Featuring: Friedrich Fröebel Jeannine Mosely Shea Zellweger

Organized by Sina Najafi. Selected by Norman Brosterman and Christine and Margaret Wertheim.

The tactile, visual, and philosophical fuse in this exhibition, historically anchored in the “gifts” innovated in the 1830s by Friedrich Fröebel, the inventor of Kindergarten. The historical and contemporary works featured prove that if combined with visual and material pleasure, learning even the most abstract thought can be made into a wondrous experience—literally, child’s play.

Mr. Brosterman has chosen works by Friedrich Fröebel, the crystallographer who invented Kindergarten, and a collection of unattributed 19th-century exercise books and parquetry puzzles. The Wertheims have selected works by Jeannine Mosely, an MIT-trained electrical engineer who is one of the world’s most renowned paper folders, and Shea Zellweger, a self-taught logician who has devised a visual alphabet for revealing the geometry behind logic operations.

Sina Najafi is Editor-in-Chief of Cabinet Magazine, New York.