhibition brings together artists from different generations and cultures who challenge established categories of craft, design, and fine art, and who share a fascination with the handmade and the processes of making itself.

2017 New York

Making Space shines a spotlight on the stunning achievements of women artists between the end of World War II (1945) and the start of the Feminist movement (around 1968). In the postwar era, societal shifts made it possible for larger numbers of women to work professionally as artists, yet their work was often dismissed in the male dominated art world, and few support networks existed for them. Abstraction dominated artistic practice during these years, as many artists working in the aftermath of World War II sought an international language that might transcend national and regional narratives—and for women artists, additionally, those relating to gender.

Drawn entirely from the MoMA's collection, the exhibition features more than 100 paintings, sculptures, photographs, drawings, prints, textiles, and ceramics by some 50 artists. Within a trajectory that is at once loosely chronological and synchronous, it includes works that range from the boldly gestural canvases of Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, and Joan Mitchell; the radical geometries by Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, and Gego; and the reductive abstractions of Agnes Martin, Anne Truitt, and Jo Baer; to the fiber weavings of Magdalena Abakanowicz, Anni Albers, Sheila Hicks, and Lenore Tawney; and the process-oriented sculptures of Lee Bontecou, Louise Bourgeois, and Eva Hesse.

2017 New York

Thread Benefit supports Thread, a Senegal-based nonprofit cultural and community center established by The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. The show features twenty-eight works donated by twenty-six gallery artists, including Josef and Anni Albers, plus photographs of Thread by Giovanni Hänninen. With this benefit, Thread will be able to establish an endowment in order to operate in perpetuity in the region.

2017 New York

Josef and Anni and Ruth and Ray is the inaugural exhibition in David Zwirner's new location at 34 East 69th Street in New York City. Featuring work by Josef Albers, Anni Albers, Ruth Asawa, and Ray Johnson—all of whom were at Black Mountain College in North Carolina in the late 1940s—this exhibition explores both the aesthetic and personal dialogue among these artists during their Black Mountain years and beyond; and includes a number of works exchanged within the group, in addition to a selection of key compositions influenced by their time there. The influence of Josef and Anni Albers is especially visible in Asawa's and Johnson's works from the period, a number of which are featured. For example, in a painting on paper from around 1946 to 1949 inscribed and given to Anni Albers, Asawa uses subtle modifications in color and form to create a sense of depth and motion within the otherwise flat picture plane. Similarly in a rare figurative composition by Johnson from 1946, watercolor shapes and colors overlap and coalesce to form an abstracted portrait of Asawa, later given to her.

Other highlights from the exhibition includes two vibrant Leaf Studies by Josef Albers made by adhering leaves from Black Mountain's environs (a motif also used by Asawa) to colored paper; Asawa's first looped-wire sculpture from 1949; a group of Moticos by Johnson sent to Asawa in San Francisco; and a Pictorial Weaving by Anni Albers from 1950. A selection of archival materials, including photographs from Black Mountain College and letters exchanged among the artists are also included. These materials are drawn from the collections of The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, The Ruth Asawa Papers at Stanford University and the Asawa family, and the Estate of Ray Johnson.

2017 Paris

Medusa considers our relationship to jewelry both physically and conceptually. Neither sculpture nor fashion per se, jewelry lies somewhere in between. Jewelry is an art form, but it is rarely considered a work of art. Jewelry is a kind of taboo in the art world, contradictory to what an artwork is supposed to be. It is seen as too gendered (too feminine), too precious, too corporeal and decorative, and too primitive and useless. Jewelry creates an attraction/repulsion for the one who stares at it, wears it or makes it, as the mythological face of Medusa.

The exhibition gathers 400 works—handmade, delegated, unique or multiple—by artists, studio jewelry designers, and contemporary and high end makers, as well as historical pieces. Medusa envisions jewelry as a meta language, a transitional object that adorns and socializes the body, and allows it to re-invent itself, in the private or public spheres: a crucial tool in terms of body politics. The show aims to go beyond the no-go "legitimacy" discourse, in favor of a critical perspective that respects jewelry's status as a peripheral, problematic and fascinating object.

2017 Rochester, New York

Minimal Mostly features work by Anni and Josef Albers, Carmen Herrera, Ellsworth Kelly, Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin, and Frank Stella, among others. The exhibition includes objects in a variety of media—painting, print, sculpture and photo-based work—and examines the stylistic varieties within Minimalism as well as its continued influence on visual art today by younger artists committed to the practice.

2017 Sheffield, United Kingdom

Going Public: The Kirkland Collection is part of the exhibition series Going Public: International Art Collectors in Sheffield. Reflecting a passion for photography, minimalism, and geometric abstraction, Jack Kirkland's personal collection brings together work by some of the most important artists of the past seventy-five years. The exhibition showcases personally selected highlights from the collection, including painting, sculpture, works on paper, and photography by artists such as Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Josef and Anni Albers, Bridget Riley, and Lewis Baltz, among others.

2018 Asheville, North Carolina

Between Form and Content: Perspectives on Jacob Lawrence and Black Mountain College is the first exhibition to focus on Lawrence's experiences during the summer of 1946, when Josef Albers invited Lawrence to teach painting at Black Mountain College. One of the most widely regarded American artists of the 20th century, Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000) is known for his paintings, drawings, and prints that hover between abstraction and socially inspired narrative realism, chronicling African-American history and experience during his lifetime. In addition to Lawrence's paintings, the exhibition features works by Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence, Josef and Anni Albers, Leo Amino, Jean Varda, Ruth Asawa, Ray Johnson, and Beaumont and Nancy Newhall. The exhibition also examines Lawrence's paintings, pedagogy, and legacy in a contemporary context, through the lens of four multimedia artists: Animator/filmmaker Martha Colburn; composer/performer Tyondai Braxton; installation artist Grace Villamil; and writer and interdisciplinary artist Jace Clayton (DJ Rupture).

2018 Lower Hutt, New Zealand

The Language of Things features over 100 artists from Europe, America, Asia, Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand whose work reveals how personal meaning develops from the often unusual materials and processes used in the field of contemporary jewelry. Visitors can expect to see beautifully crafted, wearable pieces as well as installation, photography and video, including a necklace made of scissors; a woman covered in brass leaves and a screening of jewelry appearances in films over the last 80 years.

2018 Madrid

VII Biennial of Contemporary Art recognizes and disseminates the work of artists with disabilities, enhancing their participation in and attracting the attention of the global art world. This is the seventh edition of the biennial, featuring the work of Anni Albers, Sophie Calle, Tacita Dean, Francisco de Goya, Dorothea Lange, and Eusebio Sempere Juan, among many others.

2018 Melbourne, Australia

MoMA at NGV: 130 Years of Modern and Contemporary Art provides a unique survey of the MoMA's iconic collection. Consisting of approximately 200 key works, arranged chronologically into eight thematic sections, the exhibition traces the development of art and design from late-nineteenth-century urban and industrial transformation, through to the digital and global present. Works by pioneering cubist and futurist artists, including Pablo Picasso and Umberto Boccioni, appear alongside the radically abstracted forms present in works by such artists as Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian, the surreal visual language of paintings by artists like Salvador Dalí and Frida Kahlo, and the spontaneity and tactility advanced in works by Alexander Calder and Jackson Pollock, and other prominent Abstract Expressionist artists. Developments in art from the 1960s, from Minimalism through Post Modernism, are explored with the work of Roy Lichtenstein, Gerhard Richter, Andy Warhol, Lynda Benglis, Sol LeWitt, Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman, and Keith Haring, among others. Significant works of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first century art, including major pieces by Kara Walker, Rineke Dijkstra, Andreas Gursky, Olafur Eliasson, Huang Yong Ping, Mona Hatoum, El Anatsui, and Camille Henrot, foreground ideas that inform much contemporary art, such as those around cultural and national identity, and mobility in a globalized world.

2018 Metz, France

Modern Couples considers the work of around forty artist couples including Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar, Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, Man Ray and Lee Miller, and Charles and Ray Eames. With a comprehensive mix of visual arts, architecture, design, cinema, and literature from the first half of the twentieth century, the exhibition displays masterpieces from Centre Pompidou, Musée national d'art moderne, and from international prestigious collections. Modern Couples looks into creative pair-work and the mechanisms of an artistic companionship: does each approach dissolve into one, are they complementary, or do they oppose each other? The very idea of modernity, as impacted by social, artistic, and technical evolutions, is reviewed here through the prism of the couple.

2018 Münster

Bauhaus and America: Experiments in Light and Motion is being presented on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus. Based on the importance of the Bauhaus—and in particular the Bauhaus stage as an interdisciplinary laboratory for experiments in light and movement—the artistic debates of former Bauhaus members and Americans are examined for the first time with light and movement, including light and kinetic art, experimental film, dance, and performance. The exhibition also features works by European artists from the 1950s to the present day.

2018 New York

Saturated explores the elusive, complex phenomenon of color perception and how it has captivated artists, designers, scientists, and sages. Featuring over 190 objects spanning antiquity to the present from the collections of Smithsonian Libraries and Cooper Hewitt, the exhibition reveals how designers apply the theories of the world's greatest color thinkers to bring order and excitement to the visual world.

