Unboxing the Museum

From 1967 to 1978, the curator and artist Johannes Cladders (1924–2009) organized a series of thirty-five shows intended to explore and expand the relationship between institutions and audiences at the small municipal museum in Mönchengladbach, West Germany, an unassuming city near the Dutch border. Cladders’s first show, in September 1967, featured a then-unknown artist named Joseph Beuys, a forty-six-year-old war veteran who had not previously been the subject of a major exhib