The Bard Graduate Center Gallery produces multiple exhibitions and publications each year, serving as a vital center of learning and a catalyst for engagement in the interrelated disciplines of decorative arts, design, and material culture. The gallery is celebrated in the museum world for its longstanding legacy of landmark projects dedicated to significant—yet often understudied—figures and movements in the history of decorative arts and design; these exhibitions and publications typically represent the definitive intervention on the artists and objects they investigate. BGC Gallery is also committed to generating and supporting a vast range of diverse presentations, small and large, that challenge traditional approaches to object inquiry; these examinations of material culture explore the human experience as manifest in our creation and use of “things” of all kinds. Whether originating in internal research and expertise, or in collaboration with external subject specialists, these endeavors prioritize rigorous scholarship while seeking to adhere to the field’s highest standards in production and design.

“Laid out in finely wrought displays, it is one of the most comprehensive exhibitions about the artistry and making of design you are likely to see.”

- Roberta Smith, New York Times, September 1, 2016

Artek and the Aaltos: Creating a Modern World was the first exhibition in the United States to examine Artek, a pioneering Finnish design company founded in 1935, and the first to have a specific focus on the two architect co-founders, Alvar Aalto (1898–1976) and Aino Marsio-Aalto (1894–1949). The exhibition considered the Aaltos’ shared practice through the lens of this groundbreaking company, whose under-recognized and multifaceted mission far exceeded its manufacturing of bentwood furniture designed by Alvar Aalto, for which the firm is best known. It also offered for the first time a specific analysis of Artek’s distinct international role as a disseminator of modernism in art, architecture, interiors, furniture, and other products.

Approximately 200 works were featured—many never before on public view—including architectural drawings, sketches and drawings for interiors and furniture, paintings, photography, furniture, glassware, lighting, and textiles.

Artek and the Aaltos: Creating a Modern World was curated by Bard Graduate Center Gallery Director Nina Stritzler-Levine, a recognized scholar of modern architecture and design, and Juhani Pallasmaa, a prolific writer on modern and contemporary art and architecture, and an architect and professor. Timo Riekko, archivist at the Alvar Aalto Archive in Jyväskylä, served as the curatorial assistant in Finland, and Kirstin Purtich, a recent graduate of the Bard Graduate Center master’s program, was the curatorial assistant in New York.

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A full reproduction of Aino Marsio’s travel sketchbook.The first half of this book traces Marsio’s study trip to Germany, Austria, and Italy in 1921, following her graduation from the Polytechnic Institute of Helsinki. The second half of the sketchbook follows Marsio’s travels in Ostrobothnia, a region in western Finland, where she made sketches of interiors, rubbings from gravestones, and meticulous ground plans of farms.

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“Laid out in finely wrought displays, it is one of the most comprehensive exhibitions about the artistry and making of design you are likely to see.”

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