West Bend Exhibition

Frank Lloyd Wright: Modern Chair Design is a visionary exhibition that reconsiders the Wisconsin-born architect’s innovative and often overlooked contributions to furniture design. While Wright is celebrated for his buildings and his role in shaping an American architectural vision, he also designed more than two hundred chairs over the course of his seventy-year career. This exhibition presents forty of Wright’s most significant domestic pieces—several on view for the first time—together with working sketches and archival photographs.

Organized around five distinct design periods between 1911 and 1959, Modern Chair Design traces Wright’s evolution from his Prairie School years through experimental designs at Taliesin in Wisconsin and later innovations at Taliesin West in Arizona. These works highlight the ways his home and studios functioned as laboratories for design, where he tested ideas, embraced new materials, and redefined how furniture could shape modern living.

History Reincarnated

Modern Chair Design takes an inventive approach to activating the past by bringing a selection of Frank Lloyd Wright’s lost and unbuilt chairs back to life through contemporary fabrication. Using original drawings, archival materials, and historical photographs, the exhibition includes the first-ever realizations of designs for projects such as the A.D. German Warehouse in Richland Center, Wisconsin, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Created in partnership with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and Taliesin Institute, these newly fabricated works are now part of MOWA’s permanent collection. They are exhibited here alongside thirty historic pieces to present a more comprehensive view of Wright’s design trajectory. This innovative approach treats fabrication not as replication, but as an active investigation into Wright’s process, philosophy, and evolving material language. In translating drawings into objects, the exhibition invites reflection on themes of craft, transience, authorship, and innovation—offering audiences a fresh way to encounter Wright’s furniture.

Image: Photograph by Zak Gruber

Image: Hugh Williamson/Alamy Stock Photo