2018 New York

David Zwirner: 25 Years celebrates the artists who have shaped the gallery's program since its founding in 1993. The exhibition features significant historical work alongside new and never-before-seen works commissioned specially for the occasion. David Zwirner: 25 Years is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue revisiting the nearly 400 exhibitions presented by the gallery. With contributions by celebrated art historian Richard Shiff, renowned curator and academic Robert Storr, as well as David Zwirner himself, the publication offers insights into the growth of a commercial gallery through its long-term commitment to its extraordinary artists.

2018 New York

Albers, Lustig Cohen, Tissi, 1958–2018 explores sixty years of graphic design and art work by three influential women artist-designers: Anni Albers, Elaine Lustig Cohen, and Rosmarie Tissi. Connected by shared circumstances of identity, each is a twentieth century woman connected to a well-known male artist or designer and business partner, with mutual friends, patrons, places, and communities. Working through and inspired by constraints, all three demonstrated an affinity for geometric, hard-edged forms. They made work with a common ideal, exemplars of the Bauhaus ethos: unity in art and design. In the work is a vivacity that feels always new, timeless, and individual. The exhibition features a selection of art and design objects—typography, textiles, prints, paintings, posters, sculptures, trademarks, and books, design and/or art—in chronological order beginning in 1958. The three women's overlapping careers span the arc of the Modernist era—from the Bauhaus, to mid-century Pax Americana, to Postmodernism, and into the present.

2018 Old Lyme, Connecticut

Paper Trail: American Prints, Drawings, and Watercolors draws from the museum's collection and features significant works by Connecticut artists from colonial times to the present. Works on paper have been cherished in Old Lyme since the art colony's heyday, when artists gathered around Florence Griswold's parlor table to play the "Wiggle Game"—an amusement where one artist was challenged to finish a drawing of disparate lines begun by another. The museum's collection has grown in scope to include works on paper by Josef and Anni Albers, Fidelia Bridges, Thomas Nason, and Sol LeWitt, among many others.

2018 Saint Louis, Missouri

Printing Abstraction considers what it means to create images without direct reference to the natural, visible world, focusing on line, color, and shape alone. Printmaking, which offers an expansive range of outcomes—from the crisp, mechanical contours of screenprint to aquatint's atmospheric shifts of tone—have served these artists' goals with exceptional results. The exhibition presents various strategies, from Op art to hard-edge abstraction and beyond, that have emerged over the past six decades. Featured artists include figures who defined the field, such as Anni Albers, Marcel Duchamp, and Ad Reinhardt. Works by artists from more recent generations, like McArthur Binion and James Turrell, speak to the continuing relevance of abstraction today.

2019 Bielefeld, Germany

Künstlerräume, Grafiken aus der Sammlung allows access to rarely seen drawings and prints by Anni and Josef Albers, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Pablo Picasso, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Hermann Stenner from the Kunsthalle Bielefeld collection. These works on paper are supplemented by the film Fly by Yoko Ono from 1968/2003, a gift from the artist to the museum on the occasion of the exhibition Between the Sky and my Head in 2008.

2019 Cambridge, Massachusetts

The Bauhaus and Harvard presented in conjunction with the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany, features nearly 200 works by 74 artists, drawn almost entirely from the Busch-Reisinger Museum's extensive Bauhaus collection. Founded in 1919 and closed just fourteen years later, the Bauhaus was the twentieth century's most influential school of art, architecture, and design. Harvard University played host to the first Bauhaus exhibition in the United States in 1930, and went on to become an unofficial center for the Bauhaus in America when founding director Walter Gropius joined Harvard's department of architecture in 1937. Today the Busch-Reisinger Museum houses the largest Bauhaus collection outside Germany, initiated and assembled through the efforts of Gropius and many former teachers and students who emigrated from Nazi Germany, including Anni and Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer, Lyonel Feininger, and László Moholy-Nagy.

The exhibition features rarely seen student exercises, iconic design objects, photography, textiles, typography, paintings, and archival materials. It explores the school's pioneering approach to art education, the ways its workshops sought to revolutionize the experience of everyday life, the widespread influence of Bauhaus instruction in America, and Harvard's own Graduate Center.

2019 Canberra, Australia

Lichtenstein to Warhol: The Kenneth Tyler Collection displays exceptional works by major artists active in America in the post-war period. Artists include Anni and Josef Albers, Helen Frankenthaler, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Joan Mitchell, Robert Motherwell, Robert Rauschenberg, Donald Sultan, Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, Claes Oldenburg, Nancy Graves and David Hockney.

