Current & Upcoming Exhibitions

This exhibition explores Calder’s work through the lens of his connection with MoMA, from his first appearance in a group show of 1930 to his iconic mobile Lobster Trap and Fish Tail, commissioned for the museum’s stairway in 1939, to his major 1943–44 retrospective, organized by James Johnson Sweeney and Marcel Duchamp—and beyond.

This exhibition explores the resonances between these two seminal figures of twentieth-century art and reveals a key connection: the exploration of the void, or the absence of space, which each artist defined in his own way, from the figure through to abstraction. The de Young is the first American venue for the show, which debuted at the Musée national Picasso-Paris in 2019.

Four large-scale stabiles are installed among the rolling hills of Storm King, three of which are on loan from the Calder Foundation.

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.

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.