Calder Foundation

Calder Foundation The Calder Foundation works to preserve the integrity of the artist Alexander Calder’s life and work through exhibitions, publications, archives, and research.
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06/02/2026

We are delighted to announce upcoming performances of Earle Brown’s Calder Piece (1963–66), to be staged for the first time in Paris since its debut at the Théâtre de l’Atelier in 1967. The performances will take place on Saturday, 20 June, and Sunday, 21 June, at Fondation Louis Vuitton in connection with the retrospective Calder. Rêver en équilibre. In this radical collaboration, Calder’s large-scale standing mobile Chef d’orchestre functions as both a conductor for Brown’s open-form composition and as an instrument.

Advanced tickets are available: https://tinyurl.com/47wbbhkr

[Video: Clip from a performance of Earle Brown’s Calder Piece (1963–1966), TIME:SPANS festival, DiMenna Center for Classical Music, New York, 2023. Presented by the Calder Foundation and the Earle Brown Music Foundation. Performed by the Talujon Percussion Quartet. © 2026 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York]

Summer programming is underway at Calder Gardens. This weekend, four films commissioned by the Calder Foundation in 2017...
05/28/2026

Summer programming is underway at Calder Gardens. This weekend, four films commissioned by the Calder Foundation in 2017—by artists Agnès Varda, Lucy Raven, Rosa Barba, and Ephraim Asili—will screen throughout the day. On Tuesday, 16 June, at 6pm, People Talking: Gryphon Rue & Michael Mandeville on the Music of Cirque Calder brings together artist and composer Rue and archivist and musician Mandeville for a unique listening session. Ongoing programs, including the Moon Alignment series, Guided Walks, and Silent Days, will continue throughout the season.

Learn more about these events: https://tinyurl.com/yfsjj6ze

[Images: Installation view, Calder Gardens, Philadelphia, 2025. Photograph by Tom Powel Imaging; Calder Gardens programming © 2026 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; © Calder Gardens]

05/26/2026

A remarkable early standing mobile from around 1932 is on view for the first time in Calder. Rêver en équilibre at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. Three wooden elements—two painted, the third in ebony—are set in motion within a white hoop. During the time this work was made, Calder asked himself, “How can art be realized?” In reply, he wrote: “Each element able to move, to stir, to oscillate, to come and go in its relationships with the other elements in its universe. It must not be just a ‘fleeting’ moment, but a physical bond between the varying events in life … Abstractions that are like nothing in life except in their manner of reacting.”

For more information: https://tinyurl.com/yfbpm4ac

[Video: Untitled (c. 1932), wood, rod, wire, string, and paint. © 2026 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York]

Marcel Breuer was born on this day in 1902. In 1937, the Hungarian architect accepted a position at Harvard’s Graduate S...
05/21/2026

Marcel Breuer was born on this day in 1902. In 1937, the Hungarian architect accepted a position at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and moved to the United States. He met Calder during this time and the two collaborated on a number of projects in the ensuing years. In the catalogue for Calder’s Universe, the artist’s major 1976 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Breuer remarked: “Calder’s sculptures are often linear, floating, made of thin metal sheets and wire, delicately gamboling, turning. Their paths are traceless. Their relations to things around escape definition, proportion, rules. They are formed by the hidden breeze, by the pull of gravity.” An installation image from the exhibition shows Calder’s sculptures installed in the Breuer-designed Brutalist building, which was the Whitney’s longtime home before its move downtown in 2015.

For more information: https://tinyurl.com/375y4ynn

[Image: Opening reception for Calder’s Universe, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1976. Photograph by Waintrob-Budd. © 2026 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York]

We are pleased to share Calder: Rêver en équilibre, a new catalogue published in tandem with the exhibition of the same ...
05/19/2026

We are pleased to share Calder: Rêver en équilibre, a new catalogue published in tandem with the exhibition of the same name currently on view at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. The book includes new essays by Dieter Buchhart, Anna Karina Hofbauer, Chus Martínez, Olivier Michelon, Arnauld Pierre, and Elizabeth Hutton Turner, as well as a conversation between Jordana Mendelson and Alexander S. C. Rower. “Calder insisted that art could possess energy, an active participation in the forces that govern both human and nonhuman worlds,” writes Martínez. “In doing so, his work becomes a radical pedagogical language: a way of teaching us how to inhabit space differently, how to sense movement, relations, and interdependence not as abstract ideas but as conditions of being.”