2019 Chicago

Weaving Beyond the Bauhaus traces the diffusion of Bauhaus artists, or Bauhäusler, such as Anni Albers and Marli Ehrman, and their reciprocal relationships with fellow artists and students across America. Through their ties to arts education institutions, including Black Mountain College, the Institute of Design, the Illinois Institute of Technology, and Yale University, these artists shared their knowledge and experiences with contemporary and successive generations of artists, including Sheila Hicks, Else Regensteiner, Ethel Stein, Lenore Tawney, and Claire Zeisler, shaping the landscape of American art in the process.

2019 Chicago

In a Cloud, in a Wall, in a Chair: Six Modernists in Mexico at Midcentury brings together for the first time an exceptional body of art and design by Clara Porset, Lola Álvarez Bravo, Cynthia Sargent, Anni Albers, Ruth Asawa, and Sheila Hicks, who were each encouraged to develop work that was a reflection of and contributed greatly to the rich artistic landscape of Mexico at this time. Through furniture, drawings, textiles, sculptures, and photomontages, some rarely exhibited before or brought together in this way, this exhibition is a unique opportunity to further understand the fertile artistic environment of Mexico during this period.

2019 Hartford, Connecticut

The Bauhaus Spirit celebrates the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus, a pioneering German art and design school, and its early impact and lasting influence. A legendary movement that has come to symbolize Modernism, Bauhaus spirit is expressed throughout the Wadsworth's collection in art, furniture, and architectural design. Learn about the principles that revolutionized art and design in the early 1900s and have lasted a century.

2019 Krefeld, Germany

Folklore and Avant-Garde: The Reception of Popular Traditions in the Age of Modernism examines the avant-garde's interest in local, popular traditions—in particular folk art and handicrafts—and their effect on the development of modernism in Europe and North America. Featured artists include Anni and Josef Albers, Natalia Goncharova, Wassily Kandinsky, Johannes Itten, Marsden Hartley, Charles Sheeler, and Georgia O'Keeffe, among others, and includes folk art from the artists' own collections.

2019 London

The Interaction of Colour traces a period of over fifty years since Josef Albers first published one of the most influential art and design books of the twentieth century, Interaction of Color. The book—a teaching aid for Albers's experimental way of observing, studying, and teaching color—had a direct influence on numerous artists. His legacy is represented in this exhibition, featuring prints and drawings by Anni and Josef Albers, Ellsworth Kelly, Sol LeWitt, and Bridget Riley, among others.

2019 Munich

Reflex Bauhaus. 40 Objects–5 Conversations marks the hundredth anniversary of the Bauhaus, featuring important Bauhaus objects in dialog with contemporary art. In 1925, the year Die Neue Sammlung was established, the Bauhaus left Weimar for Dessau. Die Neue Sammlung was one of the first museums to acquire contemporary Bauhaus works that are today considered icons of modern design. Pieces from this period include textiles by Anni Albers and Gunta Stölzl, toys by Alma Buscher and Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, and works in metal by Otto Rittweger and Wilhelm Wagenfeld. Further acquisitions were made until recently, adding important works to the collection of historical objects, many of which are on view for first time.

2019 New York

Taking a Thread for a Walk considers ancient textile traditions, early-20th-century design reform movements, and industrial materials and production methods. In 1965 Anni Albers wrote, "Just as it is possible to go from any place to any other, so also, starting from a defined and specialized field, can one arrive at a realization of ever-extending relationships . . . traced back to the event of a thread."

Such events quietly brought about some of modern art's most intimate and communal breakthroughs, challenging the widespread marginalization of weaving as "women's work." In Albers's lifetime, textiles became newly visible as a creative discipline—one closely interwoven with the practices of architecture, industrial design, drawing, and sculpture. A key driver for the development of new languages for woven forms was the emergence of interdisciplinary educational institutions such as the Bauhaus school of art and design, Cranbrook Academy of Art, and Black Mountain College. These schools championed experiential learning—or learning through doing—an approach that had been in part inspired by progressive early-childhood teaching models of the nineteenth century.

Featuring adventurous combinations of natural and synthetic fibers and spatially dynamic pieces that mark the emergence of more a sculptural approach to textile art beginning in the 1960s, this show highlights the fluid expressivity of the medium.

