Museum of Wisconsin Art in West Bend, Wisconsin, about 40 miles north of Milwaukee, presents Frank Lloyd Wright: Modern Chair Design, an exhibition revealing Frank Lloyd Wright’s innovative and groundbreaking approach to chair and furniture design.

Framing his furniture within a broader context of design history and American modernism, the exhibition highlights Wright’s visionary belief that chairs must be understood as living designs in addition to being extensions of the built environments for which they were created.

© Museum of Wisconsin Art / Zac Gruber

The new exhibition presents more than 40 of Wright’s most significant, domestic furniture pieces, many on view for the first time, as well as working sketches, archival photographs and animated renderings.

The exhibition is based on the original research of architectural historian Eric Vogel, scholar-in-residence at the Taliesin Institute whose expertise in the Taliesin archives revealed new connections challenging the common perception that Wright’s furniture was secondary to his architectural work.

“When Frank Lloyd Wright rebuilt Taliesin after two major fires, he paired the new architecture with significant new and unprecedented furniture forms that were rejected by his clients at the time for their unconventionality,” said Vogel. “The Museum of Wisconsin Art has recreated several of these lost or never-produced works, offering the viewer a unique opportunity to experience these bold forms in person.”

© Frank Lloyd Wright, Chair and Table, 1932, Courtesy of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation

Viewers will experience the exhibition as an experiential tour through Wright’s previously unknown furniture experiments and a comprehensive look at how one of the greatest architects of all time fundamentally shaped furniture designs within the inspired spaces of his own home and studio.

“By viewing Wright’s furniture, specifically his chair designs, through the lens of Taliesin as a creative incubator, this exhibition reveals the experimental nature of his process and offers a fresh perspective on his architectural vision,” said Thomas Szolwinski, associate curator of Architecture and Design, MOWA. “In the wider history of exhibitions dedicated to Wright, this show marks an important moment of reexamination and rediscovery.”

Best known as a proponent of the Prairie School movement and for designing more than 1,100 structures, Wright also created more than 200 unique chair designs, many historically overlooked or lost to time. The Modern Chair Design exhibit refocuses attention to his post-Prairie School years, tracing five distinct design periods between 1911 and 1959, highlighting the innovations born at Taliesin East near Spring Green, Wisconsin, and later at Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona.

© Museum of Wisconsin Art / Zac Gruber

Exhibition highlights include collaborations with three renowned woodworkers, including Wright’s great-grandson, S. Lloyd Natof, to recreate lost or unbuilt Wright chairs using original drawings and archival materials, as well as the first-ever construction of chairs designed by Wright for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum café. The exhibition also features important loans from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Minneapolis Museum of Art and Milwaukee Art Museum.

The MOWA exhibition will be on view through Jan. 25, 2026.