Curator Zoë Ryan’s poetic exhibition title is borrowed from a quote by the furniture designer Clara Porset: “There is design in everything … in a cloud… in a wall… in a chair… in the sea… in the sand, in a pot. Natural or manmade.” And it is Porset’s 1952 exhibition Art in Daily Life: Well-Designed Objects Made in Mexico which provides the starting point for this thoughtful group exhibition. In the accompanying publication, Ryan cites the importance of the 1952 exhibition’s blend of artefacts produced both by hand and machine as “the first of its kind in Mexico – and arguably the world – to feature design in all its diversity” (2019: 22) and continues this line of thinking in her own curation...

"In a Cloud, In a Wall, In a Chair: Six Modernists in Mexico at Midcentury" at the Art Institute of Chicago review published in the Journal of Modern Craft (2020)

image: Anni Albers study for Camino Real, courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago