Current & Upcoming Exhibitions

Monochrome: Calder and Tara Donovan pairs the legendary American modernist with one of the most exciting sculptors working today. A Calder Prize winner in 2005, Donovan chose Calder’s Jacaranda and Mountains (1:5 intermediate maquette) as touchpoints for the exhibition. Like the vast majority of Calder’s sculptures, Jacaranda and Mountains are black. Donovan explains, “My primary (though not sole) focus on the color black references Calder’s use of black in many of his works as a neutralizing force that flattens sculptural shapes.”

Curated by Jennie Goldstein and Roxanne Smith, High Wire: Calder’s Circus at 100 celebrates the centennial of Calder’s iconic Cirque Calder. The artist began creating this complex, multiact body of performance art—a distillation of the natural circus fashioned from a spectrum of found materials—while living in Paris in 1926. High Wire brings together over 100 objects from the installation, along with more than thirty related works—several on loan from the Calder Foundation—including sculptures, drawings, paintings, archival materials, and film.

Calder’s friend, the critic Giovanni Carandente, donated a large portion of his personal collection to establish a modern art gallery in Spoleto’s Palazzo Collicola in 2000. Included is a permanent installation of Calder’s work and a maquette for the city’s monumental stabile Teodelapio, which the artist executed in 1962.

One of the two tower galleries in the museum’s I.M. Pei-designed East Building boasts the world’s largest permanent display of works by Calder, including several long-term loans from the Calder Foundation.