The Whole World a Bauhaus

Touring the world, the exhibitionThe Whole World a Bauhaus will celebrate the 100thanniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus, which revolutionized the parameters of art, craft, and technology. Elmhurst will be the only stop in the United States following appearances at museums in Buenos Aires and Mexico City. The eight chapters of the show focus on different aspects of the work and life at the Bauhaus during its operation. Photographs and documents combine with art and design pieces by Bauhaus masters and students—such as Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Wassily Kandinsky, Josef and Anni Albers, László Moholy-Nagy, Marcel Breuer and more. The eight themes -Art, Crafts, and Technology; Floating; Community; Encounters; The Total Work of Art; New Man; Radical Pedagogy; and Experiment -highlight the work students did in their revolutionary workshops with industrial materials and processes, the school’s major impact on the international avant-garde, and how the students and instructors sought to rethink their world.

Many of the influential figures and others involved at the Bauhaus left Germany and spread the school's lessons internationally, including Mies and other figures who emigrated to the U.S. Mies became the director of the Department of Architecture at the Armour Institute (now the Illinois Institute of Technology) and went on to create glass and steel structures that are now a hallmark of Chicago’s skyline.  He influenced generations of students and is now considered one of the 20thCentury’s greatest architects.  His prefab prototype, the Museum’s McCormick House, has been revitalized via recent restorations and will be the site for site-specific projects by two Chicago-based artists.