New Bauhaus Chicago: Experiment Photography and Film 
15.11.2017-05.03.2018

Eighty years ago László Moholy-Nagy founded the New Bauhaus in Chicago, thus providing American photography with a decisive creative impulse. The Bauhaus-Archiv photography collection’s holdings related to the New Bauhaus and to the Institute of Design, which grew out of it and still exists today, are unique outside of the US, and this anniversary has provided an occasion for presenting them. Photographs, films, publications and documents from the legendary school of photography, whose teachers included György Kepes, Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind and Arthur Siegel, bring this exuberantly experimental workshop atmosphere back to life.

Together with collection curator Dr Sibylle Hoiman, guest curator Dr Kristina Lowis has prepared this exhibition and catalogue on photography at the New Bauhaus. During research trips to Chicago, Kristina Lowis identified works to be loaned from archives, museums and galleries there in order to effectively supplement the objects from the Bauhaus-Archiv’s own extensive holdings.

New Bauhaus Chicago: Experiment Photography is the first of the Bauhaus-Archiv / Museum für Gestaltung, Berlin exhibitions for the 2019 centenary of the founding of the Bauhaus. It is supported by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes and the Federal State of Berlin.

A richly illustrated catalogue will be published to accompany the exhibition. New Bauhaus Chicago: Experiment Photography looks at 80 years of photography from Chicago. It will portray the institutions and decisive figures who have inspired and created photography, collected it and presented it to the public since the New Bauhaus’s founding in Chicago in 1937:

New Bauhaus Chicago: Experiment Photography, ed. by Bauhaus-Archiv / Museum für Gestaltung, Berlin 2017. With contributions by A. Bähr, S. Daiter, J. Grimes, S. Hoiman, K. Lowis, E. Siegel. German & English editions, c. 200 pages, c. 150 colour illustrations, 24 × 30 cm, hardback, ISBN 978-3-7774-2938-0 (German), ISBN 978-3-7774-2937-3 (English); publication date: November 2017