For more information: https://tinyurl.com/2s4fvyet

[Image: Cover of Calder: Rêver en équilibre, 2026. © 2026 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York]

05/18/2026

Little Yellow Panel is currently on view in the Curve Gallery at Calder Gardens. The wall sculpture is one in a series of works that relate to Calder’s suggestion to Mondrian in October 1930 that the older artist make a series of cut-out cardboard rectangles tacked to the walls of his studio “oscillate.” While the Dutch artist was dismissive of the idea, Calder started exploring it in his own work, creating a series of paintings in motion—“frames” and “panels” that consisted of abstract forms set in front of colored plywood panels or within boxlike frames.

For more information: https://tinyurl.com/3upfjvnx

[Video: Little Yellow Panel (1936), Calder Gardens, Philadelphia, 2025. © 2026 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York]

Monochrome: Calder and Tara Donovan opens today at the Seattle Art Museum. A Calder Prize winner in 2005, Donovan chose ...
05/13/2026

Monochrome: Calder and Tara Donovan opens today at the Seattle Art Museum. A Calder Prize winner in 2005, Donovan chose Calder’s Mountains (1:5 intermediate maquette) and Jacaranda as touchpoints for the exhibition. Like the vast majority of Calder’s sculptures, both works 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.” The exhibition is on view through 17 January 2027.

For more information: https://tinyurl.com/5xywfkef

[Image: Installation views, Monochrome: Calder and Tara Donovan, Seattle Art Museum, 2026. Photographs by Scott Leen. © 2026 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; © Tara Donovan]

On this day in 1946, Calder inquired with gallerist Marian Willard whether she would be interested in having him make je...
05/12/2026

On this day in 1946, Calder inquired with gallerist Marian Willard whether she would be interested in having him make jewelry in gold. “I’d like to make some stuff in gold—but it makes a larger investment—shall we get into that racket?” While most of Calder’s jewelry is fashioned from humble industrial materials such as brass and steel wire, there are several works made in gold. Twelve of them—including the brooches pictured here—are on view at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, in Calder. Rêver enéquilibre. These brooches are among the many works Calder made for his wife, Louisa, as tokens of his devotion.

For more information: https://tinyurl.com/mv3xsrva

[Images: Anniversary brooch (1956); Brooch (c. 1948); Brooch (1958); Medieval beastie brooch (1958), all gold and steel wire. Photographs 1 and 3 by Maria Robledo. © 2026 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York]

With spring in full swing, it’s a great time to visit Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, New York. The sculpture park...
05/11/2026

With spring in full swing, it’s a great time to visit Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, New York. The sculpture park is home to Calder’s stabile The Arch, which stands over fifty-six feet high. Calder’s process for making monumental sculptures began with the creation of a small-scale maquette. Using his intuitive conception of scale, the artist would then work with an industrial ironworks to fabricate his objects in colossal dimensions.

For more information: https://tinyurl.com/2r5f3h52

[Image: The Arch (1975), Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, New York. Photograph by Jerry L. Thompson. © 2026 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York]

Calder. Rêver en équilibre is on view at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. “This interactive aspect of Calder’s work, whic...
05/08/2026

Calder. Rêver en équilibre is on view at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. “This interactive aspect of Calder’s work, which seems so simple, is the most compelling,” Emily LaBarge writes in The New York Times. “We as viewers—and as humans in the world—have unavoidable relationships with everything around us. To coexist with something carefully and harmoniously balanced is magnificent. It demands a respect for life, whose potential, like the possible configurations of each mobile, is infinite.” The exhibition runs through 16 August.

For more information: https://tinyurl.com/3udzv2ws

[Image: Installation view, Calder. Rêver en équilibre, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, 2026. Photograph by Marc Domage. © 2026 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; © Fondation Louis Vuitton / Marc Domage]

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