Margret Kentgens-Craig, Ph.D.
Bio
Dr. Kentgens-Craig first came to the United States on a teaching grant and spent a year at the North Carolina State University Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures. She later returned as a lecturer at both NCSU and Duke University. After working for the NC Department of Cultural Resources’ public art program she served as head of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation’s Department of Museum, Collection, and Archive and joined the faculty at the Magdeburg-Stendal University of Applied Sciences, Department of Engineering and Industrial Design. Dr. Kentgens-Craig also curated art exhibitions in Germany and North Carolina and served on the NCSU Committee For International Affairs, the Federation of Architecture Collections in Germany, and the German UNESCO Commission.
Bibliography (selection)
The Bauhaus and America. First Contacts 1919-1936. The MIT-Press: Cambridge, Mass., London 1999, 2001.
The Dessau Bauhaus Building 1926-1999 (ed. with Dessau Bauhaus Foundation). Birkhäuser: Basel, Berlin, Boston 1998, 1999.
Reception between Fascination and Rejection: The Bauhaus in the USA. In: J. Fiedler (ed.), Social Utopias of the Twenties. Bauhaus, Kibbutz and the Dream of the New Man. Müller + Busmann: Wuppertal 1995.
“Nur der Schein trügt nicht”: Josef Albers und die “Homage to the Square” Bilder. In: Josef Albers, Works on Paper. Exhibition catalogue. Wienand: Köln 1998.
Transformation einer Idee. In: Bernd Nicolai, Architektur und Exil. Kulturtransfer und architektonische Emigration 1930-50. Porta Alba: Trier 2003.
The Bauhaus in America: The modernist émigrés and their influence on American architecture, interiors, and design, 1920-1940. In: Dominic Bradbury (ed.), Essential Modernism. Yale University Press: New Haven, CT, Nov. 2018.
Curator of the USA segment for the international travel exhibition The Whole World a Bauhaus, 2019–2023, Stuttgart: IfA; Author of the essay Bauhaus Reception in the USA, in related German-English exhibition catalog, Munich: Hirmer, October 2019.
Co-curator (with Roger Manley), Frank Lee Craig-Near Distance exhibition, Gregg Museum of Art and Design, Raleigh NC, 10 February-20 August, 2022; Author of the essay Art is Life, in related exhibition catalog.
Other recent essays published in Appalachian Journal, Dezeen, and Architectural Record, 2019-2020.
Mandarin Chinese translation and publication of the essay Bauhaus Reception in the USA, Munich: Hirmer, October 2019, at the occasion of the “The Whole World a Bauhaus” exhibition’s travel to Taiwan, April-17 July, 2023, National Taiwan Craft Research and Development Institute (NTCRI), Central Nantou County.
Area(s) of Expertise
Twentieth-century modernism; Bauhaus influence and history in America; Reception theory; Interrelationships of intellectual movements; Art and design pedagogy; Urban housing and sustainability.