Bauhaus and Harvard

An Exhibition Design Project

LEE²DESIGN acted as the designer for the Bauhaus and Harvard Exhibition at the Harvard Art Museums, which ran from February 8, 2019 to July 28, 2019. The Bauhaus, founded in 1919, was the 20th century’s most influential school of art, architecture, and design. In 1930, Harvard hosted the first Bauhaus exhibition in the United States and continued to be the school’s unofficial center in America. Thus, the curatorial intent of the exhibition, which displayed nearly 200 works by 74 artists from the Bauhaus collection, was not only to explore the school’s pioneering approach to artistic education and its widespread influence on present day visual culture, but also to illustrate the close, mutually-impactful relationship between the Bauhaus and Harvard. 

The exhibition was opened in tandem with Constellations II, also designed by LEE²DESIGN,  in the adjacent gallery, a room-sized wall relief by artist and poet Hans Arp that took the form of a series of “biomorphic shapes as primal forms inspired by nature.” The relief was originally commissioned for the Harvard Graduate School by Bauhaus founding director Walter Gropius. Its restoration and re-installation by Harvard University thus further commemorated the important interconnection between the two schools in light of the 100th year anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus. 

Client: Harvard Art Museums

Location: Cambridge, MA

Year Completed: 2019

Image Credits:

Harvard Art Museums