The Wolfsonian-FIU

November 29, 2021 – April 24, 2022:

Shameless. Bas van Beek

Riffing off The Wolfsonian’s focus on design history, contemporary production, and art from around the world, Dutch designer and artist Bas van Beek opens a new chapter in our close relationship with the Netherlands. This colorful, provocative exhibition presents both recent career highlights and new work by Rotterdam-based Van Beek, who draws from archival material to playfully reinterpret form and function in historical design. The show also features Wolfsonian-inspired 3D-printed objects—produced in collaboration with the artist’s students from Florida International University and the Royal Academy in The Hague—and offers a peek into Van Beek’s previous work with Dutch institutions such as Het Nieuwe Instituut, Boijmans van Beuningen, Van Abbemuseum, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and Kunstmuseum Den Haag.

Through April 24, 2022:

Aerial Vision

Aerial Vision will explore how early 20th-century inventions—airplanes and skyscrapers, each considered the embodiment of human achievement and a harbinger of a better tomorrow—sparked an era of remarkable creativity and new systems of seeing the world. Met with awe and excitement, both technologies introduced novel approaches for living, working, and traveling and opened up previously inaccessible vertical perspectives to modern spectators, from artists and designers to urban planners and everyday office workers. This exhibition of paintings, posters, furniture, and more will draw from the Wolfsonian collection to examine these heightened positions of power and privilege, revealing connections between newly available viewpoints and their impact on the artistic imagination.