Artek and the Aaltos: Creating a Modern World exhibition, produced by Bard Graduate Center Gallery and the Alvar Aalto Museum, tells the Artek success story for the first time in the USA. The company’s founders – Aino and Alvar Aalto – are also at the heart of the collaborative exhibition.

Aino and Alvar Aalto in the Artek-Pascoe showroom, New York, 1940. Image: Aalto Aalto Museum.

Artek and the Aaltos will be open to the public at Bard Graduate Center Gallery in New York 22.4–2.10.2016.

“The Finnish pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair made Alvar Aalto famous in the US and opened the way for sales of Artek’s Aalto furniture and lighting. Even so, there has never been such a major showing of both Artek and Aalto in the USA before,” says Director of the Alvar Aalto Foundation Tommi Lindh.

The exhibition focusses primarily on design, including around 200 works, many of which have never previously been shown to the public. There are drawings and sketches, paintings, photographs, furniture, lights, textiles, and more.

“Among the features of interest in the exhibition are materials from Artek now on deposit at the Alvar Aalto Museum, which are still in use, but have largely gone unresearched. The collaboration between Nina Stritzler-Levine and Timo Riekko has been the key to opening up the recesses of the archives to a broader public,” Lindh says.

Artek and the Aaltos has been curated by Bard Graduate Center Gallery director Nina Stritzler-Levine, architect and professor Juhani Pallasmaa, and Alvar Aalto Museum curator Timo Riekko.

Read more about the exhibition here.

Artek and the Aaltos: Creating a Modern World
22.4–2.10.2016
Bard Graduate Center Gallery
18 West 86th Street
New York, NY 10024

Further information:
Alvar Aalto Foundation Director Tommi Lindh, +358 44 562 1625, tommi.lindh (at) alvaraalto.fi