December 2025
Alexander Calder’s Solo Exhibition High Wire: Calder’s Circus at 100 is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA
Alexander Calder’s solo exhibition High Wire: Calder’s Circus at 100, celebrating the centennial of the artist’s formative work Calder’s Circus (1926–31), is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Marking Calder’s first solo exhibition at the museum since its relocation to the Meatpacking District in 2015, the exhibition highlights his early artistic explorations through one of the most iconic and formative works of his career.
During his stay in Paris in 1926, Calder began creating a miniature, multi-act circus composed of figures crafted from everyday materials such as wire, wood, and fabric. Brought to life with lighting, music, and narration, the artist performed Calder’s Circus for nearly two hours to fellow artists and friends, including Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miró, Piet Mondrian, and Isamu Noguchi. Calder later packed the completed work into five suitcases, containing figures, props, phonograph records, and repair tools, and continued presenting it across Europe and the United States. The portable and improvisational nature of the Circus embodied ideas of mobility and spontaneity, while the tension and play embedded in the figures’ repetitive motions laid the conceptual groundwork for Calder’s later invention of the mobile.
The exhibition features more than one hundred related objects, including performance ephemera, drawings, models, photographs, and archival film, that recreate the setting in which Calder’s Circus was conceived and performed. These materials illustrate how the work circulated within artistic communities and reveal how its formal and kinetic ideas later developed into the mobiles, stabiles, and wire drawings for which Calder is widely celebrated.
High Wire: Calder’s Circus at 100 revisits Calder’s Circus not simply as an early experiment but as a formative motif that shaped the artist’s broader sculptural language. Through the circus, Calder dissolved boundaries between entertainment, technology, and art, introducing movement as a defining artistic principle. By tracing the continuity between Calder’s performative work and his later abstract works, the exhibition underscores the circus as the foundation of a kinetic vocabulary that continues to resonate even today. The exhibition is on view through March 9, 2026.
During his stay in Paris in 1926, Calder began creating a miniature, multi-act circus composed of figures crafted from everyday materials such as wire, wood, and fabric. Brought to life with lighting, music, and narration, the artist performed Calder’s Circus for nearly two hours to fellow artists and friends, including Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miró, Piet Mondrian, and Isamu Noguchi. Calder later packed the completed work into five suitcases, containing figures, props, phonograph records, and repair tools, and continued presenting it across Europe and the United States. The portable and improvisational nature of the Circus embodied ideas of mobility and spontaneity, while the tension and play embedded in the figures’ repetitive motions laid the conceptual groundwork for Calder’s later invention of the mobile.
The exhibition features more than one hundred related objects, including performance ephemera, drawings, models, photographs, and archival film, that recreate the setting in which Calder’s Circus was conceived and performed. These materials illustrate how the work circulated within artistic communities and reveal how its formal and kinetic ideas later developed into the mobiles, stabiles, and wire drawings for which Calder is widely celebrated.
High Wire: Calder’s Circus at 100 revisits Calder’s Circus not simply as an early experiment but as a formative motif that shaped the artist’s broader sculptural language. Through the circus, Calder dissolved boundaries between entertainment, technology, and art, introducing movement as a defining artistic principle. By tracing the continuity between Calder’s performative work and his later abstract works, the exhibition underscores the circus as the foundation of a kinetic vocabulary that continues to resonate even today. The exhibition is on view through March 9, 2026.