2019 New York

Maneuver denotes a directed, or planned and controlled, set of decisions; a procedural, coordinated movement designed to gain a tactical end. In its transitive state, "maneuver" implies to guide with adroitness and design; to bring about or secure as a result of skillful management. Etymological investigation highlights origins not only in manus, Latin, meaning "hand," but also Old French, "made by hand." While the role of handcraft cannot be ignored, the primary operations determining the artworks in this exhibition can better be understood as maneuvers. Featured artists include Anni Albers, Polly Apfelbaum, Sarah Charlesworth, Zoe Leonard, Ed Rossbach, and Rosemarie Trockel.

2019 Portland, Maine

In the Vanguard: Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, 1950–1969 explores how an experimental school in rural Maine transformed art, craft, and design in the twentieth century and helped define the aesthetics of the nation's counterculture. The artists of the school's early years—Anni Albers, Dale Chihuly, Robert Ebendorf, Jack Lenor Larsen, M.C. Richards, and Toshiko Takaezu—contributed to a dynamic community of craftspeople who broke new ground across a wide range of media. The exhibition features more than ninety works of art, including textiles, ceramics, glass, metalwork, paintings, and prints, as well as newly discovered correspondence, photographs, brochures, posters, and magazine articles from the Haystack archive.

2019 San Francisco

Paul Klee and Anni Albers explores linear and geometric constructions by both artists across a range of media—including weaving, painting, and drawing—in which line and the pliable plane are paramount. Under the tutelage of Bauhaus master Paul Klee, Anni Albers elevated the ancient art of weaving into a bold and vibrant Modernist art form.

2019 Tucson, Arizona

A New Unity: The Life and Afterlife of Bauhaus considers the legacy of the Bauhaus.

2020 Asheville, North Carolina

Question Everything! The Women of Black Mountain College celebrates the work and impact of the women associated with Black Mountain College, featuring a wide-ranging group of artists including Anni Albers, Suzi Gablik, Ruth Asawa, Jo Sandman, M.C. Richards, and Hazel Larsen Archer. BMC was a place where women could explore their identities as artists and individuals; a space where women were expected to question things, to think critically and to explore their own self determinacy. Through artworks, personal accounts and archival film and photographs, Question Everything! details how this new generation went forward with a strong sense of what it meant to be a woman in the twentieth century, forging new paths for themselves and those who followed in their footsteps.

2020 Berlin

31: Women references two groundbreaking presentations held at Peggy Guggenheim's New York gallery Art of This Century, the Exhibition by 31 Women, 1943, and The Women, 1945. The initiator and co-curator was Marcel Duchamp, who was Guggenheim's friend and advisor. These were the first exhibitions in the United States that focused, to this extent, exclusively on women artists. The women represented a young generation, from eleven different countries. In terms of content, representatives of Surrealism found themselves alongside abstract painters, Dada-influenced artists and previously unknown new trends.

Taking its lead from these important founding documents of feminist art history, the exhibition 31: Women, with some sixty works from the Daimler Art Collection, brings two longstanding emphases of the collection into sharper focus. The concentration on leading female figures in twentieth- and twenty-first-century art and the research and projects conducted since 2016 on Duchamp, curatorial practice, and the readymade. 31: Women begins, in historical terms, with works from the Bauhaus and concrete art traditions, moves on to European and American movements such as Zero and Minimalism, and then broadens the horizon with younger artists from India, South Africa, Nigeria, Chile, Israel, the United States, and other countries. The exhibition brings together early feminist trends and global perspectives of contemporary art in surprising constellations and thematic stagings.

2020 Brooklyn, New York

Out of Place: A Feminist Look at the Collection presents artworks that defy conventional museum display and collecting frameworks. By featuring works that have routinely been seen as "out of place" in major museums—because of the artist's identity or their unorthodox approach to materials and subjects—the exhibition examines how artists can transform long-held cultural assumptions.

Out of Place showcases forty-four artists whose practices require a broader and more dynamic view of modern and contemporary art, including Anni Albers, Louise Bourgeois, Beverly Buchanan, Chryssa, Thornton Dial, Helen Frankenthaler, Lourdes Grobet, Betye Saar, Judith Scott, Carolee Schneemann, Joan Snyder, and Emmi Whitehorse. Over half the works are on view for the first time, including key collection objects and new acquisitions, such as highlights from the recent Souls Grown Deep Foundation Gift of art by Black artists of the American South, and a selection of American quilts.

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 New York

Pure Form explores the formal qualities of abstraction, highlighting the ways modern and contemporary artists have expanded the boundaries of art by exploring the inherent qualities of their media, materials, and forms. The exhibition includes works that date from the 1950s through the present. Featured artists include Anni Albers, Ruth Asawa, Carol Bove, Mary Corse, Suzan Frecon, and Ray Johnson, among